Friend's graphics card

hopgop1

hopgop1

Posts: 167   +33
My friend is interested in purchasing a new graphics card for his quite old PC, he has a 300W PSU which we determined and he has about £70 to spend. He will be buying the card from amazon.co.uk. Currently I am thinking he should get a GT 640 because that way he shouldn't need to upgrade his PSU. Also he has just 3 SATA power ports free and we are planning to purchase two of these to make the power to molex and use a spare adapter I have which goes from 2 molex to a six pin GPU connector, which is needed for the graphics card. It is makeshift but I see no reason why it won't work also he plans to play dayz, rust, cs go etc. Will he be able to play the listed games even if it is just at low?
 
hopgop1 said:
My friend is interested in purchasing a new graphics card for his quite old PC, he has a 300W PSU which we determined and he has about £70 to spend. He will be buying the card from amazon.co.uk. Currently I am thinking he should get a GT 640 because that way he shouldn't need to upgrade his PSU. Also he has just 3 SATA power ports free and we are planning to purchase two of these to make the power to molex and use a spare adapter I have which goes from 2 molex to a six pin GPU connector, which is needed for the graphics card. It is makeshift but I see no reason why it won't work also he plans to play dayz, rust, cs go etc. Will he be able to play the listed games even if it is just at low?
Click to expand...
If I were you, I would avoid anything below a 650 mostly because the scaling drops off a cliff after that point. At your price point of 70, I would suggest the following while keeping within your 300Watt Spectrum.

Try one of the following:

HD 7770 £71

Or if you want to go lower on price

HD 7750 £61

The performance difference from a GT 640 is way above (In many cases double the performance on the HD 7770) it. The GT series below 650 just scale down to low to be decent gaming cards. You should be well within your 300 watt spectrum because these cards use 140 watts (Give or take) which is pretty close to the GT 640 watts (About 130).

To give you a quick example, look at this benchmark chart. Thats only including the HD 7750 but the performance difference is significant!
 
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He decided to go with the 7750 as he wants to be able to purchase some games he wants as the same time (contrary to my advice but hey) and the chart definitely made his mind up! Also will the makeshift SATA power to molex to six pin work? Also will he be able (I assume yes, based on the BF 3 benchmarks) to play Dayz, Rust, CS:GO?

Also will he even need the 6 pin connector as from the pictures of the card it looks like it runs of mobo power but I have yet to see any top-down pictures of the card.
 
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hopgop1 said:
He decided to go with the 7750 as he wants to be able to purchase some games he wants as the same time (contrary to my advice but hey) and the chart definitely made his mind up! Also will the makeshift SATA power to molex to six pin work? Also will he be able (I assume yes, based on the BF 3 benchmarks) to play Dayz, Rust, CS:GO?
Click to expand...
Yes it will, probably at medium - high on those games. Dayz is a bit odd in general but will run fine on that GPU (Its random how well it runs at times as it is, its mostly CPU intensive).

hopgop1 said:
Also will he even need the 6 pin connector as from the pictures of the card it looks like it runs of mobo power but I have yet to see any top-down pictures of the card.
Click to expand...
You should be just fine using a Molex to PCI Power adapter. I have done this many times in the past and present (Including recently using a PSU that only had one PCIE and needed a second to run an HD 7870). Theres no problem running those, they just need 2 molex hookups. But you will for sure need the PCI-E Hookup.
 
Thanks for the quick reply =] Yeah the adapter I gave him goes from 2 molex to PCI 6 pin. Thanks again!
 
Hey sorry to bump this thread but my friend now has £100 to spend maximum but he still has his 300W PSU, I can't decide whether it would be best to get a CX430m (modular is cheaper than standard atm on amazon) or stick with his PSU and get the best GPU for >100 but then he is limited by his PSU. Could do with some help, thanks!
 
I would still get the HD 7750 and just worry about a PSU later if that became an issue. You would still be in the power threshold so you should be more than fine.
 
Ok, thanks guys, I think we shall stick to the 7750 but with the extra money we were looking at CPUs as the some of the games he wants to play are CPU intensive so he currently has an AMD Athlon x2 220, if we but the CPU off eBay they are quite cheap, do you have any recommendations for a CPU for £50 max? (The 7750 has gone down by £10 on amazon! Hooray!) I was thinking This CPU, This GPU and this PSU. Just a few pounds over budget. Tell me what you think, Thanks guys you have been a great help to both of us! =]
 
Before you get a CPU, you need to know which ones the motherboard will support. Look up the CPU support list for the motherboard. Sometimes a Bios update is needed for newer CPU that were released after the motherboard was sold.
 
If your going to do an upgrade, try grabbing (The motherboard says it supports this) a Phenom X4 Deneb processor.

Something like this

It says support up to 95Watt which should be fine for this machine.
 
May have messed up a little guys, I was looking at an N830, which is a laptop CPU (oops :confused:), Ghost are there any slightly cheaper on ebay.co.uk?
 
I did find this, I has a lot of cache and a quite fast clock speed, it's only dual core but it looks quite good. Is it any good?
 
hopgop1 said:
I did find this, I has a lot of cache and a quite fast clock speed, it's only dual core but it looks quite good. Is it any good?
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Well it's still a phenom II so it will be a step up, I was just trying to help you get the best for the board with a quad core. The problem is going to be the processor will bottleneck a lot in games and such so trying to get the best you can will help out significantly.

That will be a nice improvement, but I would try getting a quad core Deneb phenom ii at 95watts if I were you.
 
He plans n "biting the bullet" on May the 9th so I will keep an eye out for any at a better price until then but if I can't find any better deals it should be a great improvement for him. I also plan on going to his house and doing the upgrades with him as he knows next to nothing about the hardware side of a PC, and this HP is the best PC he has ever owned or used to it will be like stepping out of the dark into light for the first time for him in terms of performance so even a step up will feel amazing to him.
 
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