RX 480 compatability

Voltronic · August 9, 2016

So I already made another post on planning an RX 480 budget birthday build. And after some planning and dealing with a jerky smarta** from Fry's, I had a thought. What if I just throw the card in my current system? As my new build would be a budget build, I'm choosing to go with cheaper lesser parts that wouldn't quite utilize the full potential of the card. Would it not be equivalent if I just threw it in my old build and tested that?

My current build is actually an old (8 years) pre-built with some upgrades. A gateway FX-6800-01e. Threw 12GB of RAM at it and then a 2TB hard drive. The power supply is a Cooler Master Silent Gold Pro 800w

the current graphics card is a Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 1GB Toxic. The processer/motherboard is my biggest concern though. Being an i7-920 @ 2.67GHz. With the Gateway TBGM01 motherboard. If the board has the ports available and the PSU can more than support it. How much better/worse off would I be if I threw an RX 480 in this build rather than a new budget build ($600-$700)? Or much would performance change if I threw it in this vs the budget build?

Budget Build: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/MKJxcc

Current Build (inaccurate rebuild with same performance): http://pcpartpicker.com/list/GBgsXH

Nena Trinity · August 9, 2016

I see nothing terribly wrong with your budget build, what games do you play? There could a good idea to see if you can push it to a i5. That is if any of your games require much usage on one core?

Edit: Your old machine have 3 sticks of DDR3 RAM you could just recycle 2 of em and get 16GB!

Voltronic · August 9, 2016

13 minutes ago, Nena360 said:

I see nothing terribly wrong with your budget build, what games do you play? There could a good idea to see if you can push it to a i5. That is if any of your games require much usage on one core?

Edit: Your old machine have 3 sticks of DDR3 RAM you could just recycle 2 of em and get 16GB!

I have a wide range of games that I play, but with my current build I'm very limited. The newest intensive game I can play is GTAV at lowest settings with shadows removed. But I plan to play stuff like Doom or GTA V at higher settings lol, or just newer games in general. I just wasn't sure if throwing all of this money towards a new build would be worth it if I could just throw a new card and maybe more RAM in my old build.

Also thanks, employee at Fry's started going off about how my budget build is just bad and how I wouldn't get any airflow in that case and was trying to tell me to essentially ignore my budget and go for tons of high end parts that I couldn't afford one of... Lowkey, think he was just an Intel fanboy or trying to get me to spend more, not that there is anything wrong with Intel, just out of my price range. I overall just felt insulted especially being on my birthday.

Nena Trinity · August 9, 2016

Well when it comes to GTA V you want to reduce some settings such as shadows and foliage and well on the advanced menu just set everything to off or minimum...