OK I downloaded Halo:Infinite recently and quality in the cutscenes drops in and out - one moment it's glorious, the next the faces of the characters look like they've suffered severe burns and then healed. So I figure I need to upgrade my GeForce 1660 super card. I'm looking at a GTX 3060 black 12Gb OC with 2 fans. Under £300 so much cheaper than buying a console (and having to buy new copies of games) and reviews seem to think it's on a par with the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Doubles my current card's 6Gb VRAM. Two questions: 1) Do I go for the 2 fan version or the 3? It's not MUCH more expensive, but obviously takes up more room in the case. Both should fit, but how likely is it the card will be building that much heat? 2) I'm confident with fitting PCI-E cards, but have never fitted a graphics card. Recommendation is to remove the old card's drivers, fit the new card, then install the other ones. Now I may be overthinking this, but without drivers for the new card, will I actually get a display? My current card is 3K capable, and trying to boot into BIOS/UEFI is impossible on my LG TV which I use as the display, since the handshake between the card and the TV is left to the driver... I have to plug in an older monitor/TV if I want to view/change the firmware... so will I have similar issues trying to see Windows to install the new drivers? Alternatively, since I have the GeForce Experience app because my current card is nVidia too, will that auto-detect the new card?
The thing to be concerned about is the power consumption. Higher end cards have direct power connections. Your power supply needs to be able to support it. Or you'll need to upgrade it too. If you give a mouse a cookie. By default the cards display low res until you install drivers. Windows will handle it.
Cooling is one of those things that it's perfectly fine to go with overkill. Sure, your machine might not need it, but assuming that your power supply can handle the demands put on it by the system, you won't have any issues with the extra fan. You can also find software to manually control your fans, so if you want to be really anal about things, you can create "cooling profiles" to optimize the cooling your system does based on the tasks you're doing with it. You know, rather than letting the system figure it out on its own. I can't recall ever bothering to delete the old drivers before I installed a new graphics card. Any hardware that's certified for use with Windows (and nVidia cards certainly are) has to rely on Windows for some of its basic functionality (I'm ludicrously oversimplifying here) so, drivers or not, you should be able to boot the machine just fine and then install the right drivers. Assuming that the current nVidia software you have installed doesn't spot the card, recognize it and auto-download the correct drivers, which it might very well do. However, assuming that you've kept your driver software up to date, you might not even have to do that. Some companies might label their driver software with a different name for each piece of hardware that they support, but in reality, everybody gets the same massive blob of software, and it just calls itself by a different name based on the hardware it identifies, customizing what it does based on the actual hardware that you have installed.
Cheers both - the existing card is hooked into the PSU by a 6-pin plug, so assume the new one should be good on the power front. As for the driver, looks like GeForce uses a bundle-type... the "GeForce Game Ready Driver" is recommended as the latest version for both my desktop (due the upgrade) and my laptop (which has a different GeForce card - GTX 1650).
Right, card ordered. Two fan version (£269) since the three fan one went up £60 overnight. Thought I'd solved the Halo issues this morning by turning off "Minimum Framerate" which drops the resolution when performance is low. This does help the cutscenes but there are other res issues in the game itself (terrain). Even on medium settings I'm only getting 25-37fps so it's definitely time for an upgrade. I was having issues with Jedi: Survivor too but turning off some of the reflection/shading options helped massively. I am considering Starfield so hopefully this will be enough, but either way it looks like it's a good card for a few years yet, as my 1660 Super was when I bought the PC.
Arrived and installed OK. Makes a helluva difference - trees look like trees rather than this shit - now you can see the moss/lichen on the trunk! Still down around 35-40fps but that's on Ultra quality not Medium.
Happy to be a nerd if it means I can swap out a graphics card in under 5 minutes. The only issue was the display didn't come up immediately - got "no signal" from the TV. Decided it might be the handshake so lugged a lower-res TV downstairs and hooked it up.... no good. Rebooted. Solved it.
