I was wondering if my video card was at fault. Any recommendations for a budget card that will play games that are a few years old with little difficulty?
A GTX 1060 or a RX 580 will run most modern games at decent settings with no problems, if you need a little cheaper you might want to check out older ones like GTX 980/970 or RX 480.
Edit: you could also buy a SSD for your machine, you'll really notice the difference!
It seems I'm looking at paying $200ish for one of those models. Does that seem reasonable? Also will my 450wat Psu be able to handle it or will that need to be upgraded too?
I have a 970 4GB card that still runs games like far cry 5 at high settings 60 fps on a 1080p monitor. But its really only going to do that for games 2018 or older. It also has 4 gig of vram which really needs to be the minimum. You can get these cards really cheap second hand now as people seell off their mining cards but beware of that. If you go new get at least a 1060 6GB card if you can. I'm not sure where the talk for 16-32 GB of vram came from but that is highly unrealistic cost-wise when speaking of Vram and not even that common. Both these cards I mentioned will handle what you want though. The hard drive will be slowing you down as even my 2012 setup haa a 7200rpm drive speed which yiou should aim for minimum if you cant get ban SSD. SSD is great and dropping in cost but you'll mainly see benefits in streaming of large textures like in open world games. If you don't play those games SSD is overkill and will only help slightly with loading times(although its a huge improvement to desktop/browsing experience because of the speed programs open).
I don't know what kind of build you're doing. Is it development? Gaming? General use? School? Photography and graphics design?
In any case, I would honestly swap the hard drive first as that is your single biggest bottleneck right there.
Instead of that hard drive, you can get 1 TB SSD drives for about $100. That's the single biggest thing you can do to increase your performance.
The video card you have listed is $75 right here. You're not going to get high end performance on a card that like (it's not overall bad but the ram is a little skimpy) so, yes, this is probably part of your bottleneck but you don't know how much because your hard drive is slowing everything else down. Graphics cards are one of those that are straight up "You get what you pay for." You can't expect lamborghini performance from a VW bug.
Swap your hard drive for an SSD and see if you like it for a week. If you're not happy with its framerate, then repost your build, tag me, and I'll dig into your motherboard and see what I can recommend.
Sapphire - Radeon R7 350 2 GB Video Card
That's a PCIE 3.0 card. It uses GDDR5 which is good but that's far too little if you're doing anything except checking email, surfing phuks, and maybe youtube.