Hey duders -

I'm building a pc and have all of my parts and a real life experienced human to help me put it all together, but I have a question that I thought people here might be able to help me with. Or point me to the right place at least.

I have a good friend who recently upgraded his video card and offered me his old one. It's a GTX 660 ti.

I bought a motherboard that has some graphics processing built in because I was going to wait until later to buy a video card, but this one fell in my lap. My motherboard is the Gigabyte LGA1151 Intel Z170 Micro ATX DDR4 Gaming 5 Motherboards (GA-Z170MX) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014SL2XKQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_3bnbzbC03C8NX

My question is this - is installing the 660 ti going to be a better option than what's already on the motherboard? I'm a novice in this stuff, so please excuse me if it's a dumb question.

Also... what's the best method of cleaning a dusty dirty old video card? Vacuum, canned air, alcohol?

Thank you

A 660ti is exponentially more powerful than integrated graphics. Not only is it more powerful, but many games require GPU hardware to even run and some simply don't support integrated graphics. Use it.

For cleaning, use compressed air.

Integrated graphics (what's on the motherboard) basically exists to power basic computer functions - your web browser, that Youtube video you've been watching, movies, etc. Anything more power hungry than that generally tends to bring integrated graphics to their knees. It should be mentioned that, yes, people have managed to get some modern games running impressively well on integrated graphics and you can usually run most of the lighter indie stuff, but it's still not going to do you much good for gaming.

So there's no reason for you to stick with the motherboard graphics chip, put the 660ti in there. I wouldn't expect to be playing Prey at max settings, 60FPS with a 660ti next week, but it's still way better than integrated graphics.

As the others said it will be much much better, just make sure your power supply can handle it(i have made that mistake in my first builds)

install the 660ti and save up to upgrade to a 1070 or a 1080 later down the road. Skip the 900s. Have fun building.

Like others have said, a dedicated card is where it's at.

But you can check for yourself. Look up your processor, not motherboard. That will tell you the graphics processor used. You can then plug that into a benchmark site to see how it stacks up.

@oursin_360 said:

Exactly, a 660 TI is a 150 W graphics card (onboard graphics amounts to about 10 W in comparison), The motherboard slot can only provide up to 75 W power so the card needs 2 additional 6-pin connectors from a power supply that should at least be rated 450 W. (and have at least two 6-pin connectors). These values may even be higher for overclocked third party cards (from Asus or Gigabyte or EVGA, look it up.

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-660ti/specifications

Integrated graphics is continuously improving, but it is limited by DRAM bandwidth, which is clocked much lower and has a much narrower bus than GDDR5(X) that graphics card use. From the spec sheet you see the reference 660 ti has a bandwidth of 144.2 GB/s whereas normal system memory DDR4-2400 in dual channel reaches 38.4 GB/s, which it also has to share with the CPU.