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EDITED:

I recently upgraded the screen of my computer, which was an HP 2229h from about 10 years ago, to a much more recent and better screen: an AOC U32E2N (https://eu.aoc.com/en/products/monitors/u32e2n).

This new monitor can operate at a much higher resolution. However, I have noticed that the monitor refresh rate (connected with DisplayPort) is at 29Hz instead of the 60Hz that were set with the old monitor.

This monitor can handle 60Hz so the monitor is not the problem. The cable can too, I bought it on purpose. Hence, I have two questions:

  1. could my the graphic card (NVIDIA GTX 570) be the limiting factor in the refresh rate?
  2. if not, would it be the CPU or the motherboard?

I have a quite old motherboard and a quite old graphic card. Both, however, did the job quite well until yesterday. I am not a heavy gamer anymore so I don't need an ultracapable hardware graphics-wise. I make music on my PC though and that requires a lot of CPU.

Which one would you update first, why, and with what if have any suggestions?

Here are my specs:

Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

Screen resolution: 3840 x 2160

Motherboard : ASUS P8H67

Processor: Intel i5-2550K, 4 x 3.40GHz

RAM : 8 GB DDR3

Operating system : Windows 10 (x64)

According to PC-specs: "Released on 29 Dec 2010, the Asus P8H67 is now over 10 years old, which means it is extremely out of date and is based on very aged technologies."

Also my graphic card turned 10 this year. Hence, I would like to know which one in your expertise is the main culprit of slowing everything down with the resolution increase. I suspect the motherboard, but I'm no IT engineer.

Also, before someone brings it up: yes, I am going to expand that RAM to 16GB of a newer kind than DDR3 :)

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  • You cannot expand that RAM to something newer than DDR3 without changing the motherboard (and CPU). You can put up to 32 GB of DDR3 in that board though.
    – Romen
    Commented Sep 21, 2021 at 16:34
  • What do you mean by "it really took a huge toll", what specifically changed about the system? How can you confirm the system is performing slowly with just changing the screen? (This is quite hard to believe) FYI: You can always use a 4K screen in 1920x1080 resolution with essentially no down-side. (Except you're not using what you paid for).
    – Romen
    Commented Sep 21, 2021 at 16:37
  • I have edited my post for better understanding. In the last days I realized that maybe it's just the refresh rate who's gone down.
    – schmat_90
    Commented Sep 23, 2021 at 14:13

1 Answer 1

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could my the graphic card (NVIDIA GTX 570) be the limiting factor in the refresh rate?

It is absolutely this.

The GTX 570 is too old to have a DisplayPort that can handle 3840x2160 at 60hz.

Update your GPU, the CPU can survive a while longer.

You can easily tell if your CPU is the limiting factor by looking at the CPU usage in Task Manager. If the whole CPU or a single core is at 100% while performing a task, a faster CPU would do better. If not, then more information is needed to determine what is slowing things down.

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