Hardware Computer Upgrade Options

[Halbour]

So, i have a device that has a default graphics card. (UHD 630) Can i, like, buy a new one and just install it, or should i buy a new PC?


Thanks in advance!

 

[Latiodile]

desktop or laptop? if you have a desktop then yeah you can install a graphics card, as long as the power supply can handle it and you don't have one of those tiny low power boxes

 

[mightymuffy]

- you sound a bit clueless (sorry!) there. First of all, define 'device' - if you're talking laptop, then hell no in most instances. Desktop? What size are we talking here? Is it a big one or a small one?
Edit: Ninja'd!

 

[zxr750j]

What games do you want to play? And what's your budget?!

 

[Halbour]

A desktop, yeah. i plan installing a GTX 1000 series. and if CPU-Z can show my voltage, then i attached a txt file extracted from there.

 

[tech3475]

Is it a prebuilt? Do you have a model number?

 

[FAST6191]

Was bored so basic parse out

CPU
Intel Core i5 10500

8 gigs of 1200MHz DDR4. Might be underclocked but don't know there. Kingston by the looks of things. Part number KHX3200C16D4/8GX it reckons but I can't decode it using the official tool to see what goes.

Asus PRIME B460M-A
https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-B460M-A/
It is a microATX but has 4 memory slots and a couple of M2 slots. 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x1 as well and looks like it could fit a reasonable size card in it.

Drive is seemingly just a low-mid range SATA ssd
https://devicelist.best/en/kingston-a400-sa400s37240g/ KINGSTON SA400S37240G aka Kingston A400 [SA400S37240G]
Flanked by a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB 5400RPM SATA in what I hope is bulk storage.

Graphics Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 so whatever is on the CPU really trying to power a ASUS VA24E monitor (1080p 75Hz Freesync capable thing, albeit running at 60Hz for that wall of text linked above) and sporting Microsoft Windows 11 Professional 64-bit.

No mention of PSU type that I saw.

Way too lazy/late in the evening to figure out if that was an OEM bundle (not to mention build dates of 2021 is going to make this hard). Some things were mentioning as being left to be set by the OEM so maybe not but also matching mid tier mobo and mid tier screen with no GPU which is classic OEM so I am not putting any money down.

 

[Halbour]

Was bored so basic parse out

CPU
Intel Core i5 10500

8 gigs of 1200MHz DDR4. Might be underclocked but don't know there. Kingston by the looks of things. Part number KHX3200C16D4/8GX it reckons but I can't decode it using the official tool to see what goes.

Asus PRIME B460M-A
https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-B460M-A/
It is a microATX but has 4 memory slots and a couple of M2 slots. 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x1 as well and looks like it could fit a reasonable size card in it.

Drive is seemingly just a low-mid range SATA ssd
https://devicelist.best/en/kingston-a400-sa400s37240g/ KINGSTON SA400S37240G aka Kingston A400 [SA400S37240G]
Flanked by a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB 5400RPM SATA in what I hope is bulk storage.

Graphics Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 so whatever is on the CPU really trying to power a ASUS VA24E monitor (1080p 75Hz Freesync capable thing, albeit running at 60Hz for that wall of text linked above) and sporting Microsoft Windows 11 Professional 64-bit.

No mention of PSU type that I saw.

Way too lazy/late in the evening to figure out if that was an OEM bundle (not to mention build dates of 2021 is going to make this hard). Some things were mentioning as being left to be set by the OEM so maybe not but also matching mid tier mobo and mid tier screen with no GPU which is classic OEM so I am not putting any money down.

Thank you so much for taking your time to answer! it's not a prebuilt, i built it myself intending to do casual stuff, but now i wanna game on it. well, guess i need to physically check the voltage, huh...

 

[FAST6191]

No just tell us a model number for the supply -- if it was an OEM thing or cheap thing then you might not have enough leftover power to power a fancy graphics card. If that is the case you would be told to get a graphics card and new power supply, or a more power economical graphics card (usually more expensive and less able to push pixels, though 75Hz 1080p is not that demanding as things go these days unless you have a VR headset in mind).
If it is a good one then you can enter the rest of the parts above (plus any reasonable upgrades -- are you going to want to go for 2 lots of m2 drive and 4 sata drives?) to get an idea of the power remaining you have to play with.

Might also want to share the case type as well -- microATX and matching case might limit the graphics card you can use too (some really powerful things are long)/

 

[Halbour]

No just tell us a model number for the supply -- if it was an OEM thing or cheap thing then you might not have enough leftover power to power a fancy graphics card. If that is the case you would be told to get a graphics card and new power supply, or a more power economical graphics card (usually more expensive and less able to push pixels, though 75Hz 1080p is not that demanding as things go these days unless you have a VR headset in mind).
If it is a good one then you can enter the rest of the parts above (plus any reasonable upgrades -- are you going to want to go for 2 lots of m2 drive and 4 sata drives?) to get an idea of the power remaining you have to play with.

Might also want to share the case type as well -- microATX and matching case might limit the graphics card you can use too (some really powerful things are long)/

How do i check the model number? open my computer? BTW gaming at 1080 60 FPS is more then enough for me...

 

[Halbour]

No just tell us a model number for the supply -- if it was an OEM thing or cheap thing then you might not have enough leftover power to power a fancy graphics card. If that is the case you would be told to get a graphics card and new power supply, or a more power economical graphics card (usually more expensive and less able to push pixels, though 75Hz 1080p is not that demanding as things go these days unless you have a VR headset in mind).
If it is a good one then you can enter the rest of the parts above (plus any reasonable upgrades -- are you going to want to go for 2 lots of m2 drive and 4 sata drives?) to get an idea of the power remaining you have to play with.

Might also want to share the case type as well -- microATX and matching case might limit the graphics card you can use too (some really powerful things are long)/

And my case is the Antec P7 silent... guess ill need to change that too, right?

 

[mituzora]

Reading your specs, my biggest concern would be the power supply.

You need a high enough wattage to run certain cards, and you would need a PCI-E power plugs to power it depending on the card.

For example, I have a machine with a Geforce GTX 1070. that thing can run on 500w if you want to push it. It requires a single 8-pin PCI-E power connector from the power supply to power it.

If you're just going 1080p @60Hz, you could likely go with a GTX 3050 if you can find it. It's not all that powerful, but anything is going to be better off than your integrated graphics controller.

Regarding your RAM, it's likely 2400 MHz. A lot of computers will only report half of the speed of DDR RAM (hence the DDR, or Double Data Rate) I would recommend upgrading that to a minimum of 16 GB, but you can swing 8 if you need to.

You also don't need an m.2 card to play games, but it would be a nice to have. a "bog-standard" SATA SSD is plenty for most people.

Your Motherboard and CPU are alright as well. If it's any consolation, I do 1080p 60 gaming on a bog standard SSD, with 16 GB of RAM, a Geforce GTX 1070 (at medium to high quality on modern games, epic/ultra on anything pre-2020) and an archaic 8-year old 4th Gen Intel i5 CPU with 4 Cores (i5-4690k overclocked to 4.6 GHz)

Do mind the size of your case, make sure the card you have fits the case.

 

[FAST6191]

How do i check the [power supply] model number? open my computer? BTW gaming at 1080 60 FPS is more then enough for me...

If you built it yourself then check emails/receipts from whatever supplier you used. Sometimes it will be bundled with the case if it is not immediately apparent somewhere.

Otherwise yeah this is not the sort of thing that tends to reveal itself to software based methods. 95% of them though will be visible if you take the side panel off.

As far as the case then https://www.antec.com/product/case/p7-silent "Dimensions 445x 210 x 470 mm(DxWxH) Form Factor Mid Tower MB Tray Clearance ≤20mm
Max GPU Length ≤ 390mm
Max CPU Height ≤ 165mm
Max PSU Length ≤200mm" is reasonable for all but the highest of high end graphics cards really (and most of those will still fit if https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#sort=-length&page=1 is anything to go by). The reason for the concern was the motherboard size -- if it had been put in a matching size case then that gets more fun.

 

[Halbour]

more fun.

What do you mean?

 

[FAST6191]

What do you mean?

Motherboards come in various sizes. The ATX family of such things being the most common but there are others (even from big players like Dell but I shall spare us that rant). You don't need to match the motherboard size with the case though in as much as you can put a microATX in a full size ATX case (physics having something to say if you tried standard ATX in a pico ATX case).
This appears to have happened here and your motherboard is microATX but you have a standard size case. Might look like a marble sitting in the middle of a basketball court inside there but it is there and you can still use it just fine.
If it had been smaller then they tend to start limiting the size of graphics card you can fit in the thing (they do get very long at times) and while people have run off and grabbed hacksaws, tin snips and such then... best to avoid that in the first place.

 

[Halbour]

Motherboards come in various sizes. The ATX family of such things being the most common but there are others (even from big players like Dell but I shall spare us that rant). You don't need to match the motherboard size with the case though in as much as you can put a microATX in a full size ATX case (physics having something to say if you tried standard ATX in a pico ATX case).
This appears to have happened here and your motherboard is microATX but you have a standard size case. Might look like a marble sitting in the middle of a basketball court inside there but it is there and you can still use it just fine.
If it had been smaller then they tend to start limiting the size of graphics card you can fit in the thing (they do get very long at times) and while people have run off and grabbed hacksaws, tin snips and such then... best to avoid that in the first place.

Well... can i put a card in there or not?

 

[FAST6191]

Well... can i put a card in there or not?

It is a normal ATX size case from what I can see so it will fit most things out there on the market ("Max GPU Length ≤ 390mm" from the link earlier) it seems. The specifications for whatever graphics card you get* will tell you what size it is/space it requires.
However we are still waiting on the power supply model number to figure out whether you need to upgrade it or limit your ambitions on that front.

*do bear in mind Nvidia and AMD/ATI don't make graphics cards per se. They make the chips and give reference designs. Other companies the buy the chips and designs in and build accordingly, and while most are using those reference designs then others will do something more creative and that is where we start to see things of different sizes crop up. However if you are going on the manufacturer's website for it then it will tell you that, mostly there so you don't assume that one manufacturer's say RTX 3080 is the same as another manufacturer's.

 

[Halbour]

It is a normal ATX size case from what I can see so it will fit most things out there on the market ("Max GPU Length ≤ 390mm" from the link earlier) it seems. The specifications for whatever graphics card you get* will tell you what size it is/space it requires.
However we are still waiting on the power supply model number to figure out whether you need to upgrade it or limit your ambitions on that front.

*do bear in mind Nvidia and AMD/ATI don't make graphics cards per se. They make the chips and give reference designs. Other companies the buy the chips and designs in and build accordingly, and while most are using those reference designs then others will do something more creative and that is where we start to see things of different sizes crop up. However if you are going on the manufacturer's website for it then it will tell you that, mostly there so you don't assume that one manufacturer's say RTX 3080 is the same as another manufacturer's.

I think ill buy This. because my Motherboard is from ASUS and i like them.

i'll try to figure out the voltage at a later date.

 

[fringle]

I think ill buy This. because my Motherboard is from ASUS and i like them.

i'll try to figure out the voltage at a later date.

If you can get an RTX 2060 for around the same price I think you'd be better off. It's about the same in terms of performance (maybe a bit better actually) and won't suffer from the pcie 4.0 bottleneck that the 3050 will in your motherboard. Mind you the performance drop for a 3050 on pcie 3.0 is small you may want to squeeze out as many frames as you can for your machine.

 

[Halbour]

It is a normal ATX size case from what I can see so it will fit most things out there on the market ("Max GPU Length ≤ 390mm" from the link earlier) it seems. The specifications for whatever graphics card you get* will tell you what size it is/space it requires.
However we are still waiting on the power supply model number to figure out whether you need to upgrade it or limit your ambitions on that front.

*do bear in mind Nvidia and AMD/ATI don't make graphics cards per se. They make the chips and give reference designs. Other companies the buy the chips and designs in and build accordingly, and while most are using those reference designs then others will do something more creative and that is where we start to see things of different sizes crop up. However if you are going on the manufacturer's website for it then it will tell you that, mostly there so you don't assume that one manufacturer's say RTX 3080 is the same as another manufacturer's.

I think im going on This One. is it good? (the size will fit...)
i have 3 more questions- if ill need to get a new power supply, how strong should it be?
second- how will i cool it?
and third, i need to have 16\32 GB of RAM, or i can have 24 too?
thank you very much!!