Gaming card in old PC?

[edm]

It's been a long time since I upgraded anything on my pc, probably about 5 years now, and I'm thinking about finally getting a new video card. Looking at the XFX Double D Radeon R9 270X 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0.

I'm just wondering if this card would be worth getting or are the rest of my specs too outdated to make it worth wild?

Do I need a complete overhaul?

Asus M4N82 Deluxe (PCIe 2.0 x16)
AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz
GTX 260 Core 216 896MB
4GB (2 x 2GB)
Corsair 650-Watt TX Series
(edit) 1080p

Thanks 🙂

 

[3DVagabond]

You'll need to O/C that Phenom to make it run smoothly in a lot of todays CPU intensive games. Other than that you should be fine. A R7 265 will probably be all the card you need with that system though, assuming 1080p resolution.

 

[mohit9206]

I wouldn't get a 270X because am afraid you may not get full performance from it despite overclocking the cpu.I would suggest Nvidia 750Ti 2gb. Its much better than R7 265 in terms of performance/watt.

 

[NTMBK]

I wouldn't get a 270X because am afraid you may not get full performance from it despite overclocking the cpu.I would suggest Nvidia 750Ti 2gb. Its much better than R7 265 in terms of performance/watt.

It's better in performance/W, but worse in performance... I say go for the 265 or 270. I have a similar setup (Phenom II at 3GHz), and I often feel like my HD7770 is the bottleneck.

 

[3DVagabond]

It's better in performance/W, but worse in performance... I say go for the 265 or 270. I have a similar setup (Phenom II at 3GHz), and I often feel like my HD7770 is the bottleneck.

Yes, I was thinking what might be the highest performance card that would likely match up with the rest of the system. Not which GPU will use the least power. If that's the biggest concern, perf/W, then yes the 750 ti is king in that metric.

 

[mdram]

i have a phenom ii 955, wors fine with a r9 270

i say go for it, you will most likely cpu bottleneck

 

[birthdaymonkey]

The Phenom II 940 should be good for 3.4-3.6GHz overclock if your motherboard will let you OC - a potential 20% performance improvement.

Might as well get the 270X if you like that card and can afford it. You can always carry it over to a new platform if you upgrade CPU etc. in a year or two.

 

[zelcs]

You will NOT get full potential of R9 270 in many games.

At least I am NOT getting it.

I upgraded from ancient Athlon X2 5000+ 2.6 Ghz to Phenom II X4 910E 3.1 Ghz and saw major major performance gain with R9 270.

With the X2 Athlon my 270 was sometimes SLOWER THAN 9800GT and became an actual DOWNGRADE rather than upgrade.

With Phenom I still see that some games are limited by something else other than GPU - I see fps slowdown and low GPU utilization at the same time.

My system, however is AM2 with 800 Mhz DDR2. Not even AM2+. If yours is AM3 with DDR3 you will get better performance than I. Even my CPU is bottle-necked 😀

All in all - go for it. You will be able to keep the card in your future PC anyway. And Phenom II is still no disaster in performance. When it was new it was one great CPU, one of AMDs best 🙂

 

[Ventanni]

The nice thing about computers is that, well, for the most part, they're pretty modular. A Radeon 270X works well in a Phenom II 940 as it does in a Haswell 4770k, and when you upgrade your CPU, you can use the Radeon 270X with it.

-Upgrade the GPU now. It'll be head-over-heels faster than the Geforce 260 it's replacing.

-Overclock your CPU if you can.

-Upgrade the CPU later.

Profit! 🙂

 

[edm]

That's good news. I don't game nearly as must as I used to, so I was hoping to avoid a complete system upgrade (at least for now). I'll see what kind of price I can get on a decent 270X or R9 270 and grab it. I mentioned the XFX R9 270X card because it's on sale for $160, but I've been reading it runs a bit warm and loud, so maybe I'll go with the 270 as I'd rather something cooler/quieter anyway. I'll probably stick 8 gigs of ram in there too, and that should hopefully hold me over a bit 🙂

Thanks again and appreciate the help.