GPU Upgrade path for OEM ASUS Essentio CM6870

CrisR82 · May 5, 2020

Budget (including currency): 250-350 BGN

Country: Bulgaria

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: AVerMedia Recentral, OpenBroadcaster, general gaming (mostly JRPGs and the occasional heavy'er game like Disaster Report 4 or Resident Evil 2 Remake).

Other details: see below

I have what I would consider a general-use PC. Purchased it as an OEM build and did some minor modifications to it (indicated in the specs below) however I'm looking at a possible GPU upgrade. I game mostly on consoles these days (just out of convenience) while using my PC for older games, PC-exclusives ones but most importantly as a capture device through AVerMedia Live Gamer Portable 2 Plus. The problem with this last one is that it cannot do 1080p60 video capture even with the capture card's hardware encoder (1080p30 works fine) and trying to do multi-device capture to add a webcam for example disables it and going through software-only is even worse.

The official page of the PC: https://www.asus.com/us/Tower-PCs/CM6870/specifications/

The actual specs I have in my model:

CPU: Intel Core i7 3770 @ 3.40GHz

RAM: 8GB DDR3 across 2 slots (out of 4 based ob Speccy's report) @ 800Mhz

Motherboard: Intel H77 (not sure what this means but: version Rev X.0x, chipset revision 09, southbridge revision 04)

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB GDDR5 (1GHz GPU clock, so I assume it's the 1GHz Edition one)

Storage: 240GB Samsung EVO 860 SATA SSD (not part of OEM build), 1TB SATA3 WEstern Digital Blue 7200rpm Seagate HDD, 1TB SATA3 7200rpm HDD (not part of OEM build)

Optical drives: CD/DVD-RW drive, not sure of manufacturer

Audio: on-board

Peripherals: Logitech M100 USB mouse, ASUS OEM USB keyboard, 16-in-1 card reader (tower front panel, seems to be USB 2.0). NOTE: often using a Logitech C920 (USB 2.0) webcam and Blue Snowball (USB 2.0) microphone. Also a lot of my data is stored on external USB 3.0 drives (mostly Western Digital if that matters). While I'll at no point have all the devices connected, webcam+mic OR x2 HDDs being able to be connected is something I hope to be able to do.

Network: built-in LAN port.

Monitor: LG 23MP55 over HDMI (23'' 1080p 60Hz)

Now here is the bad news for me: I am not sure what my PSU is. According to the page it's a 300W or 350W one (at the time of writing, I cannot check it due to PC location, but I am guessing it might be the 350W one based on the stuff currently connected and working). I'm looking at the possibility to upgrade preferably without having to touch the PSU. I would assume disconnecting the DVD drive would gain me a small amount of power but my guess is that it won't make a big difference.

So what I hope to do:

- upgrade the GPU to something that would be a good boost for the paid price (if we're talking minimal gains, no point in doing so I feel)

- if PSU would allow it after GPU upgrade, add another 8GB DDR3 RAM in the remaining slots

Any helps and tips would be greatly appreciated.

While no expert, I'm fairly tech savvy so if any additional information would help with a better advise, I can provide it.