Processor or Graphics card?

[Jack Guinea]

Hi there my friend has currently got a very low spec pc and he wants to upgrade piece by piece, he was just wondering whether it would be best for him to get a processor first or a graphics card as he will only be able to get one until a few months.

 

[keynes]

Hi there my friend has currently got a very low spec pc and he wants to upgrade piece by piece, he was just wondering whether it would be best for him to get a processor first or a graphics card as he will only be able to get one until a few months.

It depends on his current spec, the CPU could also be a bottleneck to a newer gpu.

 

[Keithg]

Also depends on the motherboard as an older board will not accept newer chips.
If you could get the spec MB/CPU/GPU/RAM some specific options can be tailored

 

[vanthus]

Hi there my friend has currently got a very low spec pc and he wants to upgrade piece by piece, he was just wondering whether it would be best for him to get a processor first or a graphics card as he will only be able to get one until a few months.

I would definitely suggest getting a GPU first,as long as the PSU and motherboard can handle it.

 

[Jack Guinea]

This is what he sent me:
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit (Service Pack 1)
DirectX version: 11.0
GPU processor: GeForce 210
Driver version: 266.58
DirectX support: 10.1
CUDA Cores: 16
Core clock: 589 MHz
Shader clock: 1402 MHz
Memory clock: 400 MHz (800 MHz data rate)
Memory interface: 64-bit
Total available graphics memory: 2303 MB
Dedicated video memory: 512 MB DDR2
System video memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 1791 MB
Video BIOS version: 70.18.39.00.17
IRQ: 16
Bus: PCI Express x16

 

[Jack Guinea]

and this pentinum R dual core cpu e5700@ 3.00 ghz

 

[Corfate]

I found when i upgraded bit by bit, my Dual core bottlenecked my 670 so much on BF3 i couldn't play it on Med without having some lag. Now im with my i5, it works perfectly smooth on ultra. Shows how much a cpu can bottle neck a GPU.

 

[wereireland]

The processor isnt too bad so i would upgrade the gpu first. Knowing what power supply he has would be a great help.

 

[Jack Guinea]

The processor isnt too bad so i would upgrade the gpu first. Knowing what power supply he has would be a great help.

sorry but everything he knows about his machine is above

 

[Karnor00]

I'm not sure you will be able to do much to upgrade the processor unfortunatly. I believe the e5700 uses an LGA775 socket which isn't compatible with the more recent i3 and later processors (which use the LGA1156 socket). Which would mean needing to upgrade the motherboard to get a significant CPU upgrade.

As for the GPU, judging simply from the CUDA core number alone, he probably has a GTX210 or similar. If this is correct, then hes got a pretty terrible (by today's standards) GPU. Given the potential CPU bottleneck I wouldn't recommend getting a very expensive GPU, but you could pick up something like a 6670 for around £50 which would be 2-3 times faster.