Do I need to worry about upgrading motherboard with GPU if its old or will it work okay just buying a new GPU?
If it’s PCI Express (as opposed to regular PCI), then it pretty much should work.
What may happen however is that the slot will run at a slower speed, so if you put a 5090 with a Core 2 Duo you will struggle to keep the GPU fed with enough data to fully load up the GPU while your CPU is pegged at 100%.
It’ll run though.
EDIT: You can also have issues with the legacy BIOS and your newer card not shipping a BIOS ROM to initialize it on boot, but once it gets into the OS it should activate. If you have an iGPU it should output there until the OS starts.
Don’t forget the PSU. You go with a power hungry gpu, and you have an older psu that’s say 400w, you’re not getting clean power.
Ironically, high end cards usually only have small penalties for having a previous gen PCIe. On a full x16 lanes, there’s usually bandwidth to spare. Although you wouldn’t want to put a RTX 5090 on PCIe 3.0. It was the RX 6500 XT with its mere x4 lane count that took a significant hit running on PCIe 3.0 instead of 4.0. That was not a good limitation for that market segment since the low end is where people are most likely to try to avoid upgrading motherboards/cpus.
I had more in mind like an AM3 platform with an FX CPU, or equivalent old Intel platform.
Really starts depending on what you run on that GPU, like it’ll render Furmark just fine at full tilt but a modern open world game will probably struggle with asset pop-in and stutters because of both bandwidth and the CPU not issuing draw calls fast enough to keep up with the GPU.
Yes*
1: Old motherboard PCI-E generation slot may bottleneck bandwidth, make sure you use the slot closet to the CPU for 16x speeds.
2: Old CPU might get bogged down by the massive modern video drivers and make the GPU under perform.
3: Going forward you’ll need to consider ReBar support. The newest Radeon GPU will under perform without ReBar enabled. If you don’t have that feature, it’ll still work, but look up on/off benchmarks.
4: Make sure your power supply can handle any upgrades.
Your decade old motherboard may or may not accept a graphics card but your decade old cpu will have a hard time running any modern games. Putting an expensive video card in there would be like buying custom rims for a junk car. If you provide more details like exactly what motherboard cpu you have. What kind of games you wanna play you can get more pointed support
The CPU in that motherboard is the amd ryzen 5 2600 6 core 12 thread 3.4ghz. The GPU is AMD RX 580 6GB. I would be buying more for computational work on a headless server than games, I’ve never had any issue with modern games because im old and okay living with 1080p + medium settings it all looks fine compared to the PS1 stuff I grew up with.
Im only really concerned with bumping up VRAM GB and hopefully TFLOP speeds. I would really really like at least 16gb of vram but it doesn’t come cheap in todays market, the intel arc stuff was a good deal compared to what nvidia and amd want for similar numbers. Ill be limited by pcie version 3 no matter what. Theres some older nvidia cards that also fit the bill that I saw thanks to some other user recommendations but maybe if im spending the money just get the newest GPU series and upgrade all the other parts later?
That’s an AM4 slot motherboard then! I’d look up the latest motherboard BIOS update, and then throw in the best used CPU you can too. The 450M chipset can support up to Ryzen 5000 series.
A 3800X (~100 CAD used) Ryzen or better is still plenty powerful paired with a modern GPU. Zen 2/3 is way better than the first gen for IPC.
5000 series are still pretty expensive however.
If your power supply will power the arc you should be all set for your use case. Should you need more cpu power you can flash to latest bios and see what the newest am4 cpu your mobo will take. Am4 chips are really cheap these days.
Assuming PCIe, you’ll be limited to the bus speed of whatever version your motherboard has, but otherwise you should be able to get video fine as long as you get your drivers configured correctly.
This is the motherboard I have it says it’s a ‘generation 3’ but duesnt say what gddr vram it supports. I would like to put in a Intel arc card with gddr6 gram
The VRAM is handled entirely by the card itself, the motherboard doesn’t need to support anything more than PCI-E.
The bus speed just translates to how quickly data can be transferred through the mobo to your card to be processed/rendered. I’d just pop it in and configure it, then run a benchmark program, which will tell you where your bottlenecks are. In terms of functionality there’s no reason it shouldn’t work, but don’t expect newer AAA games to run at full spec.
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I do believe this question is gonna require more information, like what model motherboard…
Here’s some more info. This is the motherboard I have it says it’s a ‘generation 3’ but duesnt say what gddr vram it supports. I would like to put in a Intel arc card with gddr6 gram
I don’t think anyone was expecting a Ryzen 3rd Gen era board when you wrote decade old. It’s been 7 years since that board released (although I do admit that’s a lot closer to a decade then I though it would be).
This board will run any modern GPU. The motherboard doesn’t need to specifically be compatible with certain GDDR generations or what not, that is handled by the GPU itself, which communicates with the rest of the PC through PCIe*. You just need to make sure the PSU can deliver enough power.
You should update to the latest BIOS and enable resizable Bar: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000090831/graphics.html
*The ARC GPUs are 8° lanes of PCIe 4, your motherboard only has PCIe 3. This means that the bandwidth between the CPU and GPU is half of its maximum. In the vast majority of cases this will be a negligible performance difference of 1-2%, but some edge cases can lose you a bit more performance.
°If the GPU was 16 lanes this would be even less of a problem. Even the fastest GPUs can barely saturate 16 PCIe lanes. The fastest GPU, the Nvidia 5090, only loses 1-4% of performance when comparing PCIe 5x16 vs 3x16 (1/4 its max bandwidth): https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/nvidia-rtx-5090-pcie-50-vs-40-vs-30-x16-scaling-benchmarks
Thank you for the great response! Yeah not quite a decade but were getting there. For some reason I think lots of people are still stuck in 2010s when they hear 10 year old computer parts they think subconsciously think of duo Pentiums from the early 2000s not intel i7s and AMD ryzens lol.
I decided to get try a nvidia p100 instead. it was more in my price range + it allows cuda with the nvidia card I have in another desktop I could chain up. Thanks for looking up the ARC anyways! Though do you know why it says the p100 says a bus length of 4096 while most other cards are like 128? P100 specs
It’s because it uses HBM (high bandwidth memory) as opposed to GDDR.
A short video explaining the differences https://youtu.be/CGIVKT0eM_s
Most people aren’t responding to the specifics of that board, but even though it’s old it’s still PCIe x16 and will work with a lot of modern cards. The cards of it’s era were things like the nvidia 1660 or any of the AMD Radeon 6000x series would be fine. As others have said you’ll need to ensure your PSU is able to provide enough power, and that your cpu might not be able to provide enough data. So anything past that era might be pointless.
and that your cpu might not be able to provide enough data.
That also depends on the settings and resolution you plan on playing with. The higher the visual settings and resolution, the more demand is on the GPU. So when you plan to play on very high visual settings at a high resolution, a higher end GPU might make sense even with an older CPU.
Probably it’ll be fine, with a few exceptions.
But probably it won’t be worth the money unless you’re getting a low end cardYou mention in one comment that you want to use an Intel Arc. Those require resizeable BAR support on the mainboard/CPU. Search the manuals of your Mainboard/CPU. If it isn’t mentioned, then the GPU will not work
I am pretty sure that this is not true. While Intel Arc GPUs really should be paired with a mainboard with resizable BAR for performance reasons, they will still work without it, although with pretty bad performance.
Intel mentions requiring support on their quickstart guide: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000091128/graphics/intel-arc-dedicated-graphics-family.html
Yeah, that’s mostly because performance is so poor without it.
IMO it really depends on if you can upgrade your CPU as well. I have a 12 year old dell precision that maybe (probably not?) could handle a newer CPU (32gb of ram), but there is no way that I know of to upgrade the CPU to a current generation; thus, it is stuck with a CPU that’s too weak even for a 1070Ti.
Look here to find upgrades that will let you get the most out of that old motherboard. IDK if it will be much though. I upgraded the CPU on mine in hopes that ~8% gain in performance would do much… it didn’t.
Here’s a good resource as well. They focus on used systems it seems and helped me find the strongest (yet still shitty) CPU that I could get for my ancient motherboard.
You’ll be fine, make sure it’s a x16 card (vasty majority are), stick it in your x16 slot. Make sure you have enough power, some are pretty thirsty these days (it’s usually on the specs sheet for the card and on your power supply in the case)
You can also upgrade the CPU to AMD Ryzen 3000 series (e.g. 3900X, pretty cheap second hand) by upgrading the BIOS here for a nice performance uplift. Get to at least 16Gb RAM (DDR4, also cheap).
Later, you can recycle this as a home sever or swap to a motherboard that supports Ryzen 5000 series (also cheap these days), which will take all your present hardware and enable CPU upgrade to say 5800X3D to make it a gaming beast (at least for a couple of years).
look for this in you PDF of the mother board
PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot
now go to your favorite web store and look for PCI-E 3.0 x16 gpu
max out the ram and make sure you have a fast M.2 hard drive, power supply unit PSU should probably be 500+
