Would upgrading my Graphics Card make sense?

[GornGrimm]

I finally (after a week of brainfarting) managed to get an ENB running and was on my merry way through Skyrim, when all of a sudden the FPS started to drop to sometimes 13 FPS. After restarting the game they were back to normal for a bit, but started dropping again, depending on effects (spells, flames etc) and location (outside, inside with lots of clutter)

 

I switched the display on my G510 display to show CPU and RAM usage. The CPU rarely even reaches 50% the RAM stays at 43%

 

My CPU is an Intel i-5 2500K (not overclocked), I have 8 GM RAM.

 

My graphics card is a Radeon HD 6950 2 GB  (yes, it is a bit older...) and I am confident, that it is the bottleneck.

I was considering to replace it with a Radeon R 280 or R280X (still not top notch, but a lot better than my current one in all the rankings I checked and it is in my current price range).

 

My question is: Am I correct with my assumption that the 6950 is the bottleneck in my system and would replacing it help my FPS?

 

(PS: I am not an NVIDA fan )

 

 

[Killing Joke]

I have the same card, and yes, it cannot handle a heavily modded skyrim, especially with an ENB. I don't know if you have a model with unlockable shaders and dual bios so you could get the same perf as a 6970, but you won't gain much anyway. It wasn't the best back then in 2011, even less now. With a i5 2500k you could buy basically any card at any price range, your rig won't bottleneck it. Time to upgrade.

[GornGrimm]

Thanks I am always "a bit" behind the current A-Grade hardware, I always try to buy one of the two previous generations, I am a bit stingy that way ^^

 

Now all I need is my christmas bonus and off I go to buy an R280 or R280x, hehehe

 

 

[GornGrimm]

Darn, now I bought an R280x (couldn't wait for the christmas bonus ^^) and thought "Well, just stick it in and install the new drivers."

 

But it doesn't fit, my case is to small. Now I have to buy a new tower and transplant the PC innards into the new case.

I hope I won't mess up the HDD-cables *sigh* Best to wait for the weekend. But the card is sitting there... mocking me.... teasing.... aaaargh!!!

 

At least I got three games for free from AMD (although, when should I play them, I bought the card to play Skyrim with ENBs  )

 

 

 

[Killing Joke]

Yeah, unless you already have a big case/PSU, it's a good idea to check both before buying a GPU to avoid bad surprises.

[Emberheart]

You can always buy second hand parts, even if it lasts you only a year, that's still a year you can enjoy it. They may go for little money that way.

[Rayblue]

OP: the alternative is to tweak the enbseries.ini settings by lowering down the quality a bit to either 1 or 2, use DOF effects only when making screencaps and if possible disable SSAO. Also, very large textures and/or qualities can very much affect your framerate, even follower mods with custom textures, so you have to optimize them if possible with DDSopt (unless otherwise said by the mod author).

[GornGrimm]

Thanks folks, but today I did a transplantation. I bought a nice new case, which has enough space for the card and started the job.

Too bad I had no nurse around to wipe of the sweat. I planned 2 hours, it took be 4 1/2

 

I connected all the drives like I did before, but when I started the PC, I got the message that the boot manager was missing. I was able to boot with the boot selector, though.

Drove me nuts for about an hour, then it hit me.... Didn't see the woods for all the trees (as we like to say in Germany)

Fetched my Windows DVD and ran the repair option, it repaired the boot manager and here I am again   

 

Now I am too tired to try setting up the enb again for higher quality (I use RealVision and had it already set to performance)

Well something to look forward to next, hehe

 

The carcass of my previous PC will be sitting on the living room floor until tomorrow as well. Too tired to put it away.

 

 

 

[Nergui]

To paraphrase -

 

No computer upgrade plan survives contact with the computer.

[GornGrimm]

To paraphrase -

 

No computer upgrade plan survives contact with the computer.

 

So true! All those years of being cut by sheet metal in too small cases should have taught me that