GPU installation · Upgrades · Compatibility
Graphics card installation and upgrades
Fitting a graphics card is the easy part. Whether your machine can actually run the one you are looking at is the part worth checking first, because the answer usually depends on the power supply and the case rather than the card.
Section 01 / Compatibility
Four things decide whether a card will work
Almost every graphics card upgrade that goes wrong goes wrong on one of these, and all four can be checked before any money is spent.
The power supply
The most common blocker by a wide margin. A card needs both enough total wattage and the right physical power connectors, and older supplies often have neither. Running a modern card on a supply that cannot deliver for it gives you crashes under load rather than a clean refusal, which is why it gets mistaken for a faulty card.
Physical clearance
Cards have grown considerably. Length against the drive cages, thickness across neighbouring slots, and height against the side panel all need to clear. A card that is 15mm too long does not fit at all, and that is measured beforehand rather than discovered with the case open.
The rest of the machine
A card far faster than everything around it spends its time waiting. There is a point on every machine where more graphics performance produces no visible improvement because the limit has moved elsewhere. Knowing where that point sits on your machine is what stops you overbuying.
Heat and airflow
A faster card puts significantly more heat into the same case. If the airflow was already marginal, the new card throttles and everything around it runs hotter too. This is checked as part of specifying the upgrade, and it is sometimes the reason a fan or two goes in at the same time.
Section 02 / Situations
When a graphics upgrade is the right call
And when the money is better spent on something else in the machine.
Section 03 / Machines
What can take a graphics upgrade
Section 04 / Questions
Before you book
How do I know if my power supply can handle the card I want?
Send us the model of your machine or power supply and the card you are considering, and you can have an answer quickly. It comes down to total wattage and whether the supply has the right physical connectors. This is the single most common reason a graphics upgrade fails, and it costs nothing to check first.
I installed a card myself and now the PC crashes during games.
That pattern, fine on the desktop and crashing under load, is characteristic of a power supply that cannot deliver what the card demands when it works hard. It gets returned as a faulty card constantly when the card is fine. Worth diagnosing before you send anything back.
Can you upgrade the graphics in my laptop?
No, and neither can anyone else on effectively any laptop from the last decade. It is soldered to the board. What can be done is memory, storage, and thermal service, and that last one often recovers performance the machine is already losing to throttling.
Should I buy a used card?
They can be good value, with the caveat that you cannot see how hard one has been run. If you bring a used card it gets tested under sustained load before the machine goes back to you, so if it is going to misbehave you find out here rather than a week later.
Will a better card fix my frame rate on its own?
Usually but not always. If something else in the machine is already the limit, a faster card spends its time waiting and you see very little for the money. That is why the measurement comes before the recommendation.
Book
Check it fits before you buy it.
Send the machine and the card you are considering and you can have an answer quickly. Fitted, then load tested before it goes back. One year warranty on the work.