Today, I am going to explain you how to change the graphic card of you computer. It so easy that I did not make any video to show the process. I think that with a couple os photos is enough.
Why are you changing the graphic card?
The old graphic card that I had is a GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB memory, that is good enough for me in the past, but currently is very outdated. In addition to that, now I am thinking about make streaming and I need a powerful graphic card that supports playing + streaming at the same time.
What card have you choose?
I made a complete market search but after looking a lot, I have decided to buy an RTX 3060 Ti, do you want to know why?
- I want an Nvidia card, because I always use Nvidia cards and I love the performance and software of this brand of graphic cards.
- This model has the best relationship between price and power, the performance is almost the same than RTX 3070 and it costs about 100 – 200 € less.
- Now, with the crazy price of graphic cards this model has a “reasonable” price.
Is this a good moment to change the graphic card?
It depends, nobody knows what is going on the future, but I think than in a mid term, the graphic card prices will be lower than now. Here in Spain we can see some stock on the online retailers but is not enough to make the prices lower because the demand is huge due to the former restrictions. So, if you can wait, my advice is to wait a little more. On the last weeks the price of RTX 3060 Ti has been decreased, but I think that there is a lot of speculation yet.
How to change the graphic card?
This is a very easy task, first of all unscrew the screws that holds the graphic card to the computer chasis, on the photo below you can see them inside a red circle.
After that, you must extract the old graphic card by pushing the lever that is near the PCI Express bus.
Finally put the new graaphic card on the PCI Express bus and screw the graphic card to the chasis like the old card was.
Other things to take on consideration
- The wattage of the power supply, in my case I has a 600 W power supply but this graphic card needs at least a 650 W one, I think that this was a bullshit, but it is true. I need to change the power supply and I will put a 750 W one.
- Size of the computer box, as you can see this graphic card is giant, so you need an standard ATX computer box to fit the graphic card inside, there are another RTX 3060 Ti models more little, but this the one that I can find in Spain 😛
- Power supply connectors, in this model you need one with 8 pins and another one with 6 pins, so you need to hace them free on you power supply or you need to buy an adaptor.
- Before touching anything inside the computer box, unplug the power supply and wait some minutes before doing anyhing. Be careful with static electricty too, because you can damage the computer components.
