I have been thinking of upgrading my cpu so that I can play some new games. I have a ASUS P5KPL-AM/PS motherboard, Transcend 2gb ddr2 ram, Nvidia Geforce 8400 gs graphics card and intel core 2 duo E7500 chip. The problem is that I'm on an extremely low budget of rs15000($275) so I was thinking of ditching my graphics card and buying a ZOTAC Nvidia GTX 650 Ti 1 GB DDR5 graphics card and adding another 2 gb of ram.

I'm thinking of upgrading my chip and motherboard later when I have some more cash. So I was wondering if this would suffice for now. I'm not a really hardcore gamer and I mostly just want to play the new total war games. Any advice at all would be really helpful.

 

That's the problem. My motherboard only supports ddr2 ram, if I want to buy ddr3 then I'm gonna have to change my motherboard. But then if I want to change my chip to an i5 or something in the near future I'll have change that motherboard too.

I was planning to buy a 2gb ddr2 ram for now, which I would ditch in the future for a 8gb ddr3 ram when I get enough cash to buy a new motherboard and chipset. It's a wasteful and inelegant solution but it seems to be my only option. I'll confess that the card may be more than what I need. Could you recommend a cheaper card that would suit my needs?

 

The link you posted is of gtx 650, I was considering the gtx 650 ti model. Anyway, the prices on newegg seem really cheap when compared to the prices here. Which one do you think is better, the EVGA or ZOTAC?

 

To be honest, I don't know much about GPU's. I've read that they need extra power supply, could you clarify this for me please?

 

Before anything can be really said, we need to know details about your power supply - preferably the brand and model of it.

Instead of the GTX 650 ti, I would advice you to get the HD 7850. It isn't that much more expensive, but around 20-30% more powerful than the 650 ti.

 

I have a 750 watt SMPS, if that's what you're asking. The 7850 card costs around 15k-16k rupees, while the gainward model of the 650 Ti costs around 11.5k on flipkart.

 

I'd frankly Suggest waiting a few months till you can get some more Cash into your budget.

If you don't need a Monitor, you can build a decent system with about 21,000- 23,000 Rs. Assuming you'll be using your old HDD, Rom drives and SMPS, it might be even lower.

I built a new System with i5, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 500 GB HDD, GT 240 1GB with a 300W SMPS in a cute Tower with flowers designs on it.
Cost me 25,000 Rs a year ago. I bought every component. SO it'll be substantially less for you if you already have a SATA Hard Disk and all your previous drives.

 

My situation is a little hard to explain. Put simply, If I don't buy something with the 15,000 Rs now then I won't get another 20,000 Rs in a couple of months to buy a new processor, motherboard and ram.

I did a little more research and found that the price difference between a gigabyte 2gb 7850 and a gigabyte 2gb 660 is only 1000 Rs. This has left me even more confused.

 

That's normal - those 2 cards would be the "best" 7850 and the "weakest" GTX 660 from Gigabyte. That 660 is still better than the 7850 though. Here's a chart that you can use for reference, but keep in mind that it might not be 100% accurate, since your system is different from the test system(s).

 

The 660 is really more competition for the 7870, as it stands for such a small difference I would go with the 660. I like the current generation of AMD cards and have one myself but for relatively small price differentials I would go Nvidia. Somewhat superior driver performance as well as unique technologies such as TXAA and Physx give them an advantage all things being equal. You really can't go wrong with a 7850, 7870 or a GTX 660 though, they are all great budget enthusiast cards.

 

That chart places the gtx680 & gtx670 above the gtx 690. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?

 

That is an oddity. My guess from looking at it is that for some reason they have benchmarked a 690 with SLI disabled. A GTX 690 is basically SLI on a single card. Two 680 GPUs and a SLI bridge put on one card. If you double the 690 score on that chart it comes out about right, coming above Titan by a fair bit. Why they would choose to do that instead of simply excluding the 690 from the chart I really don't know.

 

Are the PCI Express 3.0 cards backwards compatible with PCI Express 1 slots. I've heard that only Nvidia cards are backward compatible.

 

Yes PCI-E 3.0 is backwards compatible, however with older mainboards problems can occur in some cases, so I can't really 100% assure you that it will work fine. Whoever said that only nvidia cards are backwards compatible is an idiot or was lying - both are backwards compatible.

 

Is the 256 bit bandwidth of the hd7850 a huge advantage over the 128 bit bandwidth of the 650 ti?