Acer AM3970 GPU Upgrade

conam0

Hello! Newbie upgrader here. I own an Acer Aspire M3970 which has an upgraded PSU (to 600W) and an upgraded DDR3 Ram from 2 to 8GB, Storage is a 512GB SSD, an extra 500GB HDD, and the OS is at Win 10 Pro.

I was looking if my PC would be compatible with the GPU I'm about to purchase, as I will be replacing my AMD Radeon HD 6450 with a Gigabyte GT 1030 Low Profile 2GB GDDR5 or any GT 1030 out there in the market just like that's similar to the GT 1030. I'm asking for advice and/or am questioning if it is compatible with the GPU I'm purchasing, if not, can you guys recommend to me what will be compatible with my budget?

Asking for help since a GPU upgrade is all I can afford at the moment.

Thank you so much in advance!

billsey

It's quite possible the 1030 will work, but only if the system is setup for UEFI boot. By default it uses the older legacy boot with MBR disks. If you are not already booting in UEFI mode it will be a bit of a pain to convert, the M3970 was released right at the cusp of the transition from the old to the new and the EFI implementation might be a bit ... less well understood. Changing to an EFI setup pretty much requires a reinstall of the OS, so it can create the needed partitions, but once it is done you should be good to go. The 10xx series requires EFI so it can initialize the card before the OS starts loading.