Which graphics card for ye olde PC?

October 7, 2022 10:33 AM

I have a fairly decent PC (IMHO) which is also fairly old (about 10 years I think). My son has suggested he'd like a graphics card for Xmas. Will a new one work with my PC? Which one should I get?

The PC is a Dell Precision T3600 workstation. I have 16GB of RAM installed and I've never considered it as being slow. My M1 MacBook Air feels slightly more responsive but the PC still holds up.

My son would like to install a graphics card so he can play Minecraft with a ray-tracing shader (correct terminology?) and has suggested an RTX gpu.

My budget is very limited. I have an NVIDIA Quadro K2000 at the moment. It's fairly decent. Handles 1080p footage pretty well. Will a cheap RTX card be an improvement? Will a cheap card handle ray-tracing or is that the more expensive end of things? Will an RTX work with my PC? Do I need to upgrade other components in order to run one?

What are my options? What do I need to look out for?

Bonus points: My monitor has only HDMI inputs. I might upgrade to a 4k display when I have the money but would rather a card that could work with my current display but also be compatible with a modern upgrade.

posted by popcassady to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

As a broad read, this seems possible though I wouldn't rule out something unexpected throwing a wrench in the works, with it being a workstation in particular over that time.

* The minimum viable ray-tracing card looks to be the RTX 2060, which matches my understanding of it. Ray-tracing is an old technique that hasn't been cost-effective until recently, in short. So somewhere around £300 at its base.
* You'll probably want to upgrade the power supply. The good news is that cards have generally gone more power-efficient as time goes on, so while your workstation notes a 300W max, the 2060 draws 160W at most. It recommends a 450W power supply though, to have room for the rest, & that looks to have 425W.
* You're probably fine with HDMI for a while yet, this card generally still has HDMI & the only change there lately's been DisplayPort (and there's adapters for those)
* Looks like the PCI port should be compatible, though it's sized to take up 2 slots so you'd want to measure it for fit: 229mm x 113mm x 35mm

The RAM seems probably-reasonable, the CPU *may* be enough, depending on which one you have from that list. The minimum system requirements call for an Intel Core i5 or equivalent.
posted by CrystalDave at 11:05 AM on October 7, 2022

Response by poster: CPU is Xeon e5-1620. Is that powerful enough?
posted by popcassady at 11:14 AM on October 7, 2022

I'm going to lean towards "probably not going to work" for two reasons. First, modern graphics cards use the PCIe standard to mate to the motherboard, and your machine is old enough that it probably only has an AGP port. Second, new cards are huge and there may not be enough physical space to fit one in.

If it does fit, though, I'm still skeptical that the RAM bus or the CPU is actually fast enough to make the upgrade worthwhile.
posted by backseatpilot at 12:06 PM on October 7, 2022

One thing to watch out for, Dell is somewhat notorious for using proprietary PSUs in their workstations, and you *will not* be able to use one of these newer graphics cards if they specify a minimum PSU wattage that is above what you have in there. The RTX 30XX-series GPUs are more power-hungry than 20XX in general, from what I can tell, and given that they're the current gen cards (well, until the 40XX series becomes widely available, anyway) you may have an easier time getting one of those new, if that's a consideration.

The CPU uses the Sandy Bridge Core architecture and the specs look similar to i7s of the era, so I'd assume it'd be okay, if somewhat slower than a newer chip. It looks like the mobo should be a PCI-e 3.0 board which isn't that out of date either.
posted by Aleyn at 12:11 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It would work in theory. The RTX cards are pretty huge, so it might not physically fit in the case. Those specs do say that up to 300W is supported for the video card though, so maybe you're good there.

The other issue is that RTX cards are expensive. If you find a used one for cheap, it's almost certainly a clapped-out Bitcoin miner card, since those are currently being dumped on the market due to the bottom falling out of the mining economy.

(Also Minecraft RTX, and RTX ray-tracing in general, is basically just a gimmick. The killer gaming app for RTX is actually DLSS, which automatically adjusts the rendering resolution for maximum performance and uses a deep-learning algorithm to interpolate up. It's only an option in a select number of newer games though.)
posted by neckro23 at 12:28 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

It appears that if your card were labeled for gaming it would be a GTX 1030.

On the one hand, almost any current card will be dramatically better at everything than that.

On the other hand, getting into raytraced minecraft looks like it would cost you US $300-500. On the cheaper side, you could pick up a 2060 super. A more modern 3060 or 3060ti will go closer to $500 but, from appearances, will run at 60+ fps.

If that price range is acceptable to you, I'd suggest hitting youtube for "minecraft raytraced cardname" and you should be able to find videos showing the framerate in different circumstances.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:11 PM on October 7, 2022

Gonna suggest instead of that, and depending on what game you wanna play, to look into virtualised graphic capabilities through Nvidea's Geforce NOW. It's awesome.
posted by Iteki at 1:38 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

In addition the PSU's overall wattage, most newer cards will require at least one separate PCIe power connector. If the Dell's PSU is proprietary it may not provide one, and you might not be able to simply replace it with an off-the-shelf PSU.
posted by yaarrgh at 1:40 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are a some games that won't run on a Sandy Bridge but will on an Ivy Bridge CPU. Anything more than a 1660 Super or 2060 Super will probably be a bit of a waste on such an old machine. I get pretty good results at 1080p in the vast majority of games on my quad core Ivy Bridge system with a 1660 Super. No raytracing, obviously, but the last thing I need is more work for the CPU since I've only got four cores and no hyperthreading.

The biggest question is going to be whether or not your PSU can handle the load, but I bet it will. Looks like it will do up to 600 watts and it probably has the necessary PCIe power connector since the system supports some decently high end Quadros of the time. If not, you could probably get by with an adapter as long as you stick to the cards I mentioned. I've only got a 450W PSU and it's fine. The 2060 doesn't take much more power than a 1660.

(In general, I recommend using the newer cards over an older 10xx because they have better video encode/decode among other things that make non-gaming workloads better)
posted by wierdo at 5:04 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

if you are a computer hobbyist who enjoys tinkering with old hardware and are accepting of reasonable chance and cost of failure, i would say go for it, and by "go for it" i mean keep doing more research and testing with parts on hand before sinking good money into a pricey new GPU. also ignore the warning comment above about AGP slots, we can tell from the specs you linked it has 2 PCIe x16 slots and 2 PCIe X4 slots. AGP was effectively dead by 2012 around when your workstation was produced.

i don't know this particular system but having messed around with enough manufactured PCs of that era i advise you to be really cautious. i have tons of spare parts lying around to just try stuff and see what works, you may not. you can get 75W from the PCI bus, everything else beyond that is gonna have to come from somewhere else, and a Dell workstation 425W PSU is probably not gonna have much else to give it in terms of secondary power connections. when enumerating the internal connections, the spec doc doesn't say anything else about 6pin or 8pin power, so it probably has none of these. the max you can get from a SATA-to-6pin adapter is 54W, about a 100W off one of those 2-SATA-to-1-six-pin adapters.

if you're going slot-power only, the best you can probably do is a 75watt GTX 1650 which does not do ray-tracing.

if you tap additional power off a couple free SATA plugs, lets say 175W is your power budget, that could do a RTX 3050 (130W) or an RTX 3070 (170W) but the 3070 would be really close to the limit and i'm not sure i'd feel safe just throwing that together and handing it over to a gamer kid without some extensive torture testing. but that would get you in the ray-tracing game. and that's all assuming it actually works and Dell didn't pull some anti-competitive shenanigans that won't be obvious until you go to try to put it all together. for example, the PSU, as mentioned above, you can forget about buying a modern ATX PSU and slapping it in there. in time, you might be able to figure out a proprietary Dell part number that was used on similar model that's a higher-output PSU and find a used spare on ebay or something.

in summation, if you're a hobbyist/tinkerer, go for it. otherwise this is unlikely to be a project without at least a little difficulty and not guaranteed to be successful.

bonus curmudgeonly old-person comment follows: the concept of ray-traced minecraft is... i'm struggling to find a good analogy. minecraft is an inherently low-resolution game so ray-tracing the lighting is lipstick on a pig? i wouldn't buy a professional photography lighting kit to light up the chlidren's playroom. i'm sure kiddo wants what he wants but imo it is a silly waste of resources.
posted by glonous keming at 5:45 PM on October 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

Your specs are actually quite decent: 2 x PCI Express 3.0 x 16 slots for video cards and 425W P/S (possible 600W P/S as well, but rare). Don't bother with the RTX. It's way too expensive and doesn't add much to the value. You don't really want a video card that costs as much as your PC's worth anyway.

In fact, you probably should stick with something older, like GTX1050. Anything newer than that will likely be bottlenecked in PCIe3.0.
posted by kschang at 6:43 PM on October 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

To be clear, if you want to use the raytracing-enabled worlds in Minecraft for Windows (aka Minecraft Bedrock), you must have a ray-tracing capable card that meets the minimum requirements listed by CrystalDave (specifically "GPU: DirectX hardware ray tracing capable GPU like NVIDIA GeForce® RTX 20 Series and higher, and AMD Radeon™ RX 6000 Series and higher"). Any GTX 10-series or 16-series won't cut it.

If you're willing to play around with Minecraft modding you may be able to get similar results with an older card using OptiFine and a shader pack in the Minecraft Java Edition, but it will likely take some research to get working, and it will only work for Minecraft Java, and not Bedrock.
posted by Aleyn at 9:28 PM on October 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's some pretty good Minecraft shaders that don't require RTX. Here's a few:
https://sildurs-shaders.github.io/
https://www.sonicether.com/seus/ (there's actually one here that DOES do path/ray tracing but does NOT require RTX hardware)

I agree with the above comments; I wouldn't necessarily get a RTX card for that computer unless you plan to also migrate it to another, new machine later. I think the GTX 1650 mentioned above would be a good call, or maybe an AMD equivalent, if the price is right.
posted by destructive cactus at 2:15 PM on October 9, 2022