vid card

[turt21]

Ive seen some pretty incredible videos taken with some top of line video cards and I may be in the market. I present  have an AMD 8 core 3.1Ghz machine with a HD6850 1G vid card. IS it more to my advantage to upgrade the Ram or the vid card?. Both 2012 vintage. Im leaning towards vid card. If so without breaking bank looking for suggesstions?

[Bizman]

Definitely the video card. Most games today rely on that and your CPU is still pretty good despite its age.

Assuming your monitor is a mainstream one, i.e. 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz, an Nvidia GTX 1660 should run most games at max or close. An AMD RX 580 comes close for a lower price but is starting to age. Higher priced cards would require quite a lot more from the rest of your system.

[TequilaChaser]

If you are wanting to stick with the AMD/ATI route, then I would recommend the following:

ASUS TUF Gaming X3 AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Overclocked 8G GDDR6 HDMI DisplayPort Gaming Graphics Card PCIe 4.0 (TUF 3-RX5700XT-O8G-GAMING)
https://www.newegg.com/asus-radeon-rx-5700-xt-tuf-3-rx5700xt-o8g-gaming/p/N82E16814126346?Item=N82E16814126346
currently selling at $389.99 w/ free shipping  and using the following promo code you get an additional $15.00 off ( promo code: EMCUVVY35 ) sale ends friday at 12 midnight PST

ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 580 O8G Gaming OC Edition GDDR5 DP HDMI DVI VR Ready AMD Graphics Card with RGB Lighting (ROG-STRIX-RX580-O8G-GAMING)
https://www.newegg.com/asus-radeon-rx-580-rog-strix-rx580-o8g-gaming/p/N82E16814126193        currently selling for $189.99 + Shipping

ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 590  models are soldout....

ASRock Phantom Gaming U Radeon RX 590 DirectX 12 RX 590 8G OC 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-590-rx-590-8g-oc/p/N82E16814930017
currently selling at $224.99 w/ free shipping


If I wasn't able to go wih ASUS ,I would go with Saphire instead

hope this helps give you some options and good luck

[turt21]

Assuming your monitor is a mainstream one, i.e. 1920 x 1080 @ 60 Hz, an Nvidia GTX 1660 should run most games at max or close. An AMD RX 580 comes close for a lower price but is starting to age. Higher priced cards would require quite a lot more from the rest of your system.
[/quote]

What would be taxed more on my system with a better card? And is the 8G ram sufficient?

[FLS]

The better question is what do you want to do that your current card won't do?

You mention videos which I assume you can do already but it's not clear what you want to improve.

For example if you want to make 4k videos you need a 4k monitor as well as a system that can push that many pixels at a decent frame rate.

[Bizman]

With a 12 year old computer the video card is the most important improvement. 8 GB of system RAM is good enough for most games.

As FLS said, making high quality videos is an entirely different world. There you'd need all the RAM you can afford as well as the latest greatest CPU etc.