Upgrading a GTS 450 on the cheap
My main desktop has a single 1GB Gigabyte GTS 450 card which has served me well over the years. The remaining specs of the machine are that it has an i5 2550K CPU, 16GB DDR3, 128GB SSD, and 2TB WD drive using a 750W power supply. I'm looking at reusing this card into my i3 machine I also have as it currently is only using the Intel graphics. Although I'd be keen building a new machine, it's not a pressing priority and money is going elsewhere at the moment.
I've been looking around on eBay for a cheap upgrade to get a decent boost (say around $100) and attempting some comparisons using game-debate.com. So far I've concluded that a new GT 720 card despite being years apart isn't worth it from what I can tell, thus looking at alternatives. I've seen a couple of 768MB GTX 460s together for sale at $120, and a single 2GB GTX 560 for the same price. I've never tried SLI before but I'd be interested if the cards and price were reasonable. The 750W PS should be sufficient for SLI with the above though.
Any suggestions?
I've been looking around on eBay for a cheap upgrade to get a decent boost (say around $100) and attempting some comparisons using game-debate.com. So far I've concluded that a new GT 720 card despite being years apart isn't worth it from what I can tell, thus looking at alternatives. I've seen a couple of 768MB GTX 460s together for sale at $120, and a single 2GB GTX 560 for the same price. I've never tried SLI before but I'd be interested if the cards and price were reasonable. The 750W PS should be sufficient for SLI with the above though.
Any suggestions?
Comments
You're probably looking for something better though.
When I compared the GTS 450 to my Radeon 5870, the 5870 pulls ahead just barely. I actually had a GTS 450 a bit under a year ago and it was a decent card, ran most games without difficulty. Translated, it's still not a terrible card and finding an upgrade with significant performance gains within your budget isn't very likely.
That being said, the GTX 560 does have an advantage over the GTS 450 by a reasonable margin. Faster core clock, almost double the ROPs, TMUs and memory bandwidth.http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-560 ... ce-GTS-450
I've never used SLI but personally I'd rather the 2GB GTX 560; 768MB of VRAM isn't much these days and SLI can be quirky on the older cards.
When you're looking at Nvidia stuff, disregard anything that isn't GTX/GTS - it's unlikely any of them will have performance near the GTS 450.
As someone with two GTX 460's my comment about them is: don't. They're just heat and noise times two, and that's a lot of money for something that wasn't really new even five years ago.
This isn't helpful either, but I'm wondering where you live, given that kind of prices. Here you'd easily get a single GTX 660 or two 560's for that kind of money... And cheapest brand new GTX 750 Ti is just 120€ ($134).
On eBay here a GTX 750 Ti is around $200, a 2GB GTX 960 is around $330, and a 4GB at over $400. The PC shop's part list from down the road has a GT 730 for $85 and the next one up is the GTX 750 anyway.
Given the GTS 450 I have was bought new about 4-5 years ago, I would have expected an abundance of used cards by now.
Having a further look, there's some 1.5GB GTX 580s around. Comparing those with the GTS 450 on gpuboss.com seems like a worthwhile upgrade. Using that same website, a GTX 580 has better results than a GTX 650. I would have expected the opposite.
On your last thought, that doesn't surprise me. With the recent Nvidia cards, first number represents the product line and the second where in the line it goes. A GTX 650 is a mid-range card, the 580 was a high-end card when released. So not surprising. Another example, the Radeon 7570 is way slower than my 5870 despite being a newer generation card but very much low to mid range. Gotta know how to read the numbers, or at least the specs when buying.