Time to upgrade the potato

[MorePrinniesDood]

So I've been chugging along running Skyrim on a GeForce GT 620 with 1G of VRAM.

 

It occurs to me maybe I should upgrade to something a little more modern. I'm not sure a 900 series GeForce is in the budget though.

 

Which is generally more important? Card clock speed, or video memory?

 

Any suggestions on mid-range card that will run Skyrim well with a decent ENB enabled?

 

 

[Testificateguy]

Before recommending you a new GPU, it would be best to know the rest of your system specs, such as PSU, CPU, RAM, etc.. as well as your budget for the upgrade.

 

If possible, I would recommend waiting for the new Nvidia and AMD cards to come out first to allow current card prices to go down, or even save up for a higher power card.

 

As for the clock or memory question, I would say that VRAM is currently more important as higher resolutions are becoming more common.. so I'd go 4GB or more (if possible).  Plus ENB/ENBoost loves that extra memory.  You could always overclock the cards clock speeds to see if the gain is worth the extra temperatures and whatnot.

 

 

[MorePrinniesDood]

Ah, of course.

 

CPU: Athlon FX 4300 Quad core

RAM: 8GB

PSU: 600W if i remember correctly

OS: Windows 7 SP1

 

Main OS drive is a traditional HD, which Steam and Skyrim are installed on a SSD.

[Testificateguy]

So depending on how much $$$ you want to spend, I have a few options (from Amazon).

 

A real budget card is the GTX 750ti 2GB for around $100 USD.  I have tested one of these, and a lite ENB with some 1-2K textures works pretty well.

 

For around $200 USD I would recommend a R9 380 4GB.  From the benchmarks I've seen, it looks to be around the same performance of the GTX 960 and GTX 770.  Since I have use the GTX 770 (now SLI) I could say that the performance for the 380 is probably going to be around high-ultra depending on how many texture mod or how heavy the ENB is.

 

~$300 is the GTX 970 "4GB".  Personally I don't recommend this because of the 3.5GB + 512MB slowed memory, but for that price range why not?

 

Now if you can wait, you may find used cards for really cheap when the new series from Nvidia or AMD comes out, which might be your best bet if you want to get a really powerful card like a GTX 980 or a r9 390..

 

Hope I helped a bit.