Graphics card broke

[Keeper]

Hi there,
Short story:
I fell asleep last night and left sim city running all night. I awoke this morning and my bedroom was an oven. I shut off sim city, made millions but was running at a loss now so will look at it later.
Did my shit, came back to the computer a few hours later and booted up sim city.
It played for about 2 or 3 mins and then as i was playing the screen went black, then for the first time in the 3 years i've had it, the graphics card fan went 100% and was screaming at me. It has always never gone above 30% ever in its lifetime, no matter what i stressed it with. I never made it make that noise. And my god, the airflow coming out the back of the computer, delicious.

At first i thought it was a power supply issue, as my bro just got out the shower when it happened. Maybe caused a power surge or something switching it off? I dunno, I have surge protection and again the extension has surge protection. I dont have a good brand expensive PSU, infact a budget one. I bought that just last year, as my last budget one broke lasting just 2 years.
When i considered the temperature of my room when I woke up, I then thought it could be overheated - since when it died the fan kicked on full.

regardless, I have managed to get onboard graphics sorted for the time being, even though i can still play games like TF2, and ofcourse Factorio - they are running about about 20fps. And they both feel 'laggy' almost like im playing in the past where i move or interact and it happens after, delay from input. Anyway, I cant play like this so i think I need a new graphics card, and possibly a new PSU.

My specs are/were:

CPU: AMD 8350
Mobo: Asus m5a78l usb3 (with AMD 3000 onboard graphics)
RAM: 8gb 1333mhz corsair
graphics: Nvidia gtx650ti boost 2gb
PSU: 650 or 700 w budget thing
2 fans out on top, 1 fan out on back. 1 fan in on side. obv cpu fan blowing upwards.

I was considering upgrading graphics card anyway, but didnt want to spend much as the Motherboard doesn't even suit the CPU properly, and even then the CPU isn't brilliant for gaming. And with my PSU worries, i didn't want to invest alot.
What graphics card would you guys get if you were on a budget? I looked at 1060's but £200 odd is a bit much, though i will no doubt see improvements on BF4, space kerbal program, and TF2.
I considered getting AMD cards, since i have only ever got nvidia cards.
I could get my first AMD for that money the new rx580's are out which i compared with the 1060 and feel i should stick with nvidia.
Which made me consider a new mobo, processor going intel i5 77whatever 'K'. New heatsink, new ram... Wanted all that next year but the graphics card broke this morning.
What would you guys do!? I cant play factorio even at 20ups/fps with a half a second delay lmao and cant afford full system rebuild for a few months at least like after new year

[Keeper]

Well anyways, i cant not be playing games on the weekend, so i spent the day reading and whatnot.
I purchased a 1050ti asus strix thing for £157
streching my budget slightly. Could have got a 1060 for a tenner moar = more cores but less memory.
went with my gut since my cpu and mobo are not of this age any more.
The only thing that put me off is it has the same amount of those cuda cores things as my old dead late great 650ti. going near double the speed, and i'll have double the ram. So hoping i'll get it monday Then i'll be back on with the megafactory build!

[bobingabout]

With the way things are progressing these days, the only parts of a computer you'll really need to replace due to lack of performance is the graphics card.
The other big one was memory, but that's more down to stick size and how much your computer can hold, so upgrading it simply means adding more RAM.

I tried to make an argument to a friend that because of this point, he should buy the biggest value stick possible for his motherboard (2x 16GB sticks vs 4x 8GB sticks) and he shouldn't get the best graphics card (in his case a 1080ti, get the much cheaper 1070 instead), but he wouldn't listen to me, just wanted the best of the best.

Other things that might need replacing due to wear and tear are things like fans, and hard drives, and MAYBE even an SSD depending how good the technology you have is. Graphics cards are also on this list too, as they have one of the highest failure rates of the electronic systems. Though the data storage devices, you could wait until they just die before replacing them if you have sufficient backups, but I tend to replace them every couple of years anyway.

On the note of SSDs, someone recently did tests on a member the new NVMe Samsung 960 evo range. basically constantly writing data to it. Going by when the first errors appeared on the SSD, they calculated that, assuming you write 100GB a day, it should last anywhere between 20 and 50 years. With numbers like that, SSDs will last you your whole life!

But yeah, I have a GTX 970 from when I built my PC about 2 years ago, and was recently considering an upgrade. I was a little surprised to see that after 2 years they're only on generation 10 now. (actually 19 because they went up to 9000 series, then reset to 100 series.)
in contrast the CPU is an i7 4790K or something, and the newest series is a 7000 series. (even though I'm fairly sure they've only actually increased 2 generations of intel CPU, not 3 that the numbers would indicate)

Either way, I hear the new 10 series is very powerful, I hope it serves you well.

[Kayanor]

On my laptop (!) the graphics processor is dead.
Luckily the performance of my iGPU (aka the CPU's graphics processing subunit) is good enough to play Factorio singleplayer.
Multiplayer works too, but there are sometimes problems with keeping up to the server, which look quite interesting...