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Best Budget Gaming GPU for £125-150ish

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22 Apr 2020
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Current system specs:

Intel Pentium G3258 @ 3.20GHz
8GB DDR3 RAM
NVidia GT 1030

I have a £75 quid amazon gift card. I wondered if I could potentially upgrade part of my system to help with gaming performance. Right now im struggling to play Resident Evil 2 Remake...I know my CPU is under requirements but I was hoping with a slightly better GPU I might be able to tweak the settings to allow me to play this game.
I tried with my current setup and, of course..it was laggy and stuttered.

Any advice on what the best GPU might be for a budget? (£75)

Thanks in advance! (I know it's not much to work with..)
 
Soldato
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You should be able to get an RX570 for that easily enough.

As others have said, second hand is fine as long as you don't just buy randomly and take a little care.
 
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Your problem could well be the PSU can't power the GPU. What make and model is it and does it have a 6/8 pin adapter?

At £75 you will want to get second hand. If you can get a second hand card off Amazon they should give you some cover if all goes wrong but you should be fine.
 
Soldato
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OP has a £75 Amazon gift card they want to use,so they have to use Amazon. You can get an RX570 on there for around £125ish,but the OP needs to make sure their PSU is good enough.

You can get refurbed cards for half that though.
 
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OP
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22 Apr 2020
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Since you're using a a low end card currently, what's the rest of the system like? PSU capacity and case size may limit your options.

My budget has gone up to around £150.
My PSU is a Corsair CX450M.
Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z97P-D3
I'm just wondering if I'll suffer bottleneck ING is I were to go ahead and get a 1650 Super or something similar..? My CPU is a bit old by todays standards.. What do you think? I'm by no means a tech wizz with this sort of thing..!
 
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by my pc. :D
Prices are new cards aren't too great at the moment. New, going by OCUK prices you would be looking at either an AMD RX 570 or an Nvidia GTX 1650 for up to £150 - believe the RX 570 is the faster of the too but a bit more power hungry. The GTX 1650 super is apparently a reasonable step up from the non-super but a little more. Having said that they will all be a big improvement over a 1030.

You would get a better deal going second hand if you can. Your CPU is dual core (and a little over 3Ghz?) so will likely hold you back a bit.
 
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OP
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22 Apr 2020
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I see your point.

Being very new to all this - would it be possible to grab second hand versions of a 1650 super and, presumebly, an i5 CPU for around £150? Maybe I'm way off..

My motherboard won't accept AMD processors.. I'm told. So I'm stuck with the slightly more pricey Intel chips..
 
Soldato
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Well the G3258 can be overclocked so you could try that and see if it helps.

Is the game on an SSD already?

My suggestion is to get the RX570 8GB on there which is £125. Go onto CEX and get a Core i5 4460 for £32,and either re-use your current cooler,or get an Arctic Alpine 12 for £6. Then if you can stretch the budget,see if you can get a basic SSD for around £30,and load the game from the SSD if you don't have one.

If you can stretch the budget even more,you can get a Core i7 4770 non-K from CEX for £72,or look on Ebay for a Xeon E3 1230 V3 which is basically the same CPU for around £70 or a bit less.

Regarding the SSD,look at the Patriot P200,even though it is DRAM-less,it has decent performance:
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/patriot-p200-1-tb-ssd/

The TBW is very good and at least in the 1TB version,it has very little performance drop-off with large data transfers.
 
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OP
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22 Apr 2020
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7
I've got an SSD, the game is installed to that.
It's a CRUCIAL_CT275MX300SSD1 (250GB)

Remember the 125 gift card is only got amazon. But I could stretch to maybe 30 quid extra from my own pocket to get an i5 from CEX, if that's what you were advising..
Will I need to buy new cable for my PSU? Or would the graphics card come with sufficient cables?
I got an extra stick of 4gb Ram recently, but it didn't seem to affect my issues with the gameplay on RE2. I suspect something else is contributing to the performance issues..
 
Soldato
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How many sticks of RAM are in the system,and how much is the total system RAM??

The PSU will come with a modular cable,for the PCI-E 8 pin power connector.

CP-9020101-UK-CX450M_04.png


You pretty much need that for any graphics card which is not bus powered. The graphics card might come with a molex to PCI-E power adaptor,but not sure if the one on Amazon has that. However,you can buy the cable off Ebay.

It's called a Type 3 PCI-E connector,but the Type 4 should also work. I sent you a PM with some links to where you can buy them from,as they are from the famous auction site.

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I would get the RX570 8GB off Amazon then,and get the Core i5 4460.

What CPU cooler is on the G3258?? If it's an aftermarket one,you will need to clean the thermal compound off and add some fresh compound with a new CPU.

If its the stock one,even though it has a copper core,its quite a small cooler.

I would probably get the Arctic Alpine 12 which is £6 off the same site as the RX570.

Edit!!

What computer case do you have OP?

You need at least 10"~11" of clearance for the graphics card.
 
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OP
Joined
22 Apr 2020
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7
Sorry, I got a bit sidetracked yesterday. It's, as far as im aware, just a stock cooler on my CPU. My PC case is a reasonable size...i couldnt tell you what the dimensions were unless I measured it properly.. I seem to have a good 11-12 inches though at a glance!

Edit: I have 2 x 4GB RAM
 
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