3D Graphics Cards and Video

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

tjphelan1 — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 20:57:01 GMT

I will say that these benchmarks prove the GPU is the single best upgrade for a gamer, but I will say that an old CPU can still produce a wall. Bang for the buck it is the best, but I will say if you are willing take the time and sell some of your old components on eBay. When I upgraded my q6600 last year to a 2500k I sold my old board, ram, and CPU for about 200 reducing my upgrade cost significantly.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

GotDaBlunt — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 05:31:38 GMT

The author's rig is still better than any other else, the real test for the remark is this: my five year old PC uses AMD athlon 64 X2 2.9 Ghz, 9500GT 512MB DDR2, 3GB DDR2 RAM, K9N Neo V3 mobo, 500GB samsung HDD, and windows 7 32-bit . not a good rig today compared five years ago.

I just bought an HD 7750 1GB a couple of week ago, hoping it would improve the frame rates for the latest games. I'm telling you, there's an improvement but not as much as I have expected. Probably the CPU bottlenecked the GPU's performance.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

JonathanRompr — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 20:57:21 GMT

Wow really liked the review. I would have liked to see with a dual core though since that's what my friend has (and he's thinking about upgrading his old rig to match my new one :P ).

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

Dorkstar — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:24:58 GMT

What an awesome approach to performance. I've always wondered how important CPU's were in today's age. It's not like we're getting external NIC's and sound cards to take the load off our single core CPU anymore. This brings a entirely new meaning to "Budget builds". I saw a core 2 duo, motherboard, and 6 GB of ram for sale on craigslist for $150 yesterday. Get yourself a $50 case and a $200 video card, and you're good to go.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

Joel H — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:39:02 GMT

Edward,

Practically speaking, the GTX 260 / GTX 660 was a cleaner jump for me to test due to hardware on hand.

Here's what I can tell you based on relative performance between the GTX 260 and HD 4870 in 2008: I suspect the gap between the 4870 and 7950 will be slightly different than the GTX 260 - GTX 660 gap for several reasons.

The 4870 was faster than the GTX 260. The GTX 660 and HD 7950 are fairly competitive. That means that the gap between the 4870 and 7950 would probably be smaller -- except that the GTX 260 had significantly more RAM -- 896MB as opposed to 512MB. In 2008, this wasn't an advantage. By today, it could be.

The second factor means that upgrading would *improve* relative performance. So a 4870 - 7950 upgrade would give a larger advantage if the 512MB frame buffer was a limiting factor.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

EdwardCrisler — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:38:49 GMT

I think this is an awesome angle and would love to see it with both sides of the GPU war. Could this be retested with something like an HD 7850?

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

FrankBarbieri — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 06:22:22 GMT

This is nice and all, but I built my rig in late 2005, early 2006, coming in at $2000...

Right before C2Duo came out I bought a P4 3.6ghz w/ HT, 2gb ddr2 667 ram, and an Asus p5n2d-sli mobo (non-deluxe). Quite good stuff for back then, haven't been able to afford an upgrade, now its poo-poo.

Started with a 7900GT video card, now running a 9800GTX (when it still cost $300) Can't upgrade CPU OR ram because mobo is too old.

Currently running Win 7 32bit Ultimate, wish I could upgrade. Living week to week, sigh. On a plus note, I upgraded my cooling fan to a Hyper 212 Evo and can now OC to 4.23 ghz :) Been through 2 PSU's, 2 DVD Drives, and some burnt out power cables (ouch!) still running!

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

setiroN — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 13:47:49 GMT

I've recently upgraded an E5200 (@3.8GHz) on a P35 board and 4GB RAM with an HD7850, which was brought to 1200/5200.

It plays every game at quite high settings and a 1920x1200 resolution. Thanks to MLAA/FXAA, the biggest issue with lower end machines has been largely dealt with.

Easy times for gaming indeed.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

CDeeter — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:42:27 GMT

Well this article sure got a nice amount of attention. Keep um coming Joel!

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

CDeeter — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:31:52 GMT

Hmm I wonder what the issue is then for me that I couldn't go from a 7200gs to a HD 5570.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

CDeeter — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:31:50 GMT

Hmm I wonder what the issue is then for me that I couldn't go from a 7200gs to a HD 5570.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

HiBob — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:40:30 GMT

I resemble that remark ...

E8500 (Core 2 Duo, 3.16), HD4850, 4gb ram, g41 motherboard (@Eshirou: PCI-E 1.0a), 7200 RPM storage. Windows XP 32 bit. Pretty much a second class machine compared to the one used in the article (depending on whether an app utilizes more than one core).

Borderlands 2 was completely playable at 1080p with the eye candy turned way down. The only problem was a bug that would hang the application at selected spots unless I restricted the CPU to 1 core.

I upgraded from the 4850 to a 7850 last month (which runs fine in the 1.0a socket, didn't even have to upgrade the BIOS) mainly because it came free with Far Cry 3 and the 4850 is now restricted to legacy drivers/DX 10. Much faster now, but then I don't really play many titles that are CPU intensive.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

realneil — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:55:00 GMT

Joel H:
Reilneil, AMD and NV have candidly said that modern GPUs don't stress PCIe 3.0 vs. 2.0. If they did, the vendors themselves would have told us. I can pick up differences in synthetic benchmarks designed to measure PCIe bus bandwidth, but I mainly used those for confirming that things were working as they ought.

Agreed, this is why adding a better video card nets you a better experience almost every time. If your PSU can handle the extra power draw that some of these new cards have, (yes, I'm aware that the newest GPU designs use less power overall, but I also know that a top notch PSU makes a huge improvement too)

PCIe 2.0 bandwidth is wide enough and fast enough to give you great performance on any decently coded game if you have the GPU to handle it. That's why I agree that a GPU upgrade is such a great way to improve your gaming experience and my first recommended upgrade to others most of the time.

But if they have the cash for a whole new platform, that's how I steer them.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

Joel H — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:49:07 GMT

"One thing I notice about reviews like this they always run on high or even ultra instead of show a frame rate that is playable on both cards."

John,

When I put this review together, I decided on a few things.

1) I wanted to use DX10/DX11. The GTX 260 was NV's third generation of GPU to offer DX10 support. Dropping back to DX9 would've improved the card's frame rates, but would've also meant more screenshotting in an attempt to capture the visual differences. BF3 doesn't even have a DX9 mode for PCs, so this would've tossed in more variables.

2) Civ V was the only game that wasn't playable. Borderlands and BF3 were choppy in places, but I extensively playtested both.

I picked settings that *pushed* the GTX 260, but didn't overwhelm it. That was purposeful.

RE: Can A New GPU Rejuvenate A 5 Year Old Gaming PC?

wtburnette — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:26:00 GMT

I thought the article was well done. My system 5 years ago was similar, except the video card was slower (8800GTS 512MB) and I had 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB. Same rocking Q6600 though. I didn't notice, but was your processor overclocked? The two things that I was curious about was, first of all, would an overclock of the processor to 3Ghz or 3.2Ghz help with the framerates much and also, what about adding another 1GB of RAM? I guess another question that comes to mind is, how badly did the SSD skew the results? If you upgraded only the video card in a system from back then that would almost certainly have had a standard HDD, I wonder how much slower it would be? In effect, you have to add the price of the SSD into the equation, but it's still a worthy upgrade for an older system at ~$300.