Hey, I recently burned my 8500GT so I'm looking for something new. I can't call myself a gamer but it would be great to play MAFIA2 or GTA5 in the future. PC specs: Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ 2.20GHz; RAM: 2GB; PSU: Inter-tech 420W; HDD: SATA2 (or SATA1 can't remember) Western Digital 250GB; Motherboard: Biostar NF61S-M2 TE; Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 740N (1280x1024); I'm thinking of getting a ZOTAC GTS450 1GB DDR5 it's about 66pounds here in Lithuania but I'm also thinking about SPARKLE GTX550TI 1GB GDDR5/192B and Sapphire Radeon HD7750 1GB DDR5 they both are priced at about 84pounds. So what would be your choice? Is that 18pound difference really neccessary? Maybe it would be better to invest those into a better CPU cooler (I'm also thinking about that) or RAM? I don't want to put too much money in to this rig because as you can see it is not the newest one Thanks!
For you, i'd recommend a new everything really. But I realise that's probably out of reach for you. If you're not planning on overclocking, the stock cooler will work fine. Also, I recommend another 2GB of ram at least if you wanna play the likes of GTAV.etc As for the GPU, the 7750's getting really good praise and outperforms, by a rather large margin, the GTS 450 and by a smaller margin the GTX550ti. So yeah, get more RAM and a 7750 ^^.
mattyh is right tbh, if you want to play the likes of Mafia2 and GTA V in the future your better of saving for an entire new rig. Something along the lines of a second hand SB rig with a gtx 560ti or gtx 570 would be the best bet. and you could probably get second hand SB and Fermi 560/570's all together including reasonable case/new PSU/ memory/ CPU/ board/ GPU for around £500 and yes I know your not in the UK, but unfortunately I'm a bit short of time so this is the best I can explain things for the time being, I'm sure some other people will come along and help you in more detail than I can
Going purely on numbers and without checking any benchmarks, the 7750 has 512 stream processors with reference clock of 800 MHz. The GTX 550 Ti has 192 stream processors, which Sparkle clocks to 920 MHz. 550 Ti has 192-bit memory, 7750 has 128-bit memory. GTX 450 is a generation behind the 550 Ti, so I would count that out with the small price difference. My personal choice (even though I am an NVidia fan) would be the 7750 out of those two choices (although I would search for benchmarks to compare them properly).
the board only has 2 ram slots so would need to swap out both 2 x 1 sticks for 2 x2 (4 gig would be a good choice) the socket is AM2 but the support says its dual core only; tbh i would save for something newer - DDR3 based , and if on a budget then an AM3 based quad core (the board , chip and ram would be the same as an intel i5 cpu on its own)
You need new everything. Getting a new GPU (only), would be a complete waist of money. Not only you don't have enough power from our power-supply to feed the graphic card, But also your CPU and memory would be serious bottleneck, blocking the ability to take advantage of any newer card. I had a bit faster computer than you (AMD Athlon X2 4400+ 2.2GHz but on the older, yet faster Socket 939, 4GB of RAM), and my Geforce GTX 260, was being bottleneck by my CPU, so imagine now, with significant faster GPU's. You need new everything. If you also use your computer for work related task, you also may want a new, bigger monitor (higher resolution) (I also recommend also significantly better, might as well)
As everyone else has said. What you buy now completely depends on your future plans for upgrades really!
Thank you everyone for your answers, they really helped me and rescued from a mistake. I think I'll save some money for a new PC or maybe for a second hand 9800gt. But what I actually I do is nothing I guess PC is working so it suits me well.
Not worth upgrading. You need a new cpu. Even going to a Phenom II would double your fps. An i5 would triple them. See if you can't look for a second hand i7 900 series, those still have a lot of kick, and can be found for reasonably cheap.
