Frame rate drops when opening applications.

• This might be because your i7 is showing its age. Not entirely your gfx (or GPU) card. I suggest you clean your case and fans for dust and try cleaning the old thermal paste on the CPU as well.

For compatibility with your Power Supply and PCI-E slot.

• There's not much to worry about here. You are rocking a GTX 980 so I would assume that your current PC has a Power Supply of at least 450 watts. Now, you want an Intel Arc A310. Don't do that. I mean, you can but I suggest you don't do so for the simple reason that you are replacing a 4 GB card with another 4 GB card. Also the PCI-E slot will be just fine. My concern would shift to the PC case that you currently use (the new GPU card might be too big for it).

Compatible with Linux, Firefox, and Wayland, with lots of hardware codecs. Intel ARC?

• You can go with Arc B580 (12 GB) if you want to go with the Intel route or
• AMD RX 9060 XT (16 GB).
• Both are compatible with Linux and mostly share the same dimensions with your GTX 980.
• Stay away from Nvidia cards for Linux compatibility.

How do you learn all this stuff?

• Let's just say I had my fair share of making a smoke machine with my PC.
• Try looking up videos on PC building guide. They usually explain things like compatibility, what do these numbers mean, etc.

Why go nuts with Arc B580 or RX 9060 XT?

• Why not? These are fairly recent GPUs and should handle most of your needs daily driver-wise or gaming-wise. I wouldn't worry much about your processor it will still do its job. And having a much bigger VRAM with your GPU is always always a priority over lanes or interfaces (entirely different issue - story for another time) or even your CPU.

PCPartPicker is great for this. It will do a sanity check on your existing parts and show only compatible GPUs.

Step 1. Create 2 reddit accounts

Step 2. Post the question in the builds sub

Step 3. Answer it yourself with whatever you think is best. Make sure you're very confident it's the best solution and nobody could come up with a better one

Step 4. Rejoice at the flock of tryhards that will down vote your reply to hell while fighting each other for the actual best answer

Step 5. Choose whichever comment wins.

Edit: but to answer your question: The stuttering while opening applications isn't from that GPU. It can game mostly fine at 1080p medium to low.

Either you need more RAM (16gb minimum these days) or your CPU is showing its age first, which I'm gonna guess is an Intel i5 4000 series or maybe 7000 series.

Post the rest of the specs and we can all fight each other for the best answer here.

If you can identify the specific model of your graphics card and motherboard as accurately as possible that'll help. I'd guess 900 series has a wide variation in power use and performance.

In linux you'd be able to go into shell and run lspci |grep -i vga or lspci |grep -i nvidia

In this case lspci is a command to " list pci devices" On it's own that might give you a long list of sound, usb, network etc devices, so we "pipe" the output using '|' into the grep command. grep will filter by text pattern. the '-i' makes it case insensitive search and 'vga' or 'invidia' is the sequence of characters to filter by.

Alternatively most desktop environments will have a gui option like "info centre" in kde. Windows will probably have something too if you only have that, unless the'yre replaced it with coprolite trying to guess the answer.

For motherboard and PSU (power supply unit) you might need to open it up and look for labels or text on manufacturer and model. For the motherboard, you really just need to know what type of pci it has but getting the manual online will be best.

For the PSU you need to know power rating in Watts and maybe "efficiency rating" usually as some metallic rating like gold, silver, bronze. The manufacturer helps determine how reliable the ratings are.

If you go inside you may want a torch, a compressed air can, a dust mask, to be outside. and/or a gentle vacuum cleaner (with a mesh or filter or tissue over the end just in case). or duster or toothbrush or something. If you've a nice clean environment that may all be no big deal, but if you have household dust, there can be a lot of build up in there over 12 years. Best not to breathe too much of that in.

To learn more there are loads of webshites and videos. I'd search for terms like "diy build pc ". try to focus on low power or low to mid price to avoid lots of crap top end bullshit. Look at some from back in the day. they should go step by step through components, and how they are installed and connected.

I'd say try explainingcomputers.com - this is both webpage and links to youtube.

I'm a bit surprised an Nvidia 9x0 would struggle for web browsing. On a PC this old I would first check other things before swapping the GPU:

• Is it clean? Physically clean? Restricted air flow can make your CPU throttle down to avoid getting too hot.
• Is the operating system on an SSD or a spinning disk? I'm sure prices are insane nowadays but a small data SSD just for the OS will dramatically improve performance.
• How much RAM do you have? Again, prices are not good right now, but 8GiB is the minimum to run a modern desktop+browser.
• Do you have the proprietary drivers installed? I haven't touched an Nvidia GPU on Linux in a long time, but I would expect those to be basically mandatory for a smooth experience.

As for the GPU, if you are not gaming on big modern titles, anything released in the last ten years should be enough. I had a good experience with AMD over this era for out of the box Linux compatibility, but I can't say much about codecs, I never had issues and never bothered to check.

Intel is probably good enough also.

Another thing to consider is maybe your CPU has a built-in GPU, I use low/mid-range Intel CPU from this era without a discrete GPU as an HTPC and it performs fine.

Also check out your case's size, not all GPUs have the same size and fit everywhere.

It'd help to know what motherboard you've got currently. CPU-Z (or CPU-X if you're on Linux already) can give you that information.

AMD I find to be the best of out of the box Linux support. What are your use cases? Gaming, web browsing, etc.

As for your power supply, you should be able to find a model number on it to see if it'd support the new card. Some new cards require newer connectors (though adapters are available). The other consideration is power output. Can it supply enough power to the new card along side your other components. There's a power supply calculator you can use to see if the demand will exceed the supply.

How does something like this compare to the geforce from 2014? https://www.microcenter.com/product/700093/sparkle-intel-arc-a310-omni-view-single-fan-4gb-gddr6-pcie-40-graphics-card