I built a PC over the weekend (with a LOT of help from a friend). As much as I love Macs I was getting sick of having to play games on mid-to-low settings all the time, so I figured it was high time I put together something a bit more capable.
Things haven’t been 100% smooth so far – we had some problems getting the main power cable mounted onto the motherboard properly, then I forgot to connect the hard drives to the power supply and had to open up the case again, THEN I had to figure out why Windows was refusing to install onto my SSD, THEN I accidentally wiped the 20-something GB of Steam games I’d copied over from my old installation, and finally I spent most of this morning chasing down a mysterious problem that was maxing out one of my processor cores and causing some performance issues and generally fucking things up.
God dammit I’m happy to have this PC but I hope that’s the last of it. I can only mess around with drivers for so long.
Anyway, at the moment I have a basic rig:
- Intel i5-4440 3.1GHz CPU
- 4GB RAM (I’ll be adding another 4GB sometime in the near future)
- 430W Corsair Bronze PSU (I’m a cheapskate, so sue me)
- 60GB SSD (OS)
- 640GB HDD (games and data)
I’m looking for advice on a low-to-mid-end GPU along the following lines:- Nvidia (I generally trust their drivers more, but I’m open to ATI cards if there’s a big performance difference)
- Relatively inexpensive (somewhere below $200, preferably below $150)
- Can work with a 430W PSU
- Has a VGA port
- Decently playable performance on games (mostly Skyrim and similar-age/older games) around middle of the road settings.
I know not to expect much with those requirements, I’m just looking for an OK-ish card to last me for maybe a year or less, until I can afford a higher-wattage PSU and a beefy GPU to go together.
At the moment I’m looking at the Gigabyte GTX 650 1GB, which is comfortably in my price range and seems to be looked upon pretty favorably in user reviews.
Any advice?
UPDATE: I spotted a used Asus GTX 650 Ti 1GB on sale for a good price.
