I did a thing...

…and It was gonna be easy. Super easy! Upgrade an RX460 with an RX580. A simple swap of the GPU. No muss no fuss. Pull out the old and slap in the new. Now, we just need to plug in the 8-pin PCIe. Here it is…no, wait, hold on, this 8-pin looks like a 6-pin. There’s another plug. Oh yes, here it is…another 6-pin? Where’s the 8-pin? There’s no 8-pin! My 10 year old PSU doesn’t have an 8-pin PCIe cable? Oh, if I say it out loud it makes more sense. No problem, I’ll just go to Best Buy and pick up another PSU, it’s just $120, on top of the $250 I just spent on the RX580. No problem at all.

So, now that we have a new PSU and GPU everything is gonna be AWESOME! Benchmark time!

BSOD time!

CRAP.

Troubleshoot time! So, I didn’t clean the AMD drivers, I just re-installed em. That’s where we’re gonna start. So, we un-install the AMD drivers and make sure to clean em up good before we re-install em. Run some benchmarks. Run some stress tests. Everything looks good! That only took…all day…

What is time anyway but a measurement of…time.

Anyway, I did plan to completely upgrade the fridge (that’s what my gaming rig looks like), but I’m holding off on the CPU/MOBO/RAM til prices come down, and since the prices of GPU’s have finally returned to MSRP, that’s the first path I have chosen. Was it worth slapping in a new RX580 in an i7 920? Yes. But anything that demands a strong CPU will still suffer (DCS). However, everything else is 60 - 75 FPS (75 Hz FreeSync display) all the way!

Here’s a few pics to complement the journey:


And so it begins.


The 10 year old PSU.


The new PSU and GPU.


A PSU unboxing. Sexy!


We have the technology. We can fix it!


And this is just my GPU collection. All of these GPU’s are fully functional for anyone that’s interested.

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Nice! I did a very similar thing recently, in fact, I got the same PSU!

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