Shyrtandros wrote:I currently have the PNY GT 240 which is like the off-brand of an Nvidia? I don't really know ANYTHING about GFX Cards so here are the stats I found.. Since I don't really know anything about the cards I just kinda went "Hmm on sale.. heard it's a decent brand.. suure why not."
Nvidia makes the chips, other people (in this case PNY, but lots of companies do it) take the chips, assemble a full card (chips, memory, VRMs, etc) and sell the finished product. So it's a Nvidia GPU, manufactured by PNY, basically. Some companies make custom coolers and stuff to try and differentiate themselves, but it's the same thing underneath all that.
First thing to do, really, is find out what's limiting your performance. You have a slow processor, a slow graphics card, and "only" 4G of RAM (which is generally enough). The easiest way to do this is to run a hardware monitor (
this or
this) while running the game. Keep an eye on load. Generally either a couple of your CPU cores will be pegged at 100%, with the Graphics Core at somewhat lower percentage, or the graphics card will be pegged at 100%, with the CPU cores lower. Whichever is sitting at 100% is your limiting factor. For example: When I run Skyrim, my graphics card sits at 99% load, and my CPU hovers around 50%. Therefore, getting a faster CPU won't improve performance, since the graphics card is the limiting factor. This varies from game to game, too, so try it with all the ones you care about.
If your graphics card is the limit, you have several options. You can turn down video settings (resolution, detail levels) and see if that makes the situation better, but you'll obviously have less pretty graphics. Unfortunately, the problem with higher-powered video card is that they use a LOT of power. You've only got a 300W power supply, which limits your options. You may be able to run a Geforce 550Ti or a Radeon 6770 (or 5770, they are two names for the same card). These cards require somewhere around 100-125W on their own. A good quality 300W power supply should be sufficient for a 95W CPU + one of these cards, but a lot of OEM computers don't have high-quality power supplies, unfortunately. A radeon 6570 or 6670 (no geforce equivalent) should work; but they won't be much faster than the 240 (~10-15% for the 6570, ~30% faster for the 6670. A Geforce 550Ti is about twice as fast as the 6670).
As far as the CPU goes, you have a lower-power (in the literal "electricity" sense, it uses 65W rather than the "standard" 95W for quad-cores, but it manages that by running slower) version of a three-generation old CPU, it's really not fast. More modern Phenoms have better performance at the same clock speed (they added a bunch of L3 cache, which helped a LOT), and have much higher clockspeeds (3.2GHz or higher). Dropping one of them in MAY work, if you can find a BIOS upgrade that supports them. Just googling around, it looks like the motherboard in your computer doesn't support Phenom IIs without a newer BIOS, so you might be forced to get a new motherboard (and probably new memory, as well) in order to get a faster CPU. The original Phenoms are no longer available in retail, though you might find second-hand ones around. They aren't very good processors, but at least they'll be clocked higher.
Hope this is helpful, rather than confusing. I tend to ramble a bit.
