Casey
Veteran Member
My main system is an AMD Athlon II with 12Gb ram. It works quite nicely aside from the original hard drive failing.
A couple years ago a friend gifted me with some spare parts, including an EVGA GeForce gtx560 Ti. Problem was the sucker pulls 30 amps on boot up. The system only came with a 330w power supply, which was fine using the on board video. (ATI Radeon 3000 chipset)
Finally plumped down money for an EVGA 550w power supply, the card ran fine with that, and my video scores skyrocketed. Big shock, I know. Later I saw a 2Tb hard drive on sale & installed that.
The problem arose when the replacement primary drive died. Not wanting to buy a refurb drive again, I bought a 2nd 2Tb drive (apparently that's the base drive these days) and blew $20 on a Win 7 Pro disk so I wouldn't be locked in to the original hardware.
Anway, the first time I powered it up with both drives in it wouldn't boot. After mucking with it I yanked the GPU card and went back to the internal Radeon 3000 adapter.. It booted fine, then.
That's where I'm at right now, and the internal adapter handles HD quite nicely, but it gags on 4k video. I don't have many 4k clips, and I'm not a gamer, so this isn't a huge issue, but it's annoying.
I can get a more powerful p/s (New Egg has an EVGA 600w on sale for $56 right now) for $60 - $80. Or I can invest in a low end GPU card.
My question is: will I have to spend $60 - $80 to get a decent GPU that can handle 4k video, or will a $20 card do the job?
As I said, I'm not much of a gamer (Quake II & Asteroids), but the 4k situation is irksome. Sooner or later I'll need to upgrade the video on this system.
Suggestions?
A couple years ago a friend gifted me with some spare parts, including an EVGA GeForce gtx560 Ti. Problem was the sucker pulls 30 amps on boot up. The system only came with a 330w power supply, which was fine using the on board video. (ATI Radeon 3000 chipset)
Finally plumped down money for an EVGA 550w power supply, the card ran fine with that, and my video scores skyrocketed. Big shock, I know. Later I saw a 2Tb hard drive on sale & installed that.
The problem arose when the replacement primary drive died. Not wanting to buy a refurb drive again, I bought a 2nd 2Tb drive (apparently that's the base drive these days) and blew $20 on a Win 7 Pro disk so I wouldn't be locked in to the original hardware.
Anway, the first time I powered it up with both drives in it wouldn't boot. After mucking with it I yanked the GPU card and went back to the internal Radeon 3000 adapter.. It booted fine, then.
That's where I'm at right now, and the internal adapter handles HD quite nicely, but it gags on 4k video. I don't have many 4k clips, and I'm not a gamer, so this isn't a huge issue, but it's annoying.
I can get a more powerful p/s (New Egg has an EVGA 600w on sale for $56 right now) for $60 - $80. Or I can invest in a low end GPU card.
My question is: will I have to spend $60 - $80 to get a decent GPU that can handle 4k video, or will a $20 card do the job?
As I said, I'm not much of a gamer (Quake II & Asteroids), but the 4k situation is irksome. Sooner or later I'll need to upgrade the video on this system.
Suggestions?