I currently have a 1050ti and a i5 9600. Not sure about my ram and can’t check since I’m not at home…
I’m wanting to upgrade the video card and looking for recommendations. I was looking at a 4060 because it’s an upgrade at a decent price.
Thoughts?
4060 or the AMD RX 7600 would probably be at the limit of that CPU without significantly holding them back in performance.
Yea. Amazing how old that is now…. It happened so fast.
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I had an OC 8600k for a while (basically the exact same CPU) it was a good gaming CPU back then.
Yea, it hasn’t been bad. I only really play WoW, though, so haven’t had a need to really do much else.
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What power supply does your system have? You can’t necessarily just assume that you will be able to swap that 1050ti out for a 4060 or some larger GPU.
The 1050ti is a very low-end card that, depending on the model, might not even have a supplemental PCI-E power connector. If it does, It’s likely just a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector. Higher-end cards often require two 6 or 8-pin PCI-E power connectors.
I’m asking because a lot of these cheap OEM systems don’t give you a lot of PSU headroom. If you only have a 450-500w PSU in there, that doesn’t leave you much room to upgrade your videocard.
Assuming that the PSU isn’t terrible, then another thing you might look at are older used cards. There are some great bargains to be had. I just recently bought a Titan X (pascal) 12GB card for $100 that gives similar performance to a 4060. If you want RTX features, I see RTX 2080 8GB cards selling in the $150-200 range all the time, which is a faster card than the 4060.
What’s your budget?
My recommendations are radeon 6600 (~$199)for low end, 7700XT/6800 (~$350-400) for lower mid-range, 7800xt sweetspot ($450), 7900xt/4070 super ($600-650) for mid range, and then 4090 if you can afford anything more expensive than mid range.
this is a great deal right now, performs on par with a 4070 ti super and is $629
https://www.amazon.com/XFX-Speedster-MERC310-Graphics-RX-79TMERCB9/dp/B0BNLSZDCX
You’ll need a CPU upgrade to get the full potential though. Your current CPU limits out around 6600 for CPU-limited gaming at 1080p and maybe 7700XT for higher resolution gaming.
I personally do NOT like the 4060 8gb variants, they are too expensive for their VRAM and will suffer on older CPUs with PCIE3 once they run low on VRAM. 4060ti 16gb is fine in a vacuum but again is too expensive for what it is, and the 7700XT will outperform it.
Honestly if you’re on a 1050ti right now and an i5-9600 and not looking to update the platform, the Radeon 6600 is the best value. $199 and it’s double or triple the performance GPU-wise and it sips power. Should have enough VRAM so that the PCIE3 limitation of your CPU won’t matter. Plus, it is the inexpensive option so you can overlook some VRAM limitations.
https://www.newegg.com/sapphire-pulse-11310-01-20g-amd-radeon-rx-6600-8gb-gddr6/p/N82E16814202409
$20 more gets you a little more performance in the updated 6650XT version, probably worth it:
https://www.amazon.com/XFX-Speedster-SWFT210-Graphics-RX-665X8DFDY/dp/B09ZLRDMXX
i use the radeon 6600 with an old i7-8700 on my kid’s PC and it works great, very similar to your CPU except it does have hyperthreading and a tiny bit more frequency.
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RTX 4060 pulls about 125w gaming via Toms, he would be looking at around 225 to 250w total system power while gaming with his CPU. Even a budget 25c to 30c rated 450w unit can handle that. RTX 2080 would obviously need a PSU that can handle it but not sure he would see its full potential with an i5-9600/k
Rough spot to be, as the CPU is dated and WoW is very CPU-dependent. My 8700k was put out to pasture last expansion, since it just couldn’t handle Aberrus whatsoever.
At this price point, you can run with a 6700 / 6750 XT (if you can find it). Technically, a RX 6600 / 6600 XT / 6650 XT would be fine for 1080p. The 7600 is likely better due to newer drivers, and the 7000-series has access to AFMF2 as a frame gen option. I quite like it, personally, as long as you can maintain a decent frame threshold, so that it adds comfortable smoothness.
Intel Arc A750 / A770 miiiiight be on the table, but I don’t know how they perform in WoW, or if their drivers are even stable for it. It feels like a hobbyist card, more than a mainline card for most people.
Honestly, the 4060 isn’t a bad budget choice if you want it, so this starts erring into preference territory. The low end Nvidia GPUs cannot handle Ray Tracing well at all, but they would still be better than AMD if you tried.
I suppose I could just upgrade everything…
I built it what seems like last year, but I guess was closer to five years ago. My power supply is 750, so that should be good.
Any recommendations on a processor? The two games I play are WoW and Age of Empires. So I’m not playing anything too strenuous…
The RTX 2080 is pretty close in performance to the 4060, maybe 5% faster at most, but can be had cheaper used. The only thing it can’t do compared to the 4060 would be DLSS 3.0, which WoW doesn’t support anyway.
Just get a cheap B450/B550 motherboard (~$50) and a 5700X3D (~$180), and re-use your existing DDR4 to keep costs down. Despite the 5700X3D being an older CPU, it’s still faster than an Intel 14900K in WoW, because WoW loves that 3D cache so much. No other upgrade would give you as great of a performance increase per dollar IMO.
any modern desktop CPU can play the game while something like the AMD 7800X3D will handle flagship GPUs with its top notch gaming performance. Those flagship GPUs would need a PSU upgrade though. Really it’s about the monitor resolution and refresh rate you have, the performance you are looking to get, and the budget you are willing to spend for that performance.
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