Computer upgrades - good deal or nah

[Nash]

The thing is I don't know if I'll even build a new computer this year. I have plans that'll involve me being away from home for quite some time...

[GooberMan]

Chances are your performance is suffering right now thanks to the amount of RAM you're using. It should be paging in and out of disk quite often if you use it for more than just looking at the desktop. Increasing the RAM will stop that happening, and you'll get the advantage of Windows using the "unused" memory for caching. Double performance win!

[Blox]

Having a fuckton of RAM also lets you really fuck around with RAM drives, and that's always fun when playing old games. (nuking loading times from orbit is great fun)

[Nash]

I found a Leadtek GTX 960 for $200. My concern right now is my motherboard's PCIe bus is x2.0 but the 960 is x3.0.

Will it even work in the first place, and even if it does - how much of a performance loss will I be experiencing due to the bus interface bottleneck? Does it make a huge difference that I'd basically be wasting 200 dollars?

[GooberMan]

You're looking at roughly half the speed of PCIe3. So theoretically it'd affect load times, and scenes with a ton of draw calls, and scenes where you're trying to use more graphics resources than your card's memory can hold.

Realistically, some guy on the internet ran benchmarks in 2013 and found no real difference. If you're not planning on doing any current-gen console levels of gaming on it, you should be able to get by.

[Nash]

Sweet! That was all I needed to know. Going to grab that card because I can afford to spare $200 just to get this old beast from 2010 going for a few more months. XD

[Kappes Buur]

Once installed, would you mind running the GZDoom benchmark test.
Would be interesting to know how the new GTX 960 fares.

I remember, after upgrading from a GT240 to a GTX460, that I had a slight drop of fps.

[BouncyTEM]

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVI ... s_Scaling/

Even more evidence towards pci-e 2.0 vs 3.0 being not too bad a difference. PCI-E 2.0 x16 is roughly equivalent to 3.0 x8, so it's all good.

Just got a GTX 970 myself and i'm still seeing quite the improvement.

[Nash]

Ok about to drop that $200 on the 960, is my power supply good enough to take it? It's a Cooler Master Real Power Pro

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[Kostov]

Wtf, 1000 watts? I guess it can...

[Hellser]

You probably only need up to about 600-700w. 1000w is well enough to handle it.

[XanderK9]

Cooler Master Real Power Pro

Someone definitely have the power. It's the Grayskull of the power supplies.

[Graf Zahl]

That could power three high end graphics cards, I believe. No need to worry.

[BouncyTEM]

pretty sure you could have *half* that and still be good; the 900 line of nvidia cards is ridiculously power-efficient for what they give.

Your GTX 460, if I read the specifications right, could pull up to 160 watts.

The 960 pulls 120.

For reference, NVidia themselves recommend a 450 watt power supply minimum for the 460.

You're good.

[Nash]

Haha, sweet, good to know that ONE thing I bought five years ago would be considered overkill even by todays' standards... :')