Upgrade advice

[Falcon148]

Hi ! I live in India.

I have a Dell Studio XPS 7100 which bought in 2011 with a 22 inch 1920x1080 (60Hz) resolution LED monitor. I use it for playing games and watching HD movies. The other components include :

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor (3.2GHz,9MB,6C)
8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz
1GB ATI Radeon HD 5870

I was able to play all games at 1920x1080 with all graphics settings at very high or ultra till now. The newer games such as Assassin's Creed Unity and Shadow of Mordor are too demanding and I had to lower all of my graphics settings considerably to achieve playable frame rates...

I want to ask whether or not I can upgrade my video card to squeeze out performance from this PC for a couple years more?

I will be building a new gaming rig in the near future but for now, I want some more performance in the new games that I will be playing.

Key Points :
+ I play all kinds of games like fps's (crysis 3, BF 3 and 4, Farcry 4) , 3rd person shooters (Hitman Absolution etc), rpg's (Skyrim, Dragon Age Inquisition, Lords Of The Fallen), racing games (NFS and Grid Autosport) and any other type I have left out. I play no games online. Everything is single player offline. I will just be playing GTA V online with my friends when it releases on the 27th of January.

+ I don't have any liquid cooling solutions as it is the stock Dell chasis so overclocking the CPU is out of the question. I am not looking for any other upgrades, only the PSU and the GPU.

+ I have looked at the geforce gtx 770 and 970 as possible upgrades (both by ASUS and are priced similarly in India and both are shorter in length than my current card and hence would fit). If any other gpu, kindly suggest.

Kindly suggest whether the new card will give me good playable framerates with the max settings possible or will the CPU bottleneck kill the playability. I know performance will less as compared to the scenario if I had a newer CPU but I need to know whether it would be an improvement over my existing setup and by roughly how much.

Also suggest a PSU that will be required to run everything (keeping in mind the compactness of my mid tower chasis). I have access to Corsair, Seasonic, CoolerMaster and OCZ as the brands.

Thanks in advance.

[ShadowCaptain]

A 970 is probably your best option

 

A 500w PSU from any of those brands should be a decent buy (get one that is 80+ bronze rated minimum)

 

the CPU could potentially cause a bottleneck, but unless you can afford to upgrade the CPU there is not much you can do about it

[Falcon148]

Thanks for the reply man.. how much of a boost in frames per second and in game performance can I expect over the 5870 ?

[ShadowCaptain]

Thanks for the reply man.. how much of a boost in frames per second and in game performance can I expect over the 5870 ?

 

probably 2x or 3x performance, its like a billion times better though with your CPU expect anywhere from 50% to 100% more framerate

[Falcon148]

Thank you sir. Will go for the Gtx 970

[Thebman712]

Take a 970, but as a person who had a dell, upgrade and gut the oem shit from that rig asap.

Crappy case, mobo prone to faliure, crappy psu, you want all of those things gone if you can.

[WoodenMarker]

Upgrading the case would also be important to properly cool the new card.

Can you link us to where you're shopping? What's your budget?

 

Thanks for the reply man.. how much of a boost in frames per second and in game performance can I expect over the 5870 ?

You need to quote a post or tag a member or else they won't get a notification you replied to them.

[Falcon148]

I'll be building a new rig by the end of this year.. Just wanted to squeeze some more performance through this pc. So i don't want to change the case and mobo and cpu right now. Just for the time being wanted a better gpu

 

Will cooling be that big a problem because I am thing of buying the asus strix version of the gtx 970 ?