So my main gaming desktop is just a couple months shy of its 4th birthday. I think it's held up pretty well considering it only cost me about $900 new and that was including the cost of Win7. It still runs any game I try to play on high, or at least medium-high settings.
For as well as it runs, I'm unwilling to spring for a brand new rig- I don't think I need it. So, I set out to determine whether it made sense for me to do a cheap upgrade....
First off, here is my current build:
The PC game that I've been playing almost exclusively of late is State of Decay. Therefore, I used that for my testing. on "Ultra" settings, it runs fairly well but will visibly chug if I do a sudden camera spin- so I ran my tests with the Ultra settings enabled (I usually play on "high" not "ultra").
First, is the CPU maxxing out? I fired up performance monitor, set it to monitor CPU usage on all 4 cores individually and had it gather data while I gamed for a couple minutes...
The answer seems to be no.
What about the GPU? I launched GPU-Z and looked at the GPU load while gaming....
Aha! It looks like it's being pegged.
So, what do you think the best bang for my buck is in replacing my video card? I'm sure there's no shortage of cards out there that exceed my HD5770, but I don't want to buy more card than makes sense for my current build and more importantly, I wanna do it cheaply.
Thoughts?
Upgrade my rig (or fun with performance monitor)
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