Q: I don't really understand alot about gaming hardware but i play games on my pc and mine is slow so i want to upgrade it and i wanted to buy an ati hd 4850 GPU but only if it speeds up my games without buying another GB of ram 1 Will an ATI 4850 make my PC ALOT faster without buying a GB of RAM? 2 Will just another GB of ram make my games FASTER? 3 How much faster will it go if i buy the 4850 AND a GB of Ram MY specs Intel Core 2 quad CPU 1GB DDR2 RAM ATI radeon X1650 series 450W PSU 320 GB HDD ASUS p5k motherboard Windows Xp pro SP2
A: I can help, since these other answers aren't that accurate. 1.A graphics card is only used to process 3D graphics, not 2D. It will make games and 3D graphics of any type perform much better than integrated graphics. Integrated graphics is build into the circuit board, and shares your RAM and CPU for processing data. Totaly slows you down. the ATI 4850 will have a GPU, graphics processor unit. And it's own memory. Although it will still share your systems memory, it will make your gaming 1000 times faster. Even without buying a GB of ram, your games will totaly improve, and give you amazing frames per second. In larger games however, it might get choppy after awhile of playing, as I explain further in answer 2. 2. An increase in RAM will NOT make your games faster. Unless it is a different speed than what you are running now, you will notice not even 1fps difference in performance. The only time ram helps is when you are running low on memory and it uses your pagefile, which is your hard drive as extra storage. Then you notice a slow down when it's choppy. But frames per second are still the same due to the graphics card, NOT RAM. Sorry, that other answer of 5-15fps increase is totaly wrong. 3. If you get both for gaming, you are looking at a great gaming machine. The X1650 is a slower card, on a nice computer. You should upgrade your PSU for the ATI 4850 also. The ram will help with multi tasking as well as long term gaming. The graphics card will give you the power for smooth fast graphics. If you don't get the ram, just restart your PC more often or turn off more processes to free up more memory.