Would there be any reason for a GTX 960 not to work?

[Beovy]

Here my current set up:

• AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
• Stock AMD CPU Cooler
• Asus M4A88TD-M/USB3
• 1x generic 2GB stick of ram
• 1x Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1600
• HIS Radeon HD 7790 2GB
• Coolermaster RS-650 PCAR-E3 650W

 

I'm looking at used GTX 960s and I think I found one. It's a Gigabyte Windforce GTX 960 2gb. Before I jump the gun...Would there be any reason it wouldn't work with my system? My PSU has enough connectors, so that's out of the question.

[emosun]

it'll technically work in the machine in theory. Don't think it'll do very much in terms of a performance upgrade but should run at least.

[Beovy]

3 minutes ago, emosun said:

it'll technically work in the machine in theory. Don't think it'll do very much in terms of a performance upgrade but should run at least.

Why no performance upgrade? You think my CPU will bottle neck it?

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Beovy said:

Why no performance upgrade? You think my CPU will bottle neck it?

well that and it's roughly only 2x the speed of your previous gpu but only 2gb of vram.

so basically games would run faster provided you didn't change the resolution or object detail and only increase setting that revolved around the gpu and not vram.

 

the 960 seems like a gpu one would "settle" for rather than actually want to upgrade to essentially.

[Beovy]

1 minute ago, emosun said:

well that and it's roughly only 2x the speed of your previous gpu but only 2gb of vram.

so basically games would run faster provided you didn't change the resolution or object detail and only increase setting that revolved around the gpu and not vram.

 

the 960 seems like a gpu one would "settle" for rather than actually want to upgrade to essentially.

I'm running games such as Fornite, Overwatch,  LoL, etc. at 1080p. 

[Inversion]

I have a 960 and I had it paired with an Athlon X4 860K and I can say right now that your cpu will bottleneck it a bit in games. The performance between the two processors is comparable but the fact of the matter is that games are still not great at leveraging more than 4 cores and you have 6 cores that are slower than the 4 I had. It'll work. hell, a 1080ti would work if you could power it but you probably won't get the full performance of the card. You aren't even getting a bump in VRAM. If you're planning to upgrade your main platform in the not too distant future though I'd say go for it. It's pretty cheap rn and still decent. I use mine in my ryzen 5 system while I wait for Volta/Ampere/Turing.

[Froody129]

I'd just wait it out for the new gen of cards and either get one of those or buy one of the flood of cards that should hit the market reasonably soon. I'm just waiting for miners to realise that no one is going to buy their cards that they're selling at above the price we're paying new in store now. That doesn't work anymore.

[KarathKasun]

There have been triple A games launched in the last ~3 years that refuse to play nice with anything less than 3 or 4gb of VRAM.  DOOM (2016) is a good example, FPS will be great until you look at the complex area of a map.  Then FPS drops from ~100 down to 15.

[Sauron]

It should work no problem, there will be some cpu bottleneck but it should still perform better than the 7790 - besides cpu bottlenecks are much more evident at high framerates, if you just bump up the settings and are content with 60 fps you shouldn't have any problems.

[Pyramiden]

I do not agree about the CPU bottleneck. I run a GTX 780 with a Xeon X3470 and don't have any CPU bottleneck. There are videos of the X3470 doing 60+ FPS with a GTX 1060 in Far Cry 5 on Ultra.
The Phenom is a little bit slower than the X3470, but the 960 is quite a lot slower than a 780 or a 1060.

The biggest issue would be the VRAM, as mentioned before... But for the games you play it will be fine.

However, why do you want to upgrade? Your current card should run those games fine? The 960 will only give you a little bit more detail, but it might be better to safe the money and wait so you can use it when you upgrade the whole PC later.

[Mutoh]

While I haven't tried your exact setup, I used to run a Phenom II X4 965BE OC'd to 4.0Ghz and had it mated to a 1050ti 2GB I had in an HTPC. The CPU did bottleneck a bit but it wasn't so massive that it noticeably effected gaming performance. I do agree with others saying that a 960 wouldn't be a huge upgrade though. 

 

 

Also are what's the purpose of your extra 2GB stick of RAM?

[Nena Trinity]

1. Upgrade the RAM to 16GB

2. Upgrade to GTX 960

3. Game! :3