Noobish question about my pc and its gaming capabilities

[Tiny Tim]

I thought i'd ask you guys something .


Not being a gamer until recently and being a casual pc user, i bought a pre-built pc on the local store 1.5 years ago. I did think of playing some games at the time, so i just told the man that i wanted my pc to be able to run recent games. Then i just went ahead and bought the pc i was offered in what seemed like a good price, a dell inspiron 3650 with the following specs




Processor
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6400 CPU @ 2.70GHz

Video Card
NVIDIA GeForce GT 730

RAM
8.0 GB

Operating System
Microsoft Windows 10 (build 14393), 64-bit




Of course i found out soon enough that it can't really run recent games, due to its graphics card and that i was a complete fool to have trusted a random guy working at a big store without planning what i would buy in advance. But i didn't care much at the time.
I do now though. I checked and i meet the mininal but not recommended requirements for games that i want to play and that aren't considered demanding at all, like wasteland 2 director's cut and pillars of eternity. And of course it couldn't even come close to running modern high-end games like fallout 4 .



So, here's my noobish question. Can i just go ahead and buy a new graphics card to upgrade it? How much would a decent one cost ? Would i need something else?
And, could i , like , sell my old one or something?

 

[PlanHex]

Doesn't look that different from what I've got and I can run DOOM and Witcher 3 just fine on medium settings. Though my i5 is @ 3.4GHz and I've got a GTX 750 TI, but probably just a slight upgrade over yours I think.
Have you actually tried running this stuff or did you just despair because of recommended settings? I can usually switch off some the fancy stuff to get any game running fine at a near-constant 60FPS. But I dunno, might be the 730 vs 750 means more than it would seem.

If you want to upgrade, just know that going for the top-of-the-line graphics is silly with a CPU like the one you have. You shouldn't go out and buy a 1080 or something like that.
It's also important that you have enough power for whatever you buy, since most of them require at least one or maybe two sets of specific connectors from your power supply. If your power supply doesn't have any, you may be fucked.
A big bottleneck could potentially be your motherboard. I checked and the GT730 is a PCIe 2.0 card and not 3.0, which is the newest standard.
So if you want to buy a new card either make sure beforehand that your motherboard has 3.0 or make sure whatever card you buy is 2.0. If your motherboard is 2.0, you might want to get a new computer entirely...

 

[Tiny Tim]

Thanks for the reply. Damn. I should have thrown a few points on my science skill, because i don't even know how to check all this. I'll try googling, and maybe since the pc was pre-build i can find info online. Buying a new one is simply not an option for a while, so i can only hope it is somewhat upgradable.


I have played older games on this pc like skyrim (not special edition), fallout new vegas, tropico 5, dishonored and they run perfectly fine. I tried torrenting wasteland 2 director's cut yesterday though, just to test how it would run, and although i meet the minimum requirements, much to my dismay it was indeed very laggish until i turned it into a blurry mess by dropping the resolution quite a bit which made it playable i guess but probably not very fun. *Sigh*

 

[0wing]

GT 730 is not a gaming card at all. Believe me. If you're on tight budget, I suggest you find at least GTX 750 Ti (Ti, not just 750).
And yes, you can just put a new GPU.

A big bottleneck could potentially be your motherboard. I checked and the GT730 is a PCIe 2.0 card and not 3.0, which is the newest standard.
So if you want to buy a new card either make sure beforehand that your motherboard has 3.0 or make sure whatever card you buy is 2.0. If your motherboard is 2.0, you might want to get a new computer entirely...

So far, there's no difference between 2.0 and 3.0, a couple of frames at worst. But yeah, the OP's build suggests the lack of PCIe 3.0 on the mobo.

 

[Tiny Tim]

So even if the motherboard is for 2.0, i can buy a 3.0 card and it will run with just a few frames penalty?

 

[valcik]

Yes, the bus is backward compatible and you won't see any penalty with olde cards such as 750Ti.

edit: Also, make sure your PSU can support new video card.

 

[0wing]

So even if the motherboard is for 2.0, i can buy a 3.0 card and it will run with just a few frames penalty?

If you can spend more money (starting at $200), look for RX 470/480, preferably 8GB version.
Yes, so far it's not much of a deal.

 

[Tiny Tim]

Thanks a lot, guys. So, to summarize what you have said:

I can just buy a decent graphics card and turn it to a gaming pc but i would have to check if the psu can handle it.. and that's it basically?






Also, for about 150 euro more or less, any other gpu recommendations? I probably won't be making the upgrade until this summer as i have a lot of studying planned for this uni semester.

 

[Makta]

Not sure about the prices where you are from but i would try to sell the computer and buy parts used. For example an i7 2600-2700k clocked is cheap and almost as good as my 4790k unclocked. Also a radeon r9 290/390x is not that expensive used and there you have the most important things AND it would be far better than your current setup. Just add some cheap ram a HDD, WD Blue 1TB is cheap as fuck TBH. And then get a random 500wat + PSU. If you find em used it would not cost you much i guess.

 

[mobucks]

First off, it's a good idea to always run games at your monitors default resolution to avoid boyfriends. (Damn autocorrect, I meant blurriness)
I have an ancient rig, q9300 quad core @ 2.24 ghz. GTX 560Ti 1gb ram, 6gb system ram.
I always turn off SSAO and turn the textures 1 or 2 ticks below max. It ran The Phantom Pain
with everything maxxed but ssao turned off. FSAA usually goes to level 1 on most games.
What I'm saying is do some research about what different graphics settings do and fiddle with them to find the best balance between playability and prettiness.
Lastly, make sure not a lot of background apps aren't taking up precious system ram by closing/disabling/uninstalling them.
I would do all this with games you want to play before deciding on a more powerful card.