Um… was there a 730 ti? Did you mean 750 ti?
Anyway, the 750 ti should be a big step up from the 730. Did you buy it used? Perhaps it is overheating and thermal throttling. You can check GPU temps using HWmonitor. Looks like 95 degrees celcius is the max temp for a 750 ti.
Other things can limit your graphics performance as well. People usually talk about CPU’s being a bottleneck, but stuff has to be loaded from hardrives, passed through RAM, and passed through the PCIe bus. Of course, these things usually aren’t an issue that people need to concern themselves with, but that’s not always the case when dealing with older hardware and/or “low” end hardware.
Now, the 750 ti is supposed to be significantly faster than a gt 730. So, if you’re not getting noticeably better performance, you need to figure out why. Because it’s quite possible that whatever is limiting the 750 ti’s performance will also limit whatever you replace it with. Unfortunately, investigating what might be the problem starts getting kind of technical. I will try to share what I can though.
- First, I couldn’t find hard numbers, but old forum posts are saying that the 750 ti is incapable of saturating PCIe express 2.0, which is what your motherboard has. So, I doubt that’s the issue.
- I’m speculating here, but I doubt that a 4770 would be a limiting factor for that card. But I’m basing that off of GPU and CPU being similar in age and price range, and not any hard numbers. Of course, the fact that your CPU utilization isn’t going over 20% would also suggest that your CPU isn’t the issue.
- 16GB of DDR3 RAM should also be enough. And I doubt that your hard drive is an issue.
- As mentioned before, overheating can cause throttling. This is a common problem, and easy to check. So, you should definitely check this.
- Finally, your PSU might be an issue. Now, I don’t have the technical expertise to tell you what to look for. All, I know is that how a PSU divides up the juice it’s delivering can potentially cause problems, especially when the PSU is barely meeting recommended specs. There’s also the possibility that your PSU might be failing (or a cheap piece of ship that never delivered clean, in-spec power), and delivering bad power, which can impact stability and performance. So, how do you investigate if your PSU is the culprit? Well, if you have another old machine, you can try swapping PSU’s out to see. Unfortunately, because we’re dealing with a tier one manufacturer, the PSU might not fit into the case, and the motherboard might even have a proprietary power connector that’s not found on 99.9% of power supplies. If you’re handy with a multimeter, you can check to make sure that power coming across each rail is good. Or, you can buy a PSU tester for 16 bucks, which will quickly test everything and will beep if there are any problems (do note that if the PSU has a proprietary connector, it might be incompatible with testers). Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what type of wattage should be coming across each rail, and how that impact performance or stability if it is wrong. So, you’d have to try to look up guides for that. All I can say is that because 300 watts is the minimum recommend wattage for the card, because it’s older, and because we’re dealing with a tier one manufacturer that likes to cheap out on things that don’t get put on the spec sheet to drive sales, I would not assume it’s good to go just because it says 300w on the side.
Anyway, you can try posting on a tech website’s forums, like Tom’s hardware, but the quality of help can vary. Don’t get me wrong, guys will generally try to be helpful, but this is an issue that is probably more likely to be (correctly) answered by a tech professional, than a tech enthusiast.
And, in case it wasn’t clear, tier one manufactures suck. They do things like give you cheap ass power supplies that are oddly shaped, use proprietary connectors so that you have to buy their replacements, and that just barely run the hardware they put in the machine -which severely restricts your options for upgrades.
Paul’s Hardware has PC build tutorials, and he’s supposed to be releasing an updated 4 part series on building a computer within the next couple of weeks. So, you might want to check his channel out if you’re interesting in building your own computer.
There’s also the matter of when is a good time to buy a graphics card. Prices have been dropping rapidly, but some are speculating that pent up demand could curb them from dropping further. And, if crypto prices rally, that could cause price trends to reverse. Oh, and the speculated release of new generation cards this year might also benefit prices of previous gen hardware. So… wut do? Meh, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get a new graphics card for so long, I seriously doubt I’ll make it out of april without buying one. I currently have a price thresholds in mind for a couple of cards, and if prices reach that point, I’m going to pull the trigger. And, if not, well I might just buy a card anyway (well, assuming prices don’t get ridiculous again).
But like I said, before you even think about buying a new card, you should figure out what is limiting performance of the one you have.