I’ve got a PC that’s a few years old and has mostly been used for running Ubuntu for office duties, that I’d like to start using with Zwift if possible (yes, I know it means dual-booting with Windows)

It’s got a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 motherboard, which according to this:
http://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-EP45-DQ6-rev-10#ov

has 2x PCIe 2.0 x16 slots.

I’m going to look for a graphics card for it, preferably one that can run Zwift at a decent resolution, which Zwift’s site says it needs to be a minimum of “2GB Radeon R9 200 series or NVIDIA GTX 650”, and ideally one that gets close to the “Extreme” specs of “2GB Radeon R9 290 series or NVIDIA GTX 970”

…it’s been a long time since I had any idea about graphics card / PC specs and I know I could spend a few hours Googling myself back up to a working knowledge, but if any of you know this sort of thing really well and can make me a recommendation I’d really appreciate the advice.

Thanks!

I’m not a pc builder

however, I’m going to suggest that you don’t need to be anywhere near the extreme resolutions for zwift to be immersive – unless you’re planning to use it for some weird restricted form of e-cyclotouring (or maybe purely solo training on a TT bike) I don’t think you’ll be marvelling at the detail as it’s all about the behaviour of other riders

Borrow an old part if you can and try it out; I don’t think you’ll feel a need for upgrading

Well a 970 is a £300 GPU, that’s probably over-kill for what you want.

a 750TI is good value, it’s over the min spec and they come in any configuration you could ever need. They’re about £100 new, less s/h.

You also need to make sure your PSU is powerful enough

Thanks – fair point scaredypants, I’ve been using my wife’s Macbook so far for Zwift, which can only handle lowest graphics settings (and the fan’s on full then) so I know the graphics don’t really matter. I just thought as I’m going to upgrade the old AMD card in the PC I’d get something OK-ish and probably from eBay.

Thanks P-Jay for the recommendation, and anjs for the reminder. The PSU’s a 600W OCZ… does that sound like it’s likely to be enough?

You can probably pick up a used R9 290 for £100-£150, in fact there’s one on ebay BIN for £125. They’re new enough to be pokey but not new enough to be cool or exciting, that’s usually a good time to buy used… 600W psu should be plenty

But I’d doubt whether that’s really necessary, extreme settings can mean all sorts of madness these days- 4K HD, really high refresh rates, stuff that you won’t be able to make any use of anyway without a suitable monitor. Have you tried running it already? It’ll run on pretty much anything so the question is just exactly how good is good enough. (what you lised as minimum requirement is the recommended requirement btw!)

If you were to go on, say, Overclockers.co.uk forum you’ll find endless people with upgraditis selling last year’s hotness off for little money. It’s actually pretty difficult to tell what’s good, when you’re looking at pevious years’ kit, but OCUK is also a pretty informed site so a wanted ad that was like “need something between an R9 200 and R9 290”, you’ll probably get something.

Your motherboard is fine for any modern card, there is a chance that your CPU might be a bit under powered to fully utilise any of the more powerful cards though.

I don’t use Zwift but from what I can gather a £150-£200 card (RX-470/480 or Nvidia 1050Ti or 1060) would be more than enough.

Another point to watch is your Power Supply Unit. The older and more powerful cards often pull a lot more juice than the more recent cards and need to be plugged directly into the PSU. If you only have something like a 300Watt PSU you will likely need to upgrade that at the same time.

The newest RX 460’s and GTX 1050 (entry level gaming cards) should pull all the power they need direct from the motherboard but I don’t know if they will handle the ‘ultra’ settings in Zwift or the resolutions you might want to run it at.

EDIT – I am clearly a slow typer…

One of these should do you nicely for £110…

http://www.trustedreviews.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-review

Advantage is that it doesn’t need additional power connections, sipping what it needs from PCI express.

I think it’ll handle Zwift at 1080, but Zwift graphics seem to be limited by CPU and not necessarily GPU performance.

Thanks all – CPU is an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 at 3.0Ghz (not overclocked) and it’s got 8GB of DDR2, so I’m hoping it will cope but thought I’d check with you guys first. I know it’s not an old knackered PC but, like northwind points out, any forum-based research quickly runs into upgraditis and everyone convincing each other they need the latest and greatest.

1080p at 60Hz is likely to be the most I’ll demand from it for Zwift purposes. The newer, lower power GTX 1050 looks to be pretty adequate. Thanks!

Before you buy new, I have this sitting in my pc parts box.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FL8H49Q/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Just upgraded and this is now spare as it isn’t compatible with my new one in a crossfire configuration 🙁

I wouldnt get too fussed about the graphic on zwift, obviously it’d be nice to see blades of grass but I run it on a crappy old mac mini (the last one with a built in DVD drive).