This looks like some things I can upgrade but I’m not smart on what processors are good there. It looks like I may have nearly the best processor my board can handle? I dunno.
Check out Can You Run It and put Wasteland 2 in the box for Game. It will analyze your PC and tell you how well it meets (or exceeds) the minimum and recommended settings.
Unfortunately AM3 didn’t last very long, if you had an AM3+ socket you’d be better off.
I think one of the best chips available for it is the Phenom II 975 black edition. But it’s hard to find and it’s like $200. Same goes for the bit better Phenom X6 That’s not really money well spent when that kind of cash can go down to a mobo + CPU upgrade in the future.
You’d be surprised how much that that card still runs well, but AMD has always been behind driver support on their cards, specially back then.
The easy upgrade path would be a GPU now, and later a new mobo + CPU, and possibly a new case, as those old HP cases often times weren’t very upgrade friendly. The only issue is your power supply and it’s probable lack of PCIE power modules.
I think a GTX 750ti is probably your best bet for an upgrade. It doesn’t require PCie power modules and yet it’s a match for a PS4 in most games. Later on you can upgrade your CPU + mobo (maybe mini-itx form factors) and have a nice little modern system.
Wasteland 2 should be fine on your current system, btw. It meets requirements.
Yeah, your CPU isn’t too bad. It will bottleneck modern GPU’s though, at least until we start seeing DX12/OpenGL plus games.
I don’t think you’ll see any tangible performance increases from upgrading RAM from 8 to 16 GB,
The 750 ti will improve your performance in 3D games and allow you to set higher graphics options. But it won’t do much for your everyday computing on a desktop, unless you do a lot of video encoding and the software you use utilizes gpu compute.
The 750ti will also make recording and streaming games a cinch thanks to it’s hardware mp4 encoder if you’re into that.
The reason I suggested this gpu, is because of it’s relatively low price (I’ve seen it on sale for about $100), it’s great performance, and the fact that it won’t require you to purchase a new power supply. Anything else that doesn’t require extra PCIe power would be a sidegrade at best.
Maybe double check and see if your powersupply doesn’t support a Pcie 6 or 8 power module.
Another dumb question here, will it degrade my performance if I have 2 monitors hooked up to this card? I’ve got 2 and was thinking about hooking them both up.
Nope. The drivers handle that kind of thing transparently and without any noticeable overhead.
The game will always run on your main monitor however (unless you’re doing Nvidia surround in which case the game will span all your monitors, something I wouldn’t recommend with just two monitors). Steam has a setting that will automatically switch up your main monitor when playing games, in case you want to play games on your secondary monitor.
Meh, I’m not worried about you. You’re already dabbling with the dark side. By this time next year you’ll be saying things like: “60FPS or bust!” and “Uncharted who? Pillars of Eternity is where it’s at buddy!”.
Im confused. If I go to canirunit.com it says I can’t run Dark Souls or Skyrim and gives me this kind of feedback (Sorry for formatting but you can still understand it):
My video card has 2 times the required RAM and higher pixel shaders etc… Why is it saying I can’t run this?
