Video Card Upgrade. Suggestions?

[hafaphoto]

I have a Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 with a 6300 CPU. Looking to upgrade the CPU to a 8350, and upgrade from my 750 Ti video card for Diablo 4. Requirements are:

• Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 660 or AMD Radeon™ R9 280

What video card will work for the least money? I admit I am not up at all on the current video cards (esp Radeon). I know this is pretty much a legacy system, but it works fine for what I do. (light gaming, web surfing, minor Photoshop). Money is a bit tight, thinking a CPU and GPU upgrade should have me good to go for at least a couple of years.

Suggestions greatly appreciated.

 

[EarthDog]

Yikes. An 8350 in that motherboard makes me nervous in the first place. Cheap board with flagship cpu is asking for trouble. Make sure you have active cooling on those VRMs bud....

I also don't think you'll like the experience with using a minimum cpu. I'd look into something a gtx 1060.

 

[magellan]

I have to second ED's suggestion on active cooling for the MOSFET's constituting a VRM circuit -- I had a gigabyte EP45 ud3lr LGA775 board that I was overclocking a q9550 on, there were no heatsinks on any of the power MOSFETs and one day one or more of these MOSFETs fried, just as I was getting somewhere tuning the VTT's for my overclock and that was the end of LGA775 for me. I'm just glad the motherboard didn't take out anything else along with it.

 

[hafaphoto]

I got to thinking, and I have had this computer for 7+ years... Might be best to just save my $ and build a new one. With the age of the components, it is about time for a new one. I can spend a month or so saving and reading up on the best stuff to get (that I can afford.)

Thanks for the advice!

 

[EarthDog]

Reach out to us first!! We'll help you out!

 

[hafaphoto]

Reach out to us first!! We'll help you out!

Absolutely! I appreciate the help. I have not been very active on here, but it is the best forum for computer/OC stuff on the web.

 

[MisterEd]

Yikes. An 8350 in that motherboard makes me nervous in the first place. Cheap board with flagship cpu is asking for trouble. Make sure you have active cooling on those VRMs bud....

I also don't think you'll like the experience with using a minimum cpu. I'd look into something a gtx 1060.

I wasn't aware of the difference in motherboards when I built my computer 10 years ago:

MBD: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
CPU: AMD FX-8350
GPU: Asus ENGTX560 DCII OC/2DI/1GD5 (1GB RAM)

The motherboard must have been better than average because I have never had a problem with it.

Last year I upgraded the GPU on another computer so I replaced the GPU with the following:
ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1060 (6GB RAM)

The upgrade in GPU speed was welcome but more important I now have 6GB GPU RAM. Now days 1GB of GPU RAM is not enough.

 

[hafaphoto]

@MisterEd I remember back in the days of WinXP thinking people with 3G of RAM were just showing off... 2G was plenty of RAM. LOL, times change.

 

[MisterEd]

@MisterEd I remember back in the days of WinXP thinking people with 3G of RAM were just showing off... 2G was plenty of RAM. LOL, times change.

Back in 1979 my first computer had 4K RAM. It was a big upgrade when I updated it to 48K RAM. When I got my first Windows PC in 1995 I think it had 8 or 16MB RAM. Windows 95 had a limit of 480MB RAM and Windows 98 had a limit of 1GB RAM. Those were the days.

 

[magellan]

@MisterEd
That's bizarre that a PC would only have 4K RAM, even the 8051 MCU's I used to work on had 64K of addressable code space (which wasn't always enough), although it's a bit different because it was a Harvard architecture, not Von Neumann.

 

[MisterEd]

@MisterEd
That's bizarre that a PC would only have 4K RAM, even the 8051 MCU's I used to work on had 64K of addressable code space (which wasn't always enough), although it's a bit different because it was a Harvard architecture, not Von Neumann.

I should have said which computer it was.

TRS-80 Model I
CPU: Zilog Z80 @1.78 MHz
Level I BASIC - 4KB RAM
Level II BASIC - 16KB RAM (replaced LEVEL I BASIC module)
Expansion Interface added an additional 32KB RAM for a total of 48KB RAM.
The Z80 could address 64KB RAM. The RAM addresses above 48KB were used by the system.
The 48KB RAM was not enough for a disk operating system. If you wanted that you needed two floppy drives. The 1st stored the components for the disk operating system. The 2nd was for user data.

My TRS-80 Model I before I upgraded it. I am not sure but I assume it had Level II Basic and 16KB RAM.



My TRS-80 Model I after I upgraded it. I added the Expansion Interface with 32KB additional RAM, 2 x 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, and 2 x 8-inch floppy drives.

 

[Kenrou]

I have 2 FX systems, an Asus M5A97 EVO 2.0 (the upgraded version of yours) with a 4300 and a Sabertooth 990fx with a 8370, I tried switching them around at one point to test the VRMs, and it got downright toasty if doing anything more stressful than gaming. It could handle it on a ventilated case but, like ED said, wouldn't recommend it 24/7. Even at stock, I can imagine how much the 8350 would torture that little board with a worse VRM section…

 

[EarthDog]

The motherboard must have been better than average because I have never had a problem with it.

Yeah. It's the 990 chipset which was the flagship at the time IIRC (the OP's Asus is 970). It also has a heatsink which is half the battle for stock operation on that chip, lol.

 

[hafaphoto]

I should have said which computer it was.

TRS-80 Model I

I had the Radio Shack Color Computer. Upgraded from 4K to 16K (or something similar) of RAM! What was it, the Peek and Poke to speed up the CPU? Old school '80's style Overclocking.

And now we are tossing around Megs and Terabytes like candy. Got to love technology. Always getting faster and cheaper.

 

[magellan]

@MisterEd, how much data could a 8" floppy drive hold? Were they double-sided?

 

[MisterEd]

@MisterEd, how much data could a 8" floppy drive hold? Were they double-sided?

I only remember what they were for CP/M. A 8" SSSD floppy could hold about 240 KB data. A 5-1/4" SSSD floppy could hold about 80 KB data.

The computer I used when I bought the dual 8-inch floppy drive only supported single-side (SS) floppies even though the drive was supposed to be capable of double-side (DS) floppies. Many years later I tried a (DS) floppy in it. It didn't work so the I am not sure whether the drives were really single-sided or double-sided.

BTW, I must have bought the dual 8-inch floppy drives around 1983. They cost $1200 US. That was a lot of money back then.

I eventually replaced the TRS-80 Model I with a Lobo MAX-80. It could dual-boot to either TRS-80 Model IV LDOS, CP/M 2.2, or CP/M 3.0. It had 12KB RAM.

Below is a picture I found on a website for the Lobo MAX-80. The picture shows it with the same dual 8-inch floppy drives I had.



Lobo Systems MAX-80

Lobo MAX-80 computer

 

[EarthDog]

Videocard upgrade, guys...

 

[DaveB]

Videocard upgrade, guys...

I got to thinking, and I have had this computer for 7+ years... Might be best to just save my $ and build a new one. With the age of the components, it is about time for a new one. I can spend a month or so saving and reading up on the best stuff to get (that I can afford.)

Thanks for the advice!

Not really, the OP changed his mind and will be saving for completely a new system which will require a new thread anyway. Plus, the video card issue already went off the rails with discussions of motherboard VRMs for upgrading the CPU to a 8350.

That being said, my first computer back in 1982 was the infamous TI-99/4A that I added the Peripheral Box and Speech Synthesizer to. In the Peripheral Box, which was built like Mil-Spec equipment, I installed the 32K RAM update bringing the total RAM to 48K and the 5-1/4 Floppy Drive. I actually used it for free-lance Tech Writing work, running Microsoft Multiplan for cost estimates and using the TI word processor for documents. The TI word processor worked directly off the assembly language editor and so was very fast and allowed for a 40-character display vs. the normal TV based 32 characters. I bought a 40-character amber monochrome monitor for my free lance work and made a good amount of extra cash. A daisy-wheel printer provided really high quality printout for my customers. I also added a 300-baud Volksmodem and went online on using a free subscription to The Source.

On the lighter side, I wrote a little program that allowed my daughter to type words into the computer and have the speech synthesizer speak them out. She'd sit there and type F-A-R-T and hit enter over and over giggling after every time it spoke. That got her into typing and spelling at an early age. Plus it embarrassed my wife at the supermarket checkout when my 3-year old daughter told her that a man had just made an F-A-R-T spelling it out rather than saying it.

I found this image, which looks similar what I had with the Peripheral Box connect to the base unit through the speech synthesizer.

 

[EarthDog]

Good call. And i guess, my bad for pointing out the likely terrible experience with that board and cpu combo AND answering his question (smfh). Looks like this ran its course and should be closed.

OP can start a thread for his new build when he's ready.

Happy to split off the other posts to its own thread. @hafaphoto LMK!!!