GT610 VS RX6400

[UnendingOne]

So... before anybody mocks me... I don't do a ton of gaming anymore... and this is just a bridge PC to get me through until I can justify spending $1000 on a dedicated gaming PC. So far my setup has only cost me $120. I got my PC for free, upgraded to an SSD for $25, my GT610 cost me $50 like 8 years ago, and my desk cost me $40. Both monitors were free (U2417H).

 

My Specs:

HP Elite 8300 SFF - Intel I5-3470 - GT610 1gb

 

So my question is, should I spend the $150 and get a RX6400 just to get it so I can play Skyrim and Minecraft (at higher resolutions), or just wait and spend my money on a new gaming PC in a year or so. I was going to buy a GTX1650 about a year and a half ago... but I balked at the $150 at the time... boy do I regret that...

[Action_Johnson]

6400

[UnendingOne]

3 minutes ago, Action_Johnson said:

6400

Won't its speed be heavily limited on my computer though, due to it only being x4?

[SupaKomputa]

6400 for sure.

[aisle9]

If you buy that 6400, that's $150 less you have available for your permanent card, and who knows how much of that you'll realistically get back. My two cents.

 

Also my two cents: there's nothing wrong with using a 3050 or 3060 or whatever in that PC, and keeping that card when you build your new gaming setup. The compatibility issues are generally with AMD cards, but I will freely admit that I have never used anything beyond Pascal or Polaris in an old workstation PC.

[UnendingOne]

3 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

If you buy that 6400, that's $150 less you have available for your permanent card, and who knows how much of that you'll realistically get back. My two cents.

 

Also my two cents: there's nothing wrong with using a 3050 or 3060 or whatever in that PC, and keeping that card when you build your new gaming setup. The compatibility issues are generally with AMD cards, but I will freely admit that I have never used anything beyond Pascal or Polaris in an old workstation PC.

Its a small form factor PC, so only the short height cards will fit, and I don't have a PCI power cable available off my stock proprietary PSU.

 

My only concern with getting a 6400 is it being bottlenecked by my PCIe gen2 (I assume its gen2?) lanes since its PCIe 4.0 x4.

[aisle9]

1 minute ago, UnendingOne said:

Its a small form factor PC, so only the short height cards will fit, and I don't have a PCI power cable available off my stock proprietary PSU.

 

My only concern with getting a 6400 is it being bottlenecked by my PCIe gen2 (I assume its gen2?) lanes since its PCIe 4.0 x4.

If it's Gen 2, yeah, you're going to have serious performance issues, but it's probably still going to be better than a GT 610.

 

I assumed you had the full tower versions, which have a PSU that you can replace. You'd have to go to obscene levels of jankiness to make a full-height card work in a SFF workstation, so yeah, nope. There is a SFF GTX 1650 out there if that's all the power you need, but it's a terrible purchasing decision as long as its price stays anywhere near where it is ($300-ish).

[UnendingOne]

Well... I coughed up $275 for a PC with a GTX 970 and a i7-4790K... 

 

... and got scammed (it seems). USB ports randomly don't work, except for 3 of them that I can tell, and the 1 I found to plug my wifi adapter into the one day couldn't handle more than 6mbps wifi coming through. It was pulling my full 150mbps internet the first 2 days I had it.

 

... it also randomly blue screen crashes, and it crashes when playing Skyrim a lot.

 

Guess I'm just gunna go back to Plan A of eventually upgrading my above PC. Blew what I had currently budgetted for a PC on that junk.

[UnendingOne]

So update for anyone still wondering...

 

I ended up trading the GTX 970, from the PC I got scammed on (which I assume had either a bad motherboard or GPU (the 970 in question), plus $100 and got a GTX 1050ti.

 

I did some benchmarks, and honestly I'm getting really good graphical performance for the money I've invested in the setup.