Upgrade GFX card...

**CrayonVonCaesar** · May 09, 2011, 03:28 PM

MY P.C:

Motherboard: ALiveNF6G-DVI
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ Brisbane
RAM: DDR2 Corsair 2084 MBytes PC2-6400
GFX: GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB

I want to upgrade the GFX card to give me a boost for Napoleon and Empire Total war.
I do not want to spend a fortune and I want to keep the power consumption/heat down.

I will also get 2gb more ram.

Also, I don't want to buy a new pc...

What GFX card would you fine fellows recommend?
(rep for info!)

**Top-Tier-Tech** · May 09, 2011, 03:42 PM

Need budget. Thanks.

**CrayonVonCaesar** · May 09, 2011, 05:49 PM

Originally Posted by ChaobSiroc

Need budget. Thanks.

Under £100.

I don't mind good condition 2nd hand btw.

Originally Posted by [100]jplay.TGC

And what PSU you have.

650w Total

480w on the 12v

**Nota'** · May 09, 2011, 04:35 PM

And what PSU you have. Some graphics cards eat power.
But based on your current rig you probably don't want to go higher than a Nvidia 460 (not the SE version), ATI 6850, perhaps a 5770 would be enough.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · May 09, 2011, 07:27 PM

that cpu will bottleneck just about every modern gpu out there, a 460 / 6850 would be good gpus for the system but you wont see maxium performance from them, hell even a 8800gts 320mb can gain extra performance on modern CPUs in quite a few titles.

a 460 1gig or 6850 1gb would probably be the best bet overall

**craziii** · May 09, 2011, 11:27 PM

Originally Posted by CrayonVonCaesar

MY P.C:

Motherboard: ALiveNF6G-DVI
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ Brisbane
RAM: DDR2 Corsair 2084 MBytes PC2-6400
GFX: GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB

I want to upgrade the GFX card to give me a boost for Napoleon and Empire Total war.
I do not want to spend a fortune and I want to keep the power consumption/heat down.

I will also get 2gb more ram.

Also, I don't want to buy a new pc...

What GFX card would you fine fellows recommend?
(rep for info!)

you need a new computer, upgrading parts will be throwing away money.

**Devilmaypoop** · May 10, 2011, 06:57 AM

Yeah, your CPU would massively bottleneck any new GPU. Just get a new system : /

**Bolkonsky** · May 10, 2011, 09:13 AM

What's your screen resolution?

**Doono** · May 10, 2011, 09:55 AM

Check to see if a bios update exists for the motherboard, from what i recall AM3 processors are backwards compatable with socket AM2 anyway so you can probably get away with simply buying an AM3 processor if you want to avoid the full rebuild. A new GPU should show some performance increase but as others have said it will be heavily bottlenecked.

**Devilmaypoop** · May 10, 2011, 10:06 AM

Originally Posted by Doono

Check to see if a bios update exists for the motherboard, from what i recall AM3 processors are backwards compatable with socket AM2 anyway so you can probably get away with simply buying an AM3 processor if you want to avoid the full rebuild. A new GPU should show some performance increase but as others have said it will be heavily bottlenecked.

Oh no, not on this board. The horrible mosfet setting (3+1 I think) will quarantee that the board will catch fire with any CPU at 95W TDP or above. And anything under that is a dual core, so not worth it.

Just get an entirely new system .

**CrayonVonCaesar** · May 10, 2011, 07:14 PM

Originally Posted by Devilmaypoop

Just get an entirely new system .

I cannot fork out for a new pc at the present time.

Surely more ram would help at least eh?

**craziii** · May 12, 2011, 10:47 PM

4 gigs is standard for pc gaming. all new gaming pcs should have 8 or 12 gigs of tri-channel ddr3. like I said early, there is no point in throwing money away, I bet your pc only uses ddr2. 2 more gigs will help your loading times immensely, but that is about it. I am surprise you still only got 2 gigs.

**Crazyeyesreaper** · May 12, 2011, 10:55 PM

8-12gb your off your rocker,

fact only 1336 socket i7s use triple channel,

4gigs of ram is plenty heres why

all games are 32bit meaning only 2gb of ram usage max,
most 64bit games tend to run like ass with Crysis being the only 64bit out of box AAA game i can think of,

even then using LAA to make the game large adress aware it can use up to 4gb of ram but it wont,

4gigs is the standard 8 gigs is worthwhile if you want the extra ram, its cheap enough these days. but overall more then 4gigs isnt really needed, unless using Adobe Premiere Pro, Zbrush, Maya and or 3DS Max. etc.

**CrayonVonCaesar** · May 13, 2011, 01:35 AM

Thank you all for the advice.

I will get some more ram but hold off buying another GFX card. A new pc will be bought at some point instead.

On another note, by using Shader 2 rather than 3 with Brig.Grahams renders mod I can now play Nap:TW on acceptable settings. Excellent.

Rep duly given!