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What to upgrade?


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My video card has started screwing up huge today, something I'd been expecting for a while. I'm going to get a new one this Sunday, but most of my hardware is also pretty old, I'm wondering what else should I upgrade while I'm there. My current setup is:

 

MSI P35 Neo3

Intel Core Duo CPU E2800 @ ~2.7 GHz

2048 RAM (DDR2 I think)

ATi Radeon HD 4650

 

It would be nice if someone could recommend something where I can play New Vegas or Metro 2033 at max settings.

 

Also I have to start up Windows 7 in safe mode now because of said video card failing, is that normal?

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Metro on max settings, well, would require an entirely new build. You might be able to manage FNV on high if you updated your graphics card, but then you'd have to upgrade your PSU as well and your CPU/RAM would bottleneck it.

 

I'm not sure if your card is actually failing, do you have any other evidence of this? If safe mode is fixing your problem it could very well be a driver issue.

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your mobo doesnt support PCI Ex 2.0,..if you use newer graphic driver, may cause instability and sometimes the driver wont recognize the Pciex 2.0 GPU(with OLD mobo Bios)..just be sure that your BIOS version is 1.4 (this is the latest from MSI site)..if not,then you need to flashing your BIOS..

If you wish to upgrade,..as posted above,better you starting build new PC for maxed Metro..

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Metro on max settings, well, would require an entirely new build. You might be able to manage FNV on high if you updated your graphics card, but then you'd have to upgrade your PSU as well and your CPU/RAM would bottleneck it.

 

I'm not sure if your card is actually failing, do you have any other evidence of this? If safe mode is fixing your problem it could very well be a driver issue.

 

Thanks for the replies guys, I'm not sure what you mean about the PSU and RAM thing though. Not very hardware-savvy.

 

As for evidence, I'm quite certain its failing because now I'm seeing red streaks across my screen, and a few months before that I was having stray vertices appearing in every video game I played, the frequency increasing with the render load (Team Fortress 2 - few stray vertices, FNV/Minecraft - Lots of stray vertices).

 

Edit: Its definitely failing, because everything's functioning fine, apart from games, which I haven't tried, now that I switched to a backup video card.

Edited by xaechireon
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The psu is the powersupply and the ram is the memory.

 

The red streaks are artifacts, they usually appear because the card gets to hot.

 

To play metro 2033 on high or very high settings you need a very powerful computer.

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Most off the shelf big name computers have power supplies that are barely able to run the devices that come with the computer. Upgrading to a new video card that requires a lot more power (watts) to run can over tax the power supply causing problems and failures in components such as Video cards and mother boards. So be sure your power supply is powerful enough to handle the components you put in.
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