Chances are, your CPU might not really cut it for supporting newer GPUs. If you just want a cheap and cheerful upgrade, you can maybe get a used 1080 on ebay or something. If you want a modern card, I'm gonna say a whole new build might be in order, but it depends on what kind of hardware you have currently.

If you can plug in 960, you can plug in 5060 as well, but 5060 is a PCIe 5.0 card, and your motherboard is not, you won't be able to fully utilize its capabilities. But you won't lose too much performance.

It depends on the rest of his hardware, because he could be bottlenecked in other areas, which seems likely given the age of the card he is using. There's no point upgrading to a big card if bottlenecks restrict you to little card performance.

From GTX 960 either upgrade to RTX 5070 or RX 9070. You need at least a 750 watt psu which means that if your psu is under 750 then you will need to buy a new psu. In this case i recomend a 1200 WATT PSU. Why you kept the same graphics card for 11 years? How it can still work and hasnt died yet?! As for cpu and motherboards all cards work on all motherboards and cpus if it is pci 3.0 motherboard or better i. But like the other has told you after you change the graphics card then in the future also change cpu ram motherboard and ssd.

if you need to upgrade the power supply please lord use the new cables w/ the new box

引用自 LordCapitan32：

Hi,
I'm quite inexperienced regarding upgrading. I have been looking at an RTX 3060 but also have just seen an RTX 5060 for £269 which seems like a good deal to me.

1) is it just a straight swap out of cards or am I likely to need to upgrade other components too?
2) I don't do high-end gaming but I'm looking for something which will have more power- I'm noticing my PC isn't getting min spec anymore.

Thanks in advance.

The rest of your hardware specs would be useful info, and get you better advice. And whether your system is prebuilt or not. The concern might be your PSU might be on the low end, and the 5060 likely uses quite a bit more power than your 960 (the 3060 too)


If you've shopped around and that's a good price for a 5060 then sure, it's a good price. And regardless of how old your system is you will see a large performance increase over a GeForce 960 in any game that's not severely CPU limited. Granted if your system is ten years old, putting a 5060 in it won't get you the same performance as I would get pairing a 5060 with my i7 12700k. But I would argue the point of upgrades is to improve performance. Full stop. Every hardware enthusiasts concerns about bottlenecks or their made up ideas of optimal hardware configurations often misses the point, especially when it's clear we're not in a hardware enthusiast situation. My advice to them would be, "Don't let perfection be the enemy of good."

I would also argue that if the will-it-blend details check out that you can put a 5060 in your current system, and build a new system down the road any time in the next several years and move the 5060 to that. You'll have the first part of a new system and it won't matter that the 5060 wasn't in the perfect system for a while. I can tell you with 100% certainty the 5060 won't care or complain as much as hardware enthusiasts will.

In the scenario where you have a sufficient PSU, room in your case, and there's no other hangups that physically prevent the card from working. Yeah, you take the old card out, put the new card in. Turn the system on. Install the newest Nvidia drivers and you'll be fine. The GeForce drivers have a clean install option, use that.

And full disclosure, I'm a hardware enthusiast too. But, but the things I like to do for myself aren't the only viable options and I don't think it's wrong to set my personal opinions aside and acknowledge you might have different goals for your PC than I would have for mine. So my advice, based on the info provided, I'm accommodating the type of user you are and my opinions about peak performance isn't applicable.

I would put a little effort into make sure your PSU is up to snuff. It might also be worth looking for other people who've already done something similar with similar hardware to see if they ran into any additional gotchas. I would do that because a lot of people responding, including myself, probably haven't put new GPU's in modern systems. Although the subject does come up periodically on some hardware sites and they do the tests with extreme hardware pairings and the results are usually better than people without benchmark data are willing to admit.

TL:DR; it's a messy subject because people have strong opinions about what's good and right and lose sight of what's possible and what works. So I wrote a wall of text to try and cover the bases what I would do if I was doing that upgrade. And why I'm not shooting the idea down automatically. There is a limit where even me with a much more permissive/flexible view would say it might not get the results you're hoping for. But we need more details for that judgement.

A 3060 is plenty fine to play even newer games, at 1080p. You won't need a beefy PSU to use it either.

引用自 SHREDDER：

From GTX 960 either upgrade to RTX 5070 or RX 9070. You need at least a 750 watt psu which means that if your psu is under 750 then you will need to buy a new psu. In this case i recomend a 1200 WATT PSU

Why would you recommend a 1200W PSU? Even 5090 doesn't need more than 1000W.

So if your PC is all GTX 960 old then that's Haswell era plus you had a low end GPU so I'll guess entry CPU so i5 4460 or something?

New PC time if you want anything half decent to play on, any new GPU even a entry 5060 is going to be way beyond the rest of the system.

You are noticing even min settings is struggling, it will be struggling in the CPU department also just as much as the GPU on a modern title.

But without posting full specs it's all speculation.

as someone with a 2015 haswell 3. i have a nvidia 4060 rtx at 1440p. and works great. what resolution are you gonna use? 1080p? its kinda like puting a v8 in a yugo.

What do you currently have for:

CPU
Motherboard
RAM
OS (Win10 or 11; if Linux which distro and build?)
PSU (Power Supply)

Thank you all. You've given me lots to consider and I will need to further research.
It was built by a friend of mine back in 2015.
Thanks again.

I kept my gtx 970 for about nine years, there's nothing weird about using a card for a long time.

Its what I plan to do with my splurge on an amd card I plan to take good care of.

Also it'll save me thousands of dollars, which is likely why I didn't upgrade that often

But yeah whatever cpu and whatnot you have right now is relevant. You don't want to incorporate any bottleneck

In my opinion, get a 16 GB graphic card.(8 GB and 12 GB ones are getting outdated)
I have a RTX 3060TI and it's giving me trouble in newer games that easily use more than 8 GB VRAM.

And get the one that is suitable for your PSU.

it's quite a big jump from 960 to 50 series
9xx & 10xx are giga texel shader gpu's while 50xx are newest of ray tracing texel gpu's. Even early rtx have dlss and other new features that are absent in older gtx models

normally, I avoid words like bottleneck, but in this case even if you manage to do it, it will be bottleneck on your cpu / motherboard