GPU Buying Guide - (Read first post)

Someone suggested the 1050 fadedorca66, but you're looking at a 1050 that's been gutted by having 2GB less VRAM, yet they're charging almost the same. I wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole; I guess people who hunt for deals end up paying twice in the long run 😁

Are you paying cash or using a credit card? If it's a card—which one and how many installments are we talking about?

It’s officially dead.
The issue is that it decided to give up the ghost "today."
Local stores around here don't carry any replacements. (Indianapolis)

There is one option I spotted on eBay—an ASUS GeForce GTX 1060 3GB that supposedly still carries a warranty until March 29, 2020. According to $500,
Of course, I have no idea what the previous owner was actually doing with it... whether he was messing around with overclocking, pushing voltages, or just being reckless...
And even then, I'm not entirely sure about the state of the fans on that particular card. It would probably be wise to pull the heatsink off and give it a thorough cleaning, though I wouldn't go tinkering too much with it myself...

I wouldn't do that if I were you. Buying something today just to regret it six months from now isn't a great move.

You can grab this one from Micro Center; it should get to you by Monday or Tuesday:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Ca...N105TD5-4GD#kf
https://www.microcenter.com/products/detail...m_medium=click

There’s one at Best Buy, but it's $67 pricier:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/graphics-ca...i-dp-051800169
(might want to check if they actually have it in stock, though—probably out)

That 1060 3gb is also a decent enough deal for the price, as long as it comes with a warranty.

https://www.nabava.net/search.php?q=dell+gtx+1050+ti

Why on earth is there such a massive price gap?
I ended up picking up an asus gtx 1050...
Don't even ask me what I paid for it.
It absolutely gutted my bank account...
Install

The guy at the shop told me I need to turn off the fans...
But nothing online says to do that.
Turns out it actually needs a 6-pin connector...

It seems nobody bothered to mention that my TV can't even handle anything north of 60fps... 😂

We all know how this goes. There are certain games where if you actually crank up the settings, you won't even scrape 30fps. People go out and pick up an RTX 3070 or an RTX 3080 just to try and hit 1080p at 60Hz. If you have extra overhead, great—it doesn't hurt—but you can always just lock the frame rate anyway. Plus, let's be real: TVs and monitors don't market refresh rates honestly. That "100Hz" label is often nothing more than marketing fluff and total nonsense.

It's true, I'm running an RTX 3070 on a 1080p 60Hz monitor—but the real headache is my i5 4670k processor. It's causing a serious bottleneck, so I'm struggling to hit 60 fps in certain games.

I honestly think that even an RTX 3080 struggles to maintain a steady 60 fps in demanding titles like Middle Earth click 😬

The Apollo Program just starts running smoothly, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, the image freezes while the audio keeps playing, followed by ten minutes of nothing but total silence...
I didn't even realize the temperature had climbed up to 70C until it was too late.
I hit a Blue Screen while I was just browsing on Chrome.
There was another instance where, again, just during some web surfing, the whole system decided to reboot without any warning at all...
My power supply is a Seasonic, though unfortunately, the label is hidden and I haven't gone through the trouble of peeling it off to check the exact wattage. I'm assuming it's somewhere north of 600W...
I've been considering swapping things out for a non-Ti model, especially since my current GPU is capping me at 60fps.
But then I start reading about how 2GB of VRAM often isn't nearly enough for high-end settings, and those visual details are quite important to me.

I haven't run into another Blue Screen today, though my daughter mentioned her computer shut itself down—or rather, performed a hard reset—while she was watching something on YouTube...

If any experienced gamers here have the patience and the desire to take a look at my setup, I can hop on TeamViewer...

First off, you might want to check how your case temperatures are looking—when was the last time you actually blew the dust out of your rig? Or even changed the thermal paste on the CPU?

Try grabbing HWMonitor to get a read on those temps: https://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmo...nitor_1.35.exe

And if you really want to dig into what caused that blue screen, download this tool to see the actual reason: http://www.resplendence.com/download...ashedSetup.exe

If you're up for it, just post some screenshots from both HWMonitor and WhoCrashed here so we can take a look together.

It wasn't dusty at all, especially since I just gave everything a good cleaning yesterday when I installed the card. I've got HW monitor running to keep an eye on things. I pushed the GPU a bit today, and after about 15 minutes of stress testing, the max temp hit 79 degrees, while the CPU stayed a bit cooler... Is there any point in me digging through this software looking for blue screen errors? Will it even find anything?
Since I woke up this morning, absolutely nothing has happened.
I’ve decided against swapping it out; my daughter was playing some arcade-style house game, and the FPS is relatively low even on ultra settings. If the performance were any lower without "it," I’d probably be listing this card on eBay in a few months...
As for the fan? Is there some sort of trick to tell it to just stay quiet until it hits 50-60C?
I've been Googling, but so far, it doesn't look like there's an answer...

...edit
Turns out this software isn't finding a thing, mostly because my PC isn't even logging the crashes...
I noticed something rather strange quite by accident:
Since my CPU fan has a manual potentiometer, I usually keep it set to the absolute minimum. I've never had an issue before. But just now, purely out of curiosity, I cranked it up to max and realized that after about 10 minutes, the fan started shutting itself off randomly. I opened HW, saw the CPU fan sitting at 0rpm... then ten seconds later it spins back up, only to suddenly stop again for another ten seconds...
Once I turned it back down to the minimum, it started behaving normally again.
It's entirely possible I'm dealing with a faulty CPU fan...

Listen, if your CPU temps (i5 760) are climbing north of 70°C, you've got a problem. It’s nothing to celebrate. You might want to swap out the thermal paste or check if your cooler is actually doing its job—or, honestly, just grab this and call it a day. It’ll run cooler and quieter, plus it's only 133mm tall, so it fits perfectly in your case since you have room up to 135mm. Besides, it makes total sense that things are running hotter now; you finally added a GPU to the mix, which means the system is actually working harder under load. Choosing a weaker graphics card wouldn't make any sense at all. Like I said before, there are countless scenarios where even a GPU that's several times more powerful won't be able to maintain a steady 60 fps.

The Apollo Program is pretty demanding on the CPU, and frankly, you could probably use a bit more RAM too.

So, I’m running a Batman, but I’ve swapped out the fan for one with a potentiometer—I suspect it isn't even an OEM part—so I just keep it dialed down to the minimum. At idle, it’s spinning at about 800 RPM, averaging around 1200, though it doesn't seem capable of pushing past 1480 RPM even at its highest setting...
My PC has been running non-stop all day today (my thermal management situation is frankly catastrophic, but that’s how I’ve lived for years without any *actual* issues occurring yet)...
After spending the entire afternoon with the machine powered on—everything from browsing and watching YouTube to cartoons and gaming, all while keeping HW monitor open—it shows that the peak temperature for one of my cores hit 78°C. The others topped out around 75 or 76, with an average sitting at 50...
The GPU spiked to 83°C, averaging about 52...

Is 12GB of RAM supposedly not enough for gaming nowadays? How absolutely thrilling...

There's a nice warm breeze blowing out the back of the case, and honestly, once the Harman Kardon heater upstairs kicks in, I won't even need to turn on the furnace this winter... ☕
View on imgur

By default, this card should come with a zero RPM mode enabled so the fans don't even spin until it hits a certain temperature.

I personally keep mine running at up to 1200rpm because they are completely silent.

My bad, I mixed things up—I thought you were running on 4GB of RAM

Yeah, your case is basically stuffed full; there's zero airflow, which is why your temps are spiking

Austin Rodriguez5 said:That card should have zero-RPM mode enabled by default so the fans don't even spin until it hits a certain thermal threshold.

I usually keep mine running at about 1200rpm just because they’re practically silent at that speed...

It really ought to, but apparently it doesn't.
From what I've been digging up online, 29% seems to be the absolute floor...

Which Dell model were you actually looking at? There are a bunch of different versions out there. The cheapest one I came across (and I think fadedorca66 linked it too, if I recall correctly) didn't even have a fan that shuts off during idle

I would venture to say that wasn't exactly a bargain...

There isn't any