1 Solution
RE: This is all very interesting and helpful.
Thanks - if that is the case then please mark the like and/or helpful button, points make prizes and elstaci is catching me up! 
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Only joking.
RE: I was initially under the impression that if the CPU is AMD then the graphics card must also be AMD.
No, unfortunately because AMD dropped support for Pre-GCN Drivers and the installer does not like it if it finds pre-GCN GPU on your system, AMD actually drive their loyal AMD users with older AMD "Integrated GPU on Motherboard" or older AMD APU (a CPU with pre-GCN iGPU on the CPU die) to the Nvidia competition.
RE: I wasn't aware of the cross functionality.
Mixing AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU is very definitely possible.
If you look now at high end PC builds, many people are switching from Intel CPU to AMD latest Ryzen or Threadripper or EPYC CPU's as AMD has done an absolutely fantastic and revolutionary job with those new CPU's. I would love to own one. It would really help me if I had more CPU horsepower.
They may also use high end AMD GPU such as previous R9 FuryX/Nano or if they can get hold of one at reasonable price an RX Vega 64 Liquid. However many high end builds now include AMD CPU and Nvidia GTX1080 / GTX1080TI GPU's. Unfortunately AMD still needs to do some work to improve VEGA 64 cards performance and reduce power consumption so that the aftermarket coolers can be reduced in size and the aftermarket Vega 64 cards can be made more cheaply. Also Nvidia GTX1080Ti cards offer 11 GB memory versus 8GB of HBM on Vega 64.
RE: So would I be able to successfully use either Gigabyte GeForce GT 710 GV D3-2GL Low Profile Graphics Card - 2 GB DDR3 - 64-bit - 954 MHz
or PNY - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card - Black
Yes they should be fine provided you check your power supply can handle it.
RE: Or if you have recommendations for other cheap graphic cards with at least 2gb dedicated vRAM.
This is an AMD forum and I should be recommending AMD GPU on here. If I start recommending Nvidia cards on this forum I can feel the angry response and downvotes/dislikes coming my way already ....
Since in your specific situation it is very likely that a modern AMD GCN card will not work because of the AMD installer and I think you are safer with an Nvidia card, here goes.
I do not know what your budget is or what games / applications you want to run.
You should try to get hold of a GPU with as much VRAM as possible, 3GB used to be minimum to cover most DX11 games at reasonable graphics settings.
You will likely be surprised at how much gaming performance you will get if you add a good GPU to your old PC.
Here is a comparison of your PC processor to my HP Envy with its Intel Extreme i7-920xm laptop processor.
Intel Core i7 920XM vs AMD Phenom II X4 840T
The single core performance is similar.
AMD GPU Drivers with DX11 games run mostly on the primary CPU core.
To give you some idea of what performance to expect with an AMD card.
If I add a Sapphire R9 280x Tri-X, Vapor-X OC 3GB GPU to that laptop overs a low bandwidth (and performance choking) PCIe2.0x1 interface running two year old AMD Crimson Legacy Driver (because my Laptop has a non GCN Discrete ATI Mobility HD5850).
I can run a game like Crysys 3 on Very High settings (i.e. maxed out) at 45-60 FPS range. It is absolutely playable.
In your case you have a decent PCIe2.0x16 interface for your GPU. That should increase the Crysis 3 FPS perfomance by ~ 15%.
So on your system I would estimate about 52-70 FPS on that game.
A similar hardware spec Nvidia card running a DX11 game would perform better because Nvidia have a DX11 driver which makes good use of additional CPU cores. It spreads the driver workload over multiple cores. Therefore you get better performance.
With AMD card on DX12 or Vulkan games the DX12 and Vulkan driver from AMD is multithreaded and does make good use of all available CPU cores.
That is mostly why AMD cards on DX12 or Vulkan see a performance boost versus running the same game on DX11.
Majority of games are DX11. There are very yfew DX12 or Vulkan titles available. I know because I have most of those games.
I will look at what cards Nvidia have later and I will give you my recommendation in an additional response.
Bye.
