PC Video Card Upgrade Time

The magic smoke came out of the chips that make the video work on my PC. Once the smoke comes out of the chips, they don't work anymore.

I've had an nVidia 480GTX that was nice, but starting to drop below the requirements for new games. What's a good current card that won't cost more than a GRMer project car?

The PC is an old Dell T5400 server with 2 Xeon CPUs and a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot.

I like to check Tomshardware:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html

You are fortunate that you appear to have held out until after the "coin mining" GPU price run ups.  I do wonder if a lot of those previously expensive cards are being sold at a big discount used.

GTX 480 is pretty ancient.

Thanks to the recent-ish release of the new RTX & RT line up, used previous generation Nvidia cards are pretty affordable, and all over eBay.  You can pick a 1050 TI up for under $100, the benchmark comparison Google pulled up says that the 1050 TI will be about a 50% improvement over your old 480.

You can get 6GB 1060s for around $150, same benchmark comparison claims that's a 173% improvement. 

I suspect your CPUs and/or RAM are going to bottleneck most modern-ish performance GPUs.

I found some good deals on shopgoodwill.com for second hand cards, just check their specs on benchmark.com before buying.  Basically if it doesn’t at least have 1GB or more of DDR3 memory it’s not likely to be worth the effort.

eBay is a great source as well.  Heck, even Craigslist and Facebook marketplace.

Note the power supply requirements of whatever you get as some require extra power connections.

That said, it might be time to look at newer mainboard, processors and memory.  There are still good deals to be had on a generation or two older hardware that is still in good shape.

In reply to Stefan :

Power requirements of just about everything made in the last 5 years are going to be less than that 480.  If he's got the PSU to support a 480, he should be good.

In reply to bigdaddylee82 :

Yes, the Dell T5400 has a 875W supply with the graphics connectors. Browsing the 1050 and 1060 cards, I see that they are " PCI Express 3.0". My old board is "PCI Express 2.0". I expect that the cards will still work, but be degraded a little. Looking into that now. Looking at Tom's Hdw..., but I trust you guys.

Ok... editing post: 3.0 card will run fine on a 2.0 slot, slight loss of FPS capability.

AAZCD said:

In reply to bigdaddylee82 :

Yes, the Dell T5400 has a 875W supply with the graphics connectors. Browsing the 1050 and 1060 cards, I see that they are " PCI Express 3.0". My old board is "PCI Express 2.0". I expect that the cards will still work, but be degraded a little. Looking into that now. Looking at Tom's Hdw..., but I trust you guys.

Ok... editing post: 3.0 card will run fine on a 2.0 slot, slight loss of FPS capability.

PCIe 2.0 x16 just barely bottlenecks a 2080Ti.  Any lower grade of card won't encounter a bottleneck from the PCI bus.

Thanks all.

I just bought a 3GB 1060. It will be a good upgrade and probably the last upgrade until I junk my old server and get a whole new PC. One thing I found out and should have expected is that eBay is flooded with too good to be true bargains from China. There are lots of similar listings for "unbranded" GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB cards for ~$50 to $90 that have typos, conflicting info, and a few other red flags. One thing these counterfeits have in common is a standard VGA connector. I read some articles stating that they are based on the GTS 450 GPU and flashed to report they are a GTX 1050 Ti. Glad I caught this before buying one, it benchmarks well below my old GTX 480. Best to stick with the major brands.