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#1 Aug 09 2013 at 8:00 PM Rating: Good
Hello everyone, I'm looking to upgrade my power supply so I can upgrade my graphics card. The stock power supply I have is 385 watts, in this stock HP computer i got for cheap over a year ago. When I first got it I upgraded it's processor from AMD A series A4-3420 / 2.8 GHz (Dual Core) to AMD A8-3870 / 3.0 GHz (Quad Core) which i got for 50$ brand new (love having connections ^_^). When I first got the PC almost a year ago I put a AMD Radeon HD 6670 in it since I was mainly playing WoW at the time and it played flawlessly at max settings on 1920x1080. Now after running the game during Phase 3 and the new benchmark I scored in the 6k range on Standard settings. I tried it on High and got a little over 4000 (4400 range with a few tweaks) and Max settings I got a little less than 3k. If I could get it to about the 7k+ range on High settings I'd be ecstatic. I don't notice a massive difference from High to Max settings on the systems a few friends of mine have showed me so that I'm not too worried about. In most games that I play High settings is my only goal, as Max settings tend to look....idk how to explain but i'll just say "meh" in an increase comparison.

Now for my specs:
Windows 7 SP1 (64-bit of course xD)
AMD A8-3870 (3.0GHz)
4GB of RAM (will probably upgrade this to 8GB shortly after upgrading everything else; corsair seems like a good brand plus it reminds me of ffxi <_>)
AMD Radeon HD 6670 (Looking to upgrade, AMD or Nvidia either is fine dont want to go too far over 100$ if possible)
385w Power supply (Also looking to upgrade to 500w most likely)

Willing to spend a max combined total of about 150-200$ for Graphics card + Power supply. The best bang for the buck is my motto here as this will probably be the main (possibly only) pc game i play for a long time that would need a decent amount of pc power. Hopefully if I need anything with more power in the future I'll probably save up for a custom built (ibuypower/cyberpowerpc/etc.)

Thanks in advance!
#2 Aug 09 2013 at 9:12 PM Rating: Decent
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514 posts
Try 2 more gigz of ram as well as updating to AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta. The AMD upgrade alone will boost your performance. Before I had 13.5 and was scoring 3500 on HIGH, after upgrading, score 5k+ on MAX

Edited, Aug 9th 2013 11:13pm by Demonadrastos
#3 Aug 09 2013 at 10:53 PM Rating: Excellent
If you're going to go with Corsair memory might as well go with a Corsair PSU as well, or go with Seasonic as they make Corsair PSUs, rock solid gear. For GPUs in that range I would say Radeon 7770, though I don't how much of an upgrade that would be. If you can go a bit higher you can find 7870s in the 170 range. Don't know the Nvidia options, I'm a Radeon guy.
#4 Aug 10 2013 at 6:58 AM Rating: Good
Demonadrastos wrote:
Try 2 more gigz of ram as well as updating to AMD Catalyst 13.8 Beta. The AMD upgrade alone will boost your performance. Before I had 13.5 and was scoring 3500 on HIGH, after upgrading, score 5k+ on MAX

Edited, Aug 9th 2013 11:13pm by Demonadrastos


Going to try that shortly when I get home I've heard some great things about the beta driver so hoping it gives me a boost.

Asura: good call on the psu. Going to do a little more research on cards though until I can find the right one.
#5 Aug 10 2013 at 7:48 AM Rating: Good
At this point, I would ignore the ram completely. This PSU is pretty decent for the price, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020 .

Good single rail PSU with 53A, so it could possibly handle another upgrade in the future. Since that would run you 89$, it would only leave 110$ for a GPU, which is not a lot. Problem here, the best cards in the 110-130$ price range are the 7770 and the 7790 (110$ and 130$ respectively). Are they an upgrade from what you have? Sure. Are they a massive upgrade, not really. If you're willing to spend maybe 150-160$ and get a 650 Ti Boost, you'd probably notice a bigger difference.

Now, you can obviously go lower price on the PSU.

This could do the trick http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151096

So it's really up to you on what you want to do, you can obviously hit the mark with that seasonic and 7770 or even 7790, but the performance increase might not be overwhelming. Where as the Seasonic with the Ti Boost for an extra 20-30$, might be noticeable increase.

I'm sure others will chime in with their opinion, there's quite a few options, and it depends how much performance increase you actually want.

Edited, Aug 10th 2013 9:49am by Montsegurnephcreep

Edited, Aug 10th 2013 9:49am by Montsegurnephcreep
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