Graphics Card Suggestion

[Austin Damiano]

My PC is quite old. Here's the specs:

Operating System

Windows 10 Home 64-bit

CPU

Intel Core i7 920 @ 2.67GHz	53 °C

Bloomfield 45nm Technology

RAM

12.0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 795MHz (11-11-11-30)

Motherboard

EVGA 132-BL-E758 (Socket 423)	28 °C

Graphics

Acer P243W (1920x1200@59Hz)

3071MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (EVGA)	59 °C

Storage

931GB Western Digital WDC WD10EACS-00D6B0 ATA Device (SATA )	27 °C

232GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO 250GB ATA Device (SATA (SSD))	35 °C

7452GB Seagate ST8000DM0004-1ZC11G ATA Device (SATA )	28 °C

Optical Drives

TSSTcorp CDDVDW SH-S223Q ATA Device

Audio

Realtek High Definition Audio

Would getting a better GPU be worth the money and if so, any suggestions?

[Andred Darwin]

My 2 cents, I would not spend any money in that machine, instead save for a future full upgrade, having said that, I used a very similar machine in the past ( i7 920 + DX58SO + 12gb + 650ti ) and was awesome, great setup, rock solid, used for many years, that CPU (i7 920) was one of the best "overclockable" CPU's I ever had, I really liked that machine (I'm sure you do too)... even after I upgraded to a new machine, I spent a few bucks on cpu i7-980x (6 cores, 12 threads), and GPU to a GTX 780 (found a nice deal locally at the time), a nice upgrade ... these parts are really cheap today, but I'm not sure if its worth spending money on it, things are much different today... in summary, I guess its a great machine to keep for as long as it works (try Linux on it... will continue to do a great job for a long time ), but any money you spend on it, will not really bring it any closer to 2023 specs, something will always bottleneck it hard... and software industry today, ie:Microsoft/Apple/Intel/AMD/NVidia, etc,  is also working really hard to make sure our older hardware becomes obsolete as fast as possible, frustrating.... )

Edit: Looking on Ebay, a i7-980x goes for around $50 bucks, a GTX 780 for another $50, or a GTX 970 for about $60, you would need to upgrade the CPU to try to keep up with a 780 or 970 (you may need a new power supply too)... I still think the $100 bucks will better serve you if saved towards a newer system, not to count, there's a risk on getting used parts...

 

Edited February 26, 2023 by Andred Darwin

[Qie Niangao]

It does depend on your longer term plans. If you're thinking of getting a new desktop in a year or so, you might splurge on the graphics card now, with the intent of moving it to that new machine. That assumes you have adequate power supply for that new card. I used to have a GTX 660 and remember it at least had some kind of power connector, but not sure what it claimed to need for power. And of course if the new card draws more power, more heat will need dissipating in the case. But not all new cards demand more power, it's just something to take into account.

FWIW, when I "retired" my 660 I upgraded everything at the same time, as Andred suggests. Went with an nVidia RTX 3060 and got a i5-11600K @ 3.90GHz with 16 GB. (I've never seen the point of an i7 or i9 for what I do on a Windows desktop, but YMMV.)

All that said, timing of a graphics card purchase is as bad as deciding when to fill up the gas tank. If POW crypto keeps marching us towards climate Armageddon, GPUs will get rare and expensive again. Or if, god forbid, Xi decides it's time to fill the South China Sea with blood, but then we'd all have bigger problems than the price of graphics cards. Otherwise, all things being equal, the same graphics performance will cost less with each new GPU generation.

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 2/25/2023 at 4:27 AM, Austin Damiano said:

My PC is quite old

Yes, indeed... My (still running) oldest (third, computing power wise) PC got a Core2 Quad Q6600 (OCed @ 3.4GHz) with a GTX660. Yours is barely, a wee bit, more ”powerful”, and I would definitely not be using it for everyday's SLing any more, even with the fastest viewer.

On 2/25/2023 at 4:27 AM, Austin Damiano said:

Would getting a better GPU be worth the money

Forget it !  You would be CPU-bound...

For today's (and tomorrow's, considering PBR impact) SLing, I would recommend at the strict minimum an i7-4770K (or equivalent) and a GTX960 (forget about Intel/AMD (i)GPUs: their OpenGL drivers are simply not on par with NVIDIA's at equivalent hardware price level), with 16GB RAM.

[Flea Yatsenko]

I second a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM before the GPU. The GPU and CPU are going to hold you back, and it might be pretty expensive to do graphics card and the rest of your system. I had an i7 920, the stock speeds are horrible. Most CPUs are doing 4ghz now and in laymans terms they do a lot more for each ghz they have. I.E. a quad core new CPU at 4ghz is a lot faster than twice as fast as your 2.67ghz i7 920. Your graphics card is so old it no longer receives any meaningful driver updates, only security updates.

You aren't going to see any meaningful improvements until you upgrade the CPU and graphics card. If you do one at a time you're going to be very disappointed, but if you can't afford to do both at the same time you're going to have to accept that you're going to spend money on one or the other and not see much improvement.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

Well, if you aren't going to do the obvious and get two more GTX660s...

I don't think upgrading the CPU to a faster 6-core Xeon and a GTX1050ti or 1060 6GB would be unreasonable if a new PC isn't in your budget. You should be able to do that for about a hundred bucks I think. Used, obviously. If you can find another 12GB of memory cheap, Windows and Firestorm would both probably appreciate it. 

Edited February 27, 2023 by Lyssa Greymoon

[JeromFranzic]

If you want something more portable... you might be able to find a laptop like mine from 2018 for about $200-300 used. I'm happy with mine as I run a m.2 as the main drive + a SATA SSD for extra storage. And ya, I recommend a cooling pad with it. I think that's the only reason I can type this right now, LOL... otherwise I might be looking for a new laptop. 

Acer Aspire 7 (2018)/Intel 8th Gen i7/Nvidia GTX 1050/32 GB DDR4... fully win11 compatible, shipped with win10 ... if you don't play too many of the newer AAA titles, this is fine. 

[Kathrine Jansma]

9 hours ago, JeromFranzic said:

And ya, I recommend a cooling pad with it. I think that's the only reason I can type this right now

You might want to clean the fans/cooler after 2 years. Usually works wonders. I had an older Acer Aspire and cleaning basically rejuvenated it quite a bit (it felt like 20% faster/no more thermal throttling).

[AmeliaJ08]

2 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

You might want to clean the fans/cooler after 2 years. Usually works wonders. I had an older Acer Aspire and cleaning basically rejuvenated it quite a bit (it felt like 20% faster/no more thermal throttling).

Yeah, laptops need at least an annual internal cleaning (and in some cases more often). A lot of people neglect this but I service laptops and even a little bit of fluff in those tiny, fine heatsinks can cause a noticeable rise in temperature under load.

Given most laptops - especially those with dedicated GPU's - are always on the edge as far as thermal performance 2-5c extra can be the difference between everything running great and thermal throttling. Cooling pads are mostly a cludge, in many cases they don't do anything that cleaning/repasting and elevating/using the laptop on a hard surface wouldn't solve.

Also always worth considering undervolting. Modern CPU's in laptops can take as much as -100mV on the core/cache in a lot of cases and the results are often 2-5c drop in temperature under load, adjusting turbo boost frequency ratios can also be very effective but we're getting into quite complex tuning here, one for the geekier people to consider though.

 

[Jackson Redstar]

SL is really not meant for laptops IMO, They turn into a portable toaster oven (lol) and with the newer code now, the graphics card can ramp up even more, often running at 90%+ for extended periods of time, assuming you have ALM with shadows on

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Jackson Redstar said:

SL is really not meant for laptops IMO, They turn into a portable toaster oven (lol) and with the newer code now, the graphics card can ramp up even more, often running at 90%+ for extended periods of time, assuming you have ALM with shadows on

It's doable, I use a laptop exclusively but it has taken quite a lot of tuning to get everything under control as far as thermals.  Maybe dedicated gaming laptops fare better with less tweaking needed but from what I've heard that isn't often the case.  It's not an especially taxing application given the cpu/gpu power of many modern laptops but will generate heat of course.

I think most people just don't have the time or inclination though and I get that, I think the manufacturers could be a lot better about how they set up machines because they often come with default settings that lead to unacceptable thermal throttling.

[JeromFranzic]

1 hour ago, Jackson Redstar said:

SL is really not meant for laptops IMO, They turn into a portable toaster oven (lol) and with the newer code now, the graphics card can ramp up even more, often running at 90%+ for extended periods of time, assuming you have ALM with shadows on

I've had few issues with running SL for extended periods. Along with periodically cleaning the laptop and cooling pad, I think getting rid of the HDD helped me a lot. By the time I first rezzed on to SL in April, 2021... I was far away from using a HDD as a main drive. 

Some software tuning helps. I run in Linux most of the time, and using power efficient settings actually works for me. My laptop can't undervolt (BIOS isn't programmed for it), but my temps are stable, rarely going past 70c overall. I typically am on for 1-2 hours when I'm really engaged in SL. AFK is not something I do often, I'm either logged on and active or logged off.