Hardware & Technical Thoughts for a low-end Horizons-ready graphics card?

[TheDarkLord]

So, my son has started playing Elite. He's using an ancient (well, 8 year old) PC that I built myself. It's a Core i7 running at around 3.5GHz, 6GB DDR3 and an SSD running Windows 7. But I built it to do photo editing, so the graphics card was really just something to plug the monitor lead into. When I bought a MacBook Pro, the PC was relegated to being a file server, but it's having something of a new lease of life with the boy playing ED.

While it will run ED (non-Horizons) just about, it is below the minimum spec for Horizons, and runs the 64-bit game very very badly.

I think I need to replace the graphics card with something a bit more modern, but I don't really want to put in any money to such an old machine!

I can source a variety of different NVidia GT710 cards with 2GB RAM for a price that I can justify. But will a card at that low level of performance just be a waste of a (small) amount of cash?

 

[The Chairmaker]

Well im running a 2008 vintage i7 920 overclocked to 3.8ghz with 6 gig of ram and an SSD with Elite Dangerous Horizons and it handles elite at 2560 x 1600 virtual super resolution with everything set at Ultra. I don't have any problem playing other games at Ultra either.
Graphics card wises I bought a AMD RADEON RX480 Nitro + for about £250

Provided the I7 graphics card your talking about is quad core, then upgrading to a mainstream current generation graphics card will make a massive leap in gaming performance.

I appreciate you may not want to fork out £250 for a graphics card, however for between £110 and £250 you have a choice from AMD of the RX460, RX470 and RX480 graphics cards and from NVIDIA the 1050, 1050TI and 1060.
Elite tends to like video ram so I think going for a 2 gig card is cutting it fine. Would look for 4 gig of ram among those choices.
I suspect the RX460 and 1050 will play Elite no problem at 1080p resolution though probably wont handle ultra settings.

The GT710 isn't really a gaming card. Its merely a cheap card for displaying the pc desktop and watching you tube videos with.

 

[winterknight]

I think, if money is tight, that The Chairmaker is right, an AMD RX460 or Intel 1050, at about a £100 is a reasonable place to start.
Other than that you need to look at the 2nd user market, I'm not sure that I would personally want to go down that route. We here have used Intel 670's and a 960 that work fine but slow down when you get to busy places or planet surfaces.

 

[Lucius-Darcia]

I doesn't habe always to be a new card. I have still a great GTX 770 with 4gb ram here, that can play horizons on medoum to high settings without any problems. I' ve always thought about selling here but never did. So i would give her for only shipping cost.
I have used her until 2 months ago where i've created a new rig, only problem was my MB and CPU that were very old and bad. But this card is still a very good solution for what you are searching.

 

[Zieman]

I can source a variety of different NVidia GT710 cards with 2GB RAM for a price that I can justify. But will a card at that low level of performance just be a waste of a (small) amount of cash?

Depends on what the current GPU is.

That said, I think GT710 will be a waste of money anyway.

 

[MickyG1982]

So, my son has started playing Elite. He's using an ancient (well, 8 year old) PC that I built myself. It's a Core i7 running at around 3.5GHz, 6GB DDR3 and an SSD running Windows 7. But I built it to do photo editing, so the graphics card was really just something to plug the monitor lead into. When I bought a MacBook Pro, the PC was relegated to being a file server, but it's having something of a new lease of life with the boy playing ED.

While it will run ED (non-Horizons) just about, it is below the minimum spec for Horizons, and runs the 64-bit game very very badly.

I think I need to replace the graphics card with something a bit more modern, but I don't really want to put in any money to such an old machine!

I can source a variety of different NVidia GT710 cards with 2GB RAM for a price that I can justify. But will a card at that low level of performance just be a waste of a (small) amount of cash?

I can tell you right now, the GT710 would be an absolute waste of money figure out a decent budget, even £50 (the price of a GT710) will give you access to something much better if you are prepared to go second hand and do some ebay shopping. Extend that budget a little & you will end up with a half decent "gaming" rig roughly equivalent to a high end current gen i3.

The minimum that I personally would like to play EDH on is really the GPU in my rig however and I wouldn't recommend going much lower for a decent gaming experience. I would also recommend upping the RAM to 8 or, better yet, 16Gb to ensure a smooth gaming experience, just keep an eye on the power consumption however, the old I7 was a power hungry beast on it's own, a decent PSU would be a must.

 

[TheDarkLord]

Cool. Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

Going 2nd hand had honestly never occurred to me. I'll follow up on that.

This machine has an 850W PSU, so I have some headroom for increasing the power requirements on the GPU.

Cheers!

 

[The Chairmaker]

Cool. Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

Going 2nd hand had honestly never occurred to me. I'll follow up on that.

This machine has an 850W PSU, so I have some headroom for increasing the power requirements on the GPU.

Cheers!

This benchmarking chart should give you a rough idea of were various cards sit performance wise.
Should help you avoid paying over the odds for a lower grade card, especially if looking on the 2nd hand market

http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu

 

[cmdr_Sisko]

I'm kind of partial to nvidia. 970s and 980s are actually pretty cheap on ebay these days.... jeeze, I literally just gave away an extra 970 I had laying around to someone on this forum for shipping costs. a 970 handles this game with ease.