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Geek Culture / Advice on decent, modern graphics card for this computer

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Seditious
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Posted: 22nd May 2014 18:52 Edited at: 22nd May 2014 18:58
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I'm looking to give my main (ancient, as it is, 2007) computer a little boost by giving it an SDD and a decent, modern graphics card. Although the computer is pretty old it still runs things just fine, although with this severely underpowered graphics card it's hard to play any remotely modern games even on the lowest settings.

Specifications of my current computer: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00857281&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&product=3356846&ssf=1#N96. Note that I have an ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 card (from when the previous two GeForce 7500LE's burnt out and they replaced it), 4GB of memory, and I'm running Vista.

Why am I not just building a whole new computer? I am, but it's going to be used as a dedicated softsynth machine, so I won't be using it for general computing stuff for fear that I might break something and be left without equipment for a concert. It's going to be a fairly budget build (no doubt more powerful than my current machine though) with a single 64GB SSD, and no graphics card. Also it's going in a Micro/Mini ITX case, so I don't know if that would be a problem or not with gaming. If it turns out my main PC is failing in certain areas I guess I could use the new machine if I put the graphics card and SSD in it, so neither components will be a waste of money.

Anyway, can anyone suggest a modern low-end graphics card that is compatible with my system? Thanks!

[edit]

This sort of thing looks good, but it seems this and other similar cards require at least a 400W PSU: http://www.amazon.co.uk/VTX3D-Graphics-Express-CrossFire-Technology/dp/B00BHAXKU4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1400774082&sr=8-2&keywords=HD+7750. Also I should mention that I'm using a VGA monitor, so I'd need some kind of adapter I guess. [edit2] That one comes with one it seems.
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Seppuku Arts
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Posted: 22nd May 2014 23:52
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You might be able to *just* get away with a GeForce GTX 650ti, though it may bottleneck it a bit due to your PSU, the card itself will use 110w, but it's not that expensive to upgrade to a 400w PSU (I would recommend Corsair if you choose to). I would say it depends on how much your other components are using, I mean a recommended specification isn't necessarily the least you'll get away with. I did run my GTX770 on a 550w PSU (spec prefers 600w) and it was a little bottlenecked, I got away with it because my other components weren't using a lot of juice, but when I upgraded to 750w, the performance increase and temperature decrease was pretty nice.

If you're worried about it and can't upgrade your PSU, then the GT 640GDDR5 is the prolly the highest GeForce for your PSU (the non GDDR5 one requires 350w, so in this case, the better of the two cards requires fewer watts).

But the reason why I would recommend a GTX650ti:

You get a lot for what you pay for. I found despite it being inexpensive, it gave me a lot of power. I had no trouble running any modern games, granted for the highest end stuff I would adjust the settings slightly (like turn TresFX off on Tomb Raider).

This is a video of me running Tomb Raider my old GTX650ti


Of course, your other specs will let you down a bit, but it's a good card. I say a shame that mine died on me - it doesn't put me off of the card, I used a manufacturer I never heard of and to be fair, all manufacturers have a failure rate and sometimes you're unlucky. I *could* have claimed under warranty, but Amazon had such a good price on the 770 that I couldn't say no.

I don't know what the GT640GDDR5 is like, but the fact that it has DDR5 is in itself quite neat and offers nice clock speeds as a result...considering it's not really on the higher end of spectrum.

If it helps, this is the card running Battlefield 4




With ATI/AMD, I've not gone with them for quite a few years now, so I can't really offer any kind of fair comment on them, I just know that spec for spec they're the cheaper...at least on average.

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Seditious
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Posted: 23rd May 2014 14:39 Edited at: 23rd May 2014 14:39
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Thanks for the detailed response. The latter seems more like the kind of card I'm looking for, being somewhat cheaper and requiring less power. It really doesn't need to be too-beefy a card, since I don't mind playing on low settings at a medium (ie. 1024x768) resolution. And of course, I'd imagine my mobo would be somewhat of a bottleneck in any case. I could probably even use a lesser one, like this maybe. Some food for thought.

It seems the recommended PSU wattage is based on a traditional desktop setup, ie. with a HDD and optical drive, though I'm replacing the former with an SSD (=less power draw) and could remove the DVD drive and use an external one I have, so I can be more economical than a standard build.

Thanks.
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Seditious
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Posted: 31st May 2014 14:03 Edited at: 31st May 2014 14:05
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I've ordered the GT 640 (this one specifically). I'm not sure the fact that it's not DDR5 will make that big of a deal since the motherboard would probably be somewhat of a bottleneck anyway. Who knows.

Should arrive Tuesday. Thanks for the advice, I'll update you on how it runs.

[edit] I've also ordered this SSD, which seemed to be the best value for money when I looked at the benchmarks on tomshartware.com. It's my first SSD so I'm excited to see how well Windows runs on it.

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wizard of id
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Posted: 1st Jun 2014 16:08
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Word of advise on the SSD to limit writes on it, and make it last super long....

http://www.maketecheasier.com/12-things-you-must-do-when-running-a-solid-state-drive-in-windows-7/
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Seditious
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Posted: 1st Jun 2014 16:29
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Some pretty good advice there, thanks!

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Seppuku Arts
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Posted: 1st Jun 2014 22:26
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Quote: "I'm not sure the fact that it's not DDR5 will make that big of a deal since the motherboard would probably be somewhat of a bottleneck anyway. Who knows."


It's the DDR3 one, but am sure it don't matter. I would say the advantage I was looking at is that although the DD5 one is more powerful it's also more energy efficient. However, you've gone for a decent choice anyway and went Asus, which IMO is the sensible choice.

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Dar13
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Posted: 2nd Jun 2014 06:47
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Quote: " Word of advise on the SSD to limit writes on it, and make it last super long...."

New SSDs no longer suffer from the write limits. So depending on the brand, with Samsung and Crucial having the best ratings, you should no longer need to worry too much about the SSD. Though perhaps on Vista you may have to fiddle around with SMART and such.

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wizard of id
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Posted: 2nd Jun 2014 08:22
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Quote: "New SSDs no longer suffer from the write limits. So depending on the brand, with Samsung and Crucial having the best ratings, you should no longer need to worry too much about the SSD. Though perhaps on Vista you may have to fiddle around with SMART and such.
"


Irrespective, still good idea to look after your hardware Defragging an SSD is still a very bad idea, indexing, superfetch among others is also unneeded, there is still writes limits regardless.
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The Zoq2
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Posted: 2nd Jun 2014 16:44
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As far as I know, there are still write limits, but the microcontroller in modern SSDs make sure that no "sector" is used more than the others to make sure that the whole SSD lasts longer. At some point, the sectors will start failing any way but the time until that happens is increased

Say ONE stupid thing and it ends up as a forum signature forever. - Neuro Fuzzy
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Dar13
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Posted: 2nd Jun 2014 17:25
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Apparently the good brands of SSDs can handle up to 600 TBs of writing done to them. TechReport did an experiment with 5 SSDs, here's a link. I just might look into buying one of those Corsair Neutron GTXs...

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wizard of id
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Posted: 2nd Jun 2014 17:47
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600 TBs, and how quickly do you think that will add up, without disabling some features, defragging for example will practically destroy a HDD in months if not weeks.

Advise to not worry about write limits regardless of how many data can be safely written is not the best advise.It's mostly likely Seditious's first SSD, as such people do tend to go a little crazy first time around and it's just polite to tell him, enjoy, but here is some things to consider.

Not nah, don't worry, write limits is for pansies.
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Indicium
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Posted: 3rd Jun 2014 06:18
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Quote: "defragging for example will practically destroy a HDD in months if not week"


I'm assuming you meant SSD there - there is absolutely no reason to defragment a SSD as there are no moving parts, as a result the overhead of reading from one part of storage and a different part of storage is none existent.


They see me coding, they hating. http://indi-indicium.blogspot.co.uk/
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Seditious
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Posted: 3rd Jun 2014 08:27 Edited at: 3rd Jun 2014 08:34
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I'm posting this from Windows 7 (on the SSD) having installed the graphics card (and almost breaking the little clip thing on the PCI-E slot that I didn't know existed ) and I'm very pleased.

For starters, the card works surprisingly well for the price. I tried Skyrim on 'ultra' at 1280x1024 with x2 AA and I seem to get about 20fps, which is what I was previously getting on lowest settings with a crappy resolution like 640x480. On medium-high settings it now runs very smoothly. I gave the Crysis demo a try and that runs surprisingly well too, giving seemingly about the same framerate at the highest (non-ultra) settings, with AA disabled. I can't wait to try it with games like Metro 2033 that I've played and enjoyed but have had to suffer choppy frame rates with.

As for the SSD, I'm really impressed with that too. Booting is very fast (except for the annoying vista/7 chooser that it's put in place since I still had Vista installed on the other drive when I installed 7 [edit] fixed it http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2288-windows-boot-manager-delete-listed-operating-system.html), and waking from sleep is almost instantaneous. I'd imagine with just 128GB of space I'll run out pretty quick, so I'll keep some stuff stored on the HDD.

So thanks for the advice guys, it's really boosted this ageing computer!

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wizard of id
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Posted: 3rd Jun 2014 09:08
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Quote: "I'm assuming you meant SSD there - there is absolutely no reason to defragment a SSD as there are no moving parts, as a result the overhead of reading from one part of storage and a different part of storage is none existent.
"

Oh yes sorry :p Meh moment there.I blame the half closet blonde in me.
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Phaelax
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Posted: 3rd Jun 2014 19:38
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Agreed there is no reason to defrag an SSD, but it won't destroy it in a week or even a month. But it will definitely shorten its life. On the newest ones, I'm not sure by how much though because they're a lot more resilient with writing (so I've heard).

Quote: "and almost breaking the little clip thing on the PCI-E slot that I didn't know existed"

lol I almost did that too when I swapped out for a newer card.

I've had a 240GB mushkin ssd as my system drive for 2 years now and haven't had any problems yet with it.

http://zimnox.com
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