Upgrade procedure & recommendation

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Hi all,

Looking to possibly upgrade my video card and haven't went through the procedure in a long time. So, I'm looking for a bit of advice and a recommendation.

1: the upgrade process...
I know "back in the day" there were all kinds of issues with not un-installing drivers prior to installing new drivers or cards. Is this still an issue? I know it's not with just a straight driver upgrade, but how about with switching to a new card? How about in the case of switching between brands?

Anyone have any tips, or is there a guide out there that people around here think is a good place to take a look?

2: New card...
Currently in my system is:
GeForce GTX260
Intel i7 930 (2.8 GHz)
6 GB Ram
Win7 Pro x64

I'd imagine throwing anything super powered in there will quickly leave me CPU bound, so I'm looking for any type of advice on maybe a good mid or upper tier solution for my case. The primary reason for the upgrade is for gaming, work software is all running fine currently.

3: My history...
Been into PCs for a long time, built my first one in the mid 90s and built all my own up until about 2004 or 2005. Been buying mostly off the shelf, or more accurately, custom-configured rigs since then. At one time I was on top of all the chipsets, memory types, knew all the nomenclature, but I am WAY out of the loop these days, lol!

Trying to keep this a fairly smooth operation as this computer is my main work desktop, so I can't afford to be down for an extended period of time.


Thanks in advance for any and all replies!!

 

[chihlidog]

Your CPU is still pretty quick. What resolution are you running?

You may still have driver issues especially if you switch brands. Still reccomend wiping previous drivers.

Realistically....if you want to stick with NV then the 970 is where you should be looking. If you dont mind some extra power draw, the R9 290 is beastly and has a full 4 gigs of memory if you're open to switching to AMD. Cant go wrong either way.

 

[happy medium]

How is your power supply? What model is it?

If your power supply is good, I'd suggest buying a used gtx670 or gtx760 for about 150$ or on the AMD side a 7950 or 7970 for about 140$. Unless you overclock your cpu anything faster might not be worth it.

I wouldn't throw a ton of money in that rig.

ANd welcome to the forums.

 

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Thanks to you both, replying to both replies, along with some more specifics:

Current card: EVGA GTX260 896MB

Resolution: 1920 x 1200 (16:10 24" monitor)

Motherboard: Asus P6T SE

Ram: 3 x 2GB DDR3-1600

Power supply: xion 700w

I most likely won't be overclocking. And I'm certainly open to AMD, that is the brand GPU I'm running on my home desktop (R9-280X-3GB), just didn't know if my old processor would be up to running something nearly that beefy.

 

[happy medium]

Thanks to you both, replying to both replies, along with some more specifics:

Current card: EVGA GTX260 896MB

Resolution: 1920 x 1200 (16:10 24" monitor)

Motherboard: Asus P6T SE

Ram: 3 x 2GB DDR3-1600

Power supply: xion 700w

I most likely won't be overclocking. And I'm certainly open to AMD, that is the brand GPU I'm running on my home desktop (R9-280X-3GB), just didn't know if my old processor would be up to running something nearly that beefy.

Well a 7970 is about = to a 280x performance wise. So the answer is yes your cpu will push a 280x/7970 fairly well. About 3x the performance your current gtx260. your psu should be fine also.

 

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Great! Thanks for the time & advice.

 

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Received my EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Super Clocked ACX 2.0 4GB GDDR5 today, will try to get it in this weekend, figure if anything else happens to this machine soon, the card will just come with to a new PC. Thanks again

 

[rc3ilynt]

Received my EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Super Clocked ACX 2.0 4GB GDDR5 today, will try to get it in this weekend, figure if anything else happens to this machine soon, the card will just come with to a new PC. Thanks again

Advertised VRAM issue aside, solid choice. EVGA probably has the industries best service.

As for drivers, windows 7 should install them when the card is installed automatically assuming it's connected to the internet. They may not be the most recent drivers though so I'd probably just head over to the nvidia website and grab the new ones.

 

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Advertised VRAM issue aside, solid choice. EVGA probably has the industries best service.

As for drivers, windows 7 should install them when the card is installed automatically assuming it's connected to the internet. They may not be the most recent drivers though so I'd probably just head over to the nvidia website and grab the new ones.

Thanks. Yeah as far as the VRAM stuff goes, I'm going with the philosophy that at this point I at least knew the issue before purchasing, so no big deal there.

With the nvidia drivers, I have the GeForce Experience app running, and that seems to do a pretty good job of keeping drivers correctly up to date.