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Can a New GPU Rejuvenate a 5 Year Old Gaming PC?
MojoKid writes "New video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA are almost always reviewed on hardware less than 12 months old. That's not an arbitrary decision — it helps reviewers make certain that GPU performance isn't held back by older CPUs and can be particularly important when evaluating the impact of new interfaces or bus designs. That said, an equally interesting perspective might be to compare the performance impact of upgrading a graphics card in an older system that doesn't have access to the substantial performance gains of integrated memory controllers, high speed DDR3 memory, deep multithreading or internal serial links. As it turns out, even using a midrange graphics card like a GeForce GTX 660, substantial gains up to 150 percent can be achieved without the need for a complete system overhaul."
The thing is, most serious gamers willing to plunk down $400 for a video card aren't going to skimp on upgrading the rest of the computer.
And a GTX 660 is not a $400 card, it's more like $200.
The real issue is that most games are designed to run on consoles with their ultra-crappy CPUs, so they do very little on the CPU even on a PC. I've rarely seen my i7 go over 20% CPU usage in any game I've played in Windows with the CPU monitor running.
That said, ~48% of Steam users still have a dual core on Steam according to their hardware survey
One thing that helped boost my older system was switching the drive to an SSD.
I have an i7-920. Still have yet to hit a reason to upgrade.... I bought it on new years eve 2008.
I had a comparable processor, which I bought on the christmas of 2009. However, some new games such as Mechwarrior Online and Planetside 2 are heavily CPU-bound and the machine was lacking when running them. I upgraded to i7-3770K and the improvement was dramatic (30-40 -> 60fps for MWO and 40-50 -> 90fps for Planetside). The graphics card did not change, as it was already rather powerful (Radeon 6970) and not a bottleneck on the detail levels I was using.
This was literally the difference between unplayable and playable, so if you play those games, there absolutely is a reason to upgrade.
To be fair, at 25 years old and over 200 games bought on steam I think I fit the target market for PC games pretty squarely, and I just upgraded my 8800 GTS to a GTX550Ti on my computer that is around 6 years old.
I went from needing to run at medium/low settings at 1080 to being able to run just about everything maxed out at 1920x1200 for about $120.
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