Upgrade low profile PC

Barack Obama

I'm looking at upgrading the graphics card on my 5/6 year old Dell desktop. When I say upgrade, I mean add because it hasn't had one since I removed the crappy stock one when I upgraded to Windows 10! It has an i7-4770 CPU and 16GB of RAM so I'm happy with that.

I have some time on my hands so wanted to give Fallout 4 a try. I installed it and with the onboard 4600 graphics, it showed around 10 fps with Fraps.

I then put in an old AMD Radeon HD 7470 1GB card that I had and the fps dropped down to 6 fps!!

Is this to be expected? Surely by adding a GPU the performance should increase, even by a little bit? Maybe the card is just old and crap, and that's fine. The thing is, if it did show an improvement then I was going to get one of the 2TB GeForce GT 710, expecting them to me a bigger step up??
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-NVIDIA-Passive-Cooling-Graphics/dp/B01AY78NFW
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-GeForce-Passive-Silent-Graphics/dp/B01AY78MLM

Any advice greatly appreciated!

TerrorFirmer

The 7470 is worse than onboard graphics and the GT710 is the same, they are media playback cards not designed for gaming.

The best low profile card you can get is the GTX1050ti at present, would run something like Fallout 4 at 1080p high settings just fine. It's about €160 I think.

If you're on a budget, the GT1030 (GDDR5 version - do NOT get the GDDR4 version) low profile is about €75-80 and should be alright for 1080p low-medium-ish settings.

A new low profile GTX1650 should be hitting the market soon, probably cost similar to the GTX1050Ti low profile though performance is significantly better.

Any card costing less than the GT1030 GDDR5 new is going to give extremely poor results. (eg GT740, GT730, GT710, Radeon R7 240, etc)

Also some low profile graphics card don't come with a low profile plate in the box (stupid, I know) so make sure whichever you buy does, they all come with a full height bracket as standard.

Barack Obama

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

The 7470 is worse than onboard graphics and the GT710 is the same, they are media playback cards not designed for gaming.

The best low profile card you can get is the GTX1050ti at present, would run something like Fallout 4 at 1080p high settings just fine. It's about €160 I think.

If you're on a budget, the GT1030 (GDDR5 version - do NOT get the GDDR4 version) low profile is about €75-80 and should be alright for 1080p low-medium-ish settings.

A new low profile GTX1650 should be hitting the market soon, probably cost similar to the GTX1050Ti low profile though performance is significantly better.

Any card costing less than the GT1030 GDDR5 new is going to give extremely poor results. (eg GT740, GT730, GT710, Radeon R7 240, etc)

Also some low profile graphics card don't come with a low profile plate in the box (stupid, I know) so make sure whichever you buy does, they all come with a full height bracket as standard.

Great info, thanks a lot!

I might just take a step back and reevaluate. I’m limited by size and lack of space so it might be better to see what I can salvage from my setup and get a new box that’ll give me room for a standard size card.

K.O.Kiki

Good idea, but the Dell motherboard is not standard ATX spec, so you'll need a new LGA 1150 motherboard (can be picked up on eBay/AliExpress for cheap; just get anything that's B85/Q87/Z87/Z97 and avoid H81). Also a PSU.