Can anyone recommend me a new graphics card that would be worth having in my old PC? I’d still like to game with it and so would be looking for a graphics card with a higher spec but can’t afford a whole new PC. I’m currently using a Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition - 2 GB GDDR5.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Well, anything you buy is going to be severely throttled by that old hardware - limiting performance. The being said, you can't go wrong with an Nvidia RTX 3060 or 3060ti. They aren't that expensive either and give decent gaming performance. With the new Nvidia 4000 line being out and going strong, the 3060 prices might fall. But right now $500 to $650 CAD is pretty comparable to an AMD card's pricing, and the Nvidia will likely perform better. At least in my limited experience.
980 or 1080 would be a good upgrade for that computer if you can get one cheap and in good condition or you can put a 1660ti on it or up to RTX 2080 i know will work you would have to look up RTX cards though to make certain because many of the 30 series and some of the 20 series don't work on older motherboards.
Your board is gen 3 which is still good and we have only really just came into gen 4 and gen 5 so its not like you are that slow yet. I have tested a lot of new cards on old motherboards and they work fine and there is not really much to lose.
you also want to stick to 1080p if you can because on older system when you start ramping up resolution this is when you will noticed less performance.
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Not sure if you know because some people don't know what they have sometimes its common but you also have i5-3570K which is an unlocked processor for overclockers this means you are in the best shape for your motherboard currently and also if you are not overclocking that CPU then you should be to make the most of that system.
This sort of setup is still common in gaming because it can do most of the workloads with like a 980 or 1080 or higher you just wont to be able play some games at full ultra everything.
Most games now days try to design their games so they can run on anything and that is because they want to cast the net wide because that is how they make money a game like World of Warcraft is a good example of this because they were always one of the earlier games to adopt this mantra but now many triple A games or well built indie games follow that same line of thinking.
Thanks for replying, guys!
I’m glad to hear that my ageing PC is still capable of playing the more recent games! I’ll have a look through the range of RTX cards and see what best matches my budget and look into overclocking my CPU.
What’s the best way to know which card is compatible with my motherboard? Can I Google it or is there some spec that I should be looking for? How can I find out if my PSU can handle the card?
Your motherboard with your CPU support PCIe 3.0. Nvidia RTX GPUs are PCIe 4.0. That is OK because these GPUs work OK with PCIe 3.0.
I have an RTX 3060Ti (8GB) GPU. It works fine with my old ASUS motherboard with PCIe 3.0. It is more than twice as fast as the GTX 1060 (6GB) it replaced.
Sorry Edit: RTX 2070 super is the sweet spot for gen 3 motherboards as far as new cards go. 30 series are into gen 4 and still totally doable you won't get full saturation of the bandwidth in most cases with a gen 4 card anyway only in some cases
(more demanding games) but its still a loss and pci lanes share their bandwidth because they are networked.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti PCI-Express Scaling - Performance Summary | TechPowerUp
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti PCI-Express Scaling - Conclusion | TechPowerUp
With 20 series and 30 series you are losing some performance on gen3 but its negligible and this is at several factors but for many workloads its not a problem and overall it does not translate into significant performance loss.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 PCI-Express Scaling | TechPowerUp
Each page has a button at the bottom just click through to read up on it.
Either way newer cards on older computers no problem and might as well utilize them as long anything older than 1st gen is to old though like 775 and earlier because they are slow all around and it would be silly to put a new card on something that old.
Last edited by Malneb; 12 Apr 2023 at 02:24.
Thank you for replying. I’ve been looking at the 2080 chips and a lot of the cards are made by different manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte. Are there any manufacturers I should be looking for or avoiding?
Not really you will find conflicting arguments but most cards are similar Asus, Gigabyte and MSI are the top three can't go wrong or you could consider if you can find one new for a good price EVGA, you would be getting a last shot at collectors item as they are not continuing making GPU as of recently but they are still out there in new condition.
Thank you! I can’t believe the prices of some of the collector’s editions of the cards though. It seems cheaper to buy a 30 series than a 2080 ti. So, I’m tempted to go down that route
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