I don't do a lot on my computer anymore and on the odd change that actually play a game on it it's usually and older game so there's not problem. However there is one part of the game Dieing Light that I can't play because the game becomes too choppy, I quit playing it years ago for that reason but it's one game I was hoping to finish. I do sometimes play Ark, it plays fine for the post part but it takes a long while to load the map. I don't do near as much with computers as I use to and I haven't really touched hardware or built a computer in years so I no longer even know what most of the numbers and letters for the specs even mean, and I'm looking for cheap simple solution to speeding this thing up. Here's a small rundown of my hardware, can I increas the memory and if I can what kind of memory do I need to buy? I'm sure they'll have to dig it out of a junk yard.

me@mint-desktop ~ $ inxi
CPU~Quad core AMD A10-6700 APU with Radeon HD Graphics (-MCP-) speed/max~1800/3700 MHz Kernel~4.10.0-38-generic x86_64 Up~0 min Mem~957.8/7926.5MB HDD~2240.5GB(21.3% used) Procs~237 Client~Shell inxi~2.2.35

CAN you increase yoru memory? Well, that chip supports more memory, but how many slots do you have on your board? You'd probably find that you'd have more success with a new graphics card for games than an increase in ram beyond 8GB. The HD 8670D that's integrated into that is an OK IGP for it's level, but even a cheap RX 460/RX 470 that can be had on ebay for <$100 would be on the order of 10x more powerful.

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I'd always buy a PCIe video card for a desktop machine rather than use integrated graphics. I prefer graphics have it's own dedicated RAM and processor, rather than stealing resources from main memory and processor.

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Thanks. This is mostly a quick fix so I can play Ark with my daughter. But I'm also looking into moving to a laptop in the future to make my life a little more mobile. I do a little coding on Linux and those two games are the highest graphics games that I'm likely to mess with. Do you have any suggestions on a good laptop that's got enough juice for those two games and will not have a problem handling Linux? Do you know of any that are made to easily and quickly slide the HDDs/SSDs in and out? Thanks again.

If it was me, I'd look for something with a 2000 or 3000 series Ryzen 5. Vega 8 IGP is going to be quite sufficient for low end gaming, and the Ryzen processors, while nowhere near as powerful (in mobile) as their Intel counterparts, were still quite good. The 2000 series was known for having quite poor battery life, but the 3000 did improve (although not as drastic as the 4000 series) this some. However, your desire to have easily slide the drives in and out would make that you'd have to be buying quite a bit older than that machines, as that started to disappear around the time of the Sandy Bridge chips, and was completely gone (in any major OEM laptops) by the time of Broadwell processors.

Some machines I've PERSONALLY owned that I'd be looking at are:
Lenovo Thinkpad A485. 2000 series Ryzen, dual batteries so you can get a big external 9-cell to overcome the battery issues of the 2000 series. w/ Ryzen 5, Vega 8, performance is really good. Thinkpad keyboard (I can't state how big a plus this is in laptops), decent touchpad. GREAT linux compatibility as long as it's got the latest BIOS updates (had tons of issues with early BIOS).

Lenovo Thinkpad T495. The successor to the A485. Great laptop, little smaller, lighter, more powerful. Single internal only battery. Single DIMM + soldered ram. But great performance with the 3000 series Ryzen + Vega IGP. Better battery life than the A485, offset by the fact that you can't upgrade the battery. Still, great laptop overall.

Dell Inspiron 5485 2-in-1. Mostly here for it's price. I picked mine up about a year ago for $300. With a Ryzen 5, 8GB ram, and a 256 NVMe SSD, 14" FHD LCD touchscreen. I would expect it's only gotten more affordable if you can find it. Fans are annoying in that they spin up and immediately spin down, so you're just hearing this whine every couple seconds. But...the price...

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I tried another command as I was pretty sure I had put a video card in this computer some years ago.

me@mint-desktop ~ $ inxi -G
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GK107 [GeForce GT 640]
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau)

Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GT 640/PCIe/SSE2
GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.130

I actually have a Ryzen and a whole new graphics card that's been sitting in my closet for a while as I was planning on building a whole new computer, but since I'm rethinking my life and I think I need to be able to move around a little quicker if needs be is what one thing that put a hold on me finishing that computer as I think I might need a laptop instead. So in the meantime I was looking for a cheaper solution to keep this desktop going a little longer for I use it for. Is this the video card you were mentioning earlier?

XFX AMD Radeon RX 460 4GB GDDR5 DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort PCI-Express Video Card (RX-460P4SFG5), I found it I Amazon for about $100

GT640 was never a high end card, and at this point it is quite old.

If you're wanting to fix the stuttering in parts of the games, that's going to require an upgrade to the GT640. There's nothing else you can really do unless the graphics level on the game can be turned down, or you're willing to turn down the resolution. It's simply that the GT640 at this point has a hard time keeping up.

If you want to deal more with how long the maps to load, then you're looking at wanting to upgrade to an SSD to replace the HDD. Given the size of your HDD, you'd probably need to keep the HDD as probably to keep some partitions mounted on it, but get an SSD that the data can be kept on to DRASTICALLY reduce the load times.

That's what my opinion would be based on what you've told us...

Yes, one of those cards would be a huge upgrade (approximately around triple to quadruple the performance) over the GT640, and they're very linux-friendly being early Polaris parts, no proprietary drivers required.

To add to Timothy Miller's points:

- Make sure your computer's power supply will handle the newer card - power requirements for even 'mid-range' graphics cards have gone insane in the last few years.

- This may be a stupid question, but are you actually using the GT 640 and not the IGP?

- An SSD may or may not help a specific game, and I wish I could give you more than anecdotal evidence here. Essentially 'load times' and the like are not usually just disk-bound, but are usually more complex in nature. An SSD certainly won't hurt anything, but it isn't a magic bullet. Two examples: moving Total War from mechanical drive, to SSHD, to 10k RPM RAID0, to SATA SSD, to PCIe SSD (all in that's at least an order of magnitude performance increase over time) had no impact on scenario load times; moving Morrowind from the same improved performance to the point that loading screens are unreadably fast. From watching htop while running various games, I think the 'culprit' is that some games employ compression in their savegames, so you're waiting on the CPU for load as well.

I agree that the biggest/best upgrade here would be replacing the GPU with something faster, either new or used. Upgrading memory would be secondary - you should be able to do a 'drop in' to 16GB (replacing what you have entirely), but that may cost more than 'adding on' additional DIMMs - you'd have to open the machine up and see how many DIMM slots it has. It will very likely use DDR3 UDIMMs (I say 'very likely' because I don't remember if there are any desktop APU boards that took SODIMMs - that would still be DDR3 however; DDR4 didn't come to A10 until the 9000 series).

I actually have no idea which one it's using. I assumed it was using the stand alone card because I remember Clicking one Menu on my mint system and then Administration and then Driver Manager and selecting Nnvidia proprietery back when I first put that card in, be the games I play don't list which card they're actually playing off of so I don't know. So I just broke down and put in that GPU that I was intending on using on a new desktop that I was going to build and now this is what I'm getting. Not that I still have no idea which card the games are playing on neither if I'm using the right driver.

garrett@mint-desktop ~ $ inxi -G
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti]
Display Server: X.Org 1.18.4 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau)
Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 384.130


My driver manager says it's using driver nvidia-384, nvidia-384.130-0ubuntu0.16.04.2

Thanks everyone.

As far as figuring out 'whats in use' - what is the monitor physically connected to? Wherever its connected is what is in-use.

As far as the driver for the 1050 - 384 will work, but it's a bit dated (I think they're up to like 440 or 450 now, if your distro has that in its repos; check the release notes to see if its worth upgrading for whatever you're needing from the card).

The latest nvidia driver that I know of for that card is 455.45. An update would certainly be helpful.

The monitor is connected to the stand alone card. There no update listed in my Mint Cinnamon GUI driver manager and I little to no experience installing drivers in Linux. I ran `sudo apt-cache search nvidia` and it returned a giant list. I then piped that into grep for 455 & 455.45 and both result in no result. `sudo apt-cache search nvidia | grep 455` ---

For older Nvidia cards, going to newer drivers often isn't NECESSARILY a good idea if it's not needed to work with a newer kernel or such anyway. There's been lots of tests (mind you, this is Windows but I'm willing to bet it applies for Linux also) that shows that Nvidia's performance with their drivers actually starts DROPPING after about 2-3 years due to all of Nvidia's optimizations for the latest and greatest and they completely stop optimizing for the older cards.

I don't know how to tell which series but something like this?


https://www.newegg.com/p/2WC-000N-00B52?item=9SIA4P0BW17787&source=region&nm_mc=knc-googlemkp-pc&cm_mmc=knc-googlemkp-pc-_-pla-adorama-_-notebooks-_-9SIA4P0BW17787&gclid=CjwKCAiAt9z-BRBCEiwA_bWv-PoN9O5y9-kXBm24kp8EtDvZ5cy7eyJ7k8cCTJ5Xo4tW7ZGJwnxJLhoCwPAQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds