Do I need to worry about upgrading motherboard with GPU if its old or will it work okay just buying a new GPU?

  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldOP
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    5 days ago

    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

    • dangrousperson@feddit.org
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      4 days ago

      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

      • SmokeyDope@lemmy.worldOP
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        4 days ago

        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

        Amd 580 specs

    • mortalic@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      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.

      • 486@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        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.