Cheap nVidia graphics card that is a worthwhile upgrade?


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My PC currently has a nVidia 260GTX graphics card as it's primary monitor, and a 210 running a pair of secondary monitors. I'm looking to upgrade the primary card to something newer (dropping the 210, and making the 260GTX the secondary unless there is a triple monitor card/system available), but I'm not willing to spend a huge amount of money. I don't play many high end games at the moment, the most recent ones being the likes of Skyrim and Minecraft. Although I am waiting for Elite: Dangerous which will likely be the most taxing game I'll have for a long time.

 

I've been using www.hwcompare.com as a (very rough) comparison guide, and I can't find much that is a worthwhile upgrade (roughly 25% improvement) from the 260gtx without costing around ?150 for something like a 660gtx, which is unfortunately above my ?100 budget.

 

Any suggestions?

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What about a pair of GTS 450's in SLI (if your PSU allows) from eBay? You can get them for about ?40 each...

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One of the things that prompted me to look for an upgrade is nVidias recent announcement of dropping driver support for the 400GTX and older. I know that doesn't immediately affect the 450GTS, but it can't be long. I should also have mentioned that I'd also quite like the ability to use Shadowplay which requires a 650GTX or better I believe.

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One of the things that prompted me to look for an upgrade is nVidias recent announcement of dropping driver support for the 400GTX and older. I know that doesn't immediately affect the 450GTS, but it can't be long. I should also have mentioned that I'd also quite like the ability to use Shadowplay which requires a 650GTX or better I believe.

 

I read that as cards prior to 400 series, not including the 400 series but I may be wrong.

 

Yeah I read it wrong http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/03/14/nvidia-dx10-eol/1

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The newly released (low-end) nVidia GTX 750 Ti can be had for ?105, it's at least twice as fast as the GTX 260. 

 

I know it's only a 'by the specs' comparison, but this suggests that they're actually quite close:

http://www.hwcompare.com/17390/geforce-gtx-260-vs-geforce-gtx-750-ti/

 

however looking a bit deeper apart from memory bandwidth and texture mapping units the 750 seems to have quite an advantage.

 

One other quick question if I may, would there be any issues with using the 260gtx alongside the 750gtx ti for multiple monitors?

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I know it's only a 'by the specs' comparison, but this suggests that they're actually quite close:

http://www.hwcompare.com/17390/geforce-gtx-260-vs-geforce-gtx-750-ti/

 

however looking a bit deeper apart from memory bandwidth and texture mapping units the 750 seems to have quite an advantage.

 

One other quick question if I may, would there be any issues with using the 260gtx alongside the 750gtx ti for multiple monitors?

 

In reality they're nowhere near close, I upgraded my older computer from a 260GTX to 750GTX Ti and FPS at a minimum doubled. In some games such as BioShock Infinite they almost tripled (26FPS avg to 70FPS average, 1080p HQ). The 260GTX is roughly the same speed as the GTS 450, here's a real-world comparison between the GTS 450 and GTX 750Ti - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1130?vs=1134

 

I'm not really sure about running the two alongside eachother though. What PSU/Mobo do you have?

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I know it's only a 'by the specs' comparison, but this suggests that they're actually quite close:

http://www.hwcompare.com/17390/geforce-gtx-260-vs-geforce-gtx-750-ti/

 

however looking a bit deeper apart from memory bandwidth and texture mapping units the 750 seems to have quite an advantage.

 

One other quick question if I may, would there be any issues with using the 260gtx alongside the 750gtx ti for multiple monitors?

Some of the OC versions are around 25% better than a stock 260.

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One of the things that prompted me to look for an upgrade is nVidias recent announcement of dropping driver support for the 400GTX and older. I know that doesn't immediately affect the 450GTS, but it can't be long. I should also have mentioned that I'd also quite like the ability to use Shadowplay which requires a 650GTX or better I believe.

The 400 series (Fermi) will still be supported. Only the Geforce 405 which is actually a rebranded 210 and all older non-Fermi cards will be dropped. The 450GTS isn't affected. 

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I know it's only a 'by the specs' comparison, but this suggests that they're actually quite close:

http://www.hwcompare.com/17390/geforce-gtx-260-vs-geforce-gtx-750-ti/

 

however looking a bit deeper apart from memory bandwidth and texture mapping units the 750 seems to have quite an advantage.

 

One other quick question if I may, would there be any issues with using the 260gtx alongside the 750gtx ti for multiple monitors?

Don't let the smaller memory bus dissuade you.

 

The GTX750Ti whacks the GTX550Ti despite a one-third smaller memory bus.  It actually has more CUDA cores and more TMUs than GTX550Ti, let along any GTX4xx or worse.

 

GM107 (GTX750/TI commonality) is grandson of Kepler/son of TegraK1, but on the same 28nm node as base Kepler.

 

In most iterations, it draws power only from the PCI Express x16 slot it will reside in, due to it having a TDP is just sixty watts.

 

ASUS has a 1 GB factory-OC/single-slot version available now. (No DisplayPort, but it does support D-sub/DVI/full-HDMI on the same bracket.)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was reading through this thread, and thought, I have an older computer that's using a AMD 5770.  My budget is $200 or less.  Would that 750 be a worth while upgrade, or should I look at a different card?

 

Or should I post other specs of my computer before asking that?

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I know it's only a 'by the specs' comparison, but this suggests that they're actually quite close:

http://www.hwcompare.com/17390/geforce-gtx-260-vs-geforce-gtx-750-ti/

 

however looking a bit deeper apart from memory bandwidth and texture mapping units the 750 seems to have quite an advantage.

 

One other quick question if I may, would there be any issues with using the 260gtx alongside the 750gtx ti for multiple monitors?

If anything, you may want to use the GTX260 for Physx, while the GTX750 or Ti drives dual displays.

 

The reason why the memory bus is less of an issue than expected is because the GTX750 has a far-larger on-die cache than previous GPUs.

 

Actually, the GTX750 can work in ANY motherboard that has a PCI-E x16 slot, as most of them have no need for anything beyond with the PCI Express bus delivers power-wise - as far down as G31 (Bear Lake) or nForce 6xx.  (My mom's refurb has an AMD HD5450 (that was my GPU before I got a refurbished GTX550Ti), and I'm looking at a 1 GB GTX750 for her, in addition to a 2 GB GTX750TI for me.

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