PC gaming has certainly took since the early days of eSports and with many people starting to get into the game the most important question is what kind of gaming PC do you need. Most would opt to buy a new rig and that’s an entirely different story than what we want to discuss today. Today we’ll be putting the spotlight on those aging PCs that might still have enough left in them to do some modern gaming. We’ll be putting together a piece here aimed squarely at those people who have old Core 2 Duo’s or Athlon XPs who want to know if they can still play Battlefield 3, Borderlands 2, Civilization V, etc. just by purchasing a new graphics card. Sit back, and let’s make this extremely showy!
Test Setup
We’re going to be testing two systems for this test and see if a graphics card upgrade is enough to bring back some juice in a rig that’s past its prime.  Our system is an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2Ghz processor on an MSI G31TM-P31 equipped 4GB (2x2GB) Kingston DDR2-800 ValueRAM and a Kingston SSDNow V300 SSD and of course, powering our system will be our graphics card will be two NVIDIA graphics cards: 1) a Sparkle GeForce 9600GT 1GB and 2) our upgrade card, a Palit Jetstream GTX 660 Ti 2GB.
We’ve chosen NVIDIA cards for their great balance of performance, price and power consumption. Both brands listed are local favourites when it comes to pricing as they both offer some of the lowest priced variants in the market making them fit the bill as potential component choices for gamers who are on a budget.
A brief look back to 2008 and I picture myself 2 months fresh my new job, Windows 7 is still hot and SSD is in its infancy in the enthusiast market. Hot games were Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, Mass Effect and such and those still stuck in the DotA hype were still enjoying gaming on their NVIDIA nForce NF6100 IGPs.
![[OCWORKBENCH] ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU Mini SLI Review](https://www.back2gaming.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/17di3reqc2aamnz6g1-75x75.jpg "[Ocworkbench] Asus Gtx 670 Directcu Mini Sli Review 21")
This is great.. specially for those who have limited budgets, no need to buy a new system unit. Thanks for this!
This is so true. I was once in the same situation. First I have a crappy system and a crappy gfx card. At that time, my gaming experience suck. I can’t play the latest games and all of the games I have I played it on low settings to achieve tolerable frame rates. Then after upgrading just my old gfx card to a higher, more latest, mid end gaming gfx card, it gave me a hunch of what “the way its meant to played” experience is. Thanks graphics card. giyomi giyomi :3