obobski
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Posts posted by obobski
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I wouldn't bother with Skylake - it's not worth the extra cost, especially for gaming (where performance differences can amount to a BLISTERING 1% - http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/16).
As far as the build as proposed in the first post: overall not a bad machine, spec-wise. I'm not a fan of MSI motherboards (their warranty/support policies in my experience are draconian and reliability is not best-ever IME) - personally I'd go with Asus or ASRock, but if you're more comfortable with MSI, go with MSI. The GTX 970 has the memory bug, so you should at least be cognizant of that; personally I wouldn't "vote with my wallet" for a gimped product. EVGA would be my first choice for a GeForce card though. I'd also dump the Acer monitor - again, support/warranty being the biggest problem, and I'd instead go Asus, NEC, Hannstar, LG, BenQ, etc (basically anything not Acer Group and all of their hard-earned class action lawsuits). On the PSU, it did decently for JonnyGuru reviews: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=366 you may look around at competitors though, perhaps you can do better price-wise (I honestly don't know - I haven't kept up on the latest-and-greatest in mid-range PSUs in years). I'd also step up to the i5-4690 and end the discussion on CPU performance (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh-review-core-i7-4790-i5-4690-and-i3-4360-tested/9), and throw an after-market CPU cooler on there (because the Intel one will get noisy and I don't like that - Thermalright is always my first choice, but considering budget I'd look at Zalman (they've had some awesome deals on Newegg recently), Cooler Master, and Arctic).
Otherwise pretty solid build, and it should do fine with many games. I don't think you'll get anyone to swear to "run at full max ultra at 9999999 FPS with 200+ mods and ENB in Skyrim" though - that's way too variable and unpredictable. I *can* tell you that my Core 2 Quad Q9550 (which is slower than any CPU discussed here) and GTX 660SC (which is slower than the 970) will run vanilla (at least mostly, as far as graphics go) Skyrim on Ultra with FXAA (turning on MSAA will incur some lagginess at a few parts), so I don't think you'd have any problems with a newer CPU and a newer GPU running the vanilla game on Ultra, but when you're talking "and like 200 mods and ENB" that's another story entirely. You may grind the game to a halt with all of that, no matter *what* computer its run on, or it may work perfectly. There are no guarantees there. As far as "other games" I think you'd be mostly fine as well (again, that C2Q/GTX 660 system being a pretty versatile setup even with newer DX10/11 games, and what you're proposing here is capable of besting it). My biggest piece of advice here is to learn to accept lowering settings off of "full max ultra at 4K with 50,000 mods and ENBs forcing 8K textures for everything all the time at at least 62,000 FPS" - you'll save yourself a lot of money and hassle over time. That said, with a more recent machine (even the Core 2 Quad I've mentioned), you shouldn't have trouble running many newer games (and tons of older games) on (or near) max settings at 1080p or lower, but again I wouldn't take this as a guarantee across the board "it will always be consistent like this" - if you want that surety, buy an Xbox.
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You can get a 1080p monitor for around that price, and without DVI/HDMI (with HDCP) you may run into issues with some streaming formats and HD disc playback (because of the lack of HDCP support over VGA). As far as VGA output, AMD no longer offers analog outputs on their recent cards (but offers DisplayPort which can be converted, that's extra money (DP adapter + that monitor would probably cost the same or more than a 1080p monitor with digital inputs)), nVidia offers a single VGA output on some newer cards. I haven't tried DP to VGA adapters, but the VGA output quality on modern nVidia cards is abysmal compared to what was standard just a few years ago, so I'd certainly preference a digital connection between a modern graphics card and monitor(s).
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There's no measurable benefit to Skylake and DDR4 for gaming, at least presently, but there's a significant performance cost to the FX CPU vs any of the last few generations of Intel chips. Going with SLI or CrossFire with modern cards and the FX is not the best possible configuration, even at 1080p, when considering many games, and that situation isn't going to improve as time goes on. This isn't meant to beat up your rig or anything, but if you're building a new system I'd say the CPU/platform should be seriously considered alongside the graphics.
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"Decent headphones" can also blow your budget - I'm really not trying to be a doomsayer, but if you're after top of the line peripherals your budget will present a problem. On the monitors - finding a 1366x768 display will be relatively obtuse these days; 1080p monitors are around $100 and there's a load of options. Honestly I would suggest you take some time and look up actual pricing on the components you want (e.g. just price out all of your peripherals).
WRT "Windows 7 is outdated" - based on what? 7 vs 8 is largely a question of UI preference more than anything else; 10 is another matter altogether. All three will continue to receive support for many years to come. I really only bring this up because I've started seeing that rumor/myth of "Windows 7 is outdated and antique" starting to surface, and it's simply not true - even Vista is still supported (and will be for another two years) and up to the task of running a modern gaming system [and is itself not very different from 7 and 8].
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Why 1366x768? That's fairly low resolution these days. As far as what you want, ignoring all of your super-specific peripherals (which will run the price up and there's nothing to be done about it unless you can budge on them), a decent Core i3/i5 with a higher-end graphics card (e.g. 290X) should have no problems doing what you want at 1080p, and fit around $1000 price-wise. With all of your specific add-on peripherals, and starting from square zero (e.g. no monitor, no keyboard, no OS key) it'll go higher as a result (your peripherals alone can add another $1000 (or more) to the price, depending on what you mean by "high quality speakers" and "nice looking case"). Within your $800 setup, you'll either have to budge on your peripherals, or budge on performance, and potentially both depending on how much "extra" stuff you need.
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The "dual BIOS" thing on the graphics card has nothing to do with the system's BIOS - most recent AMD cards have a switch between two BIOS settings for power management and/or overclocking, but that's independent of the system's BIOS/firmware. Performance-wise a single Fury will be worse than twin 780s, and with the 9590 you'll experience generally lower performance than anything with an Intel processor (which is what a lot of modern benchmarks use, due to the 9590's age), however its much more appropriate for the PSU (assuming the PSU is still in good shape) and won't have any of the multi-GPU qurikiness of SLI/CrossFire (so performance may improve in some applications). Overall not a bad buy.
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That looks like a decent system spec-wise; not a huge fan of the PSU but it shouldn't be the end of the world.
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Honestly, not getting a SSD to a modern PC is equal to shooting yourself in the leg with a shotgun.
When I fixed the software issues on my dads laptop that was running on a HDD, I nearly went insane with how slow it was. I went as far as replacing the HDD with a 120gb SSD just to get rid of the slowness.
It's not about fps or anything like that, it's just that the whole system is a complete slowpoke when the OS is installed on a HDD.
This kind of superlative hyperbole isn't constructive imho (especially when based on vague anecdotes and not quantified data). There is no "magic secret sauce" to having an SSD - it can improve disk-related operations as it offers higher throughput and lower latency than some other storage solutions; faster storage *can* be a benefit for certain tasks and that's been true since the beginning of fixed storage on PCs (and I say "can" instead of "will" because it really depends on the application and what it needs, and how the operating system handles storage - most modern operating systems do a great deal of buffering and prefetch to improve performance, for example). However it does absolutely nothing (at all) for computationally bound tasks (e.g. "frame rate") - just because the thing can "start up" faster does nothing beyond letting it "start up" faster, and the same goes for (in a gaming context) things like level loads. Honestly I'd dump the SSD over any other significant component (e.g. graphics, CPU, memory, PSU) if budget is a consideration - you can throw as many top of the line SSDs as you want at a Pentium Pro with S3 VIRGE graphics and it will still never run Skyrim, Windows 10, etc but a Broadwell Core i7 with GeForce GTX 980 with a mechanical hard drive will happily do both (and a lot more). (and yes, this is a hyperbolic example, but so is "not having this piece of computer hardware is equivalent to attempting suicide with a gun")
As far as the remaining systems, #4 and #6 both look good to me. #6 has a better CPU (at least for gaming), and while the GTX 750 isn't the fastest kid on the block, it's not a slouch; #6 also appears to have a better warranty (I care about things like this, you may not). #4 has a better graphics card, but I'm somewhat skeptical of how useful that will be with the FX-4300.
Out of curiosity: any reason you don't build the machine yourself? What's your overall budget like as well?
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Except sentinel says there is a power issue, and i don't know if that's the case here.
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If he has a warranty even better. The problem would be solved, of course that depends on the store - how quick can he resupply the OP with a new pair of GPU's.
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> If the fans are simply failed (do they spin up?) its likely the card isn't allowing itself to engage full p-state <
That would explain the crashes whilst playing. !!!
Sentinel will silently throttle/stop the GPU for overheat (e.g. it can allow it to overheat, slow it down/stop it, let it cool, and resume functionality seamlessly) - it will complain about power on start-up if the AUX connector isn't present (but is required), but if the motherboard's power section fails (or the PSU fails) you may not get a Sentinel pop-up in Windows. All of this is independent of the drivers though, so even if the drivers (for some unknown reason) stopped cycling the fans on/off or spinning them up to appropriate levels (which, with nVidia OEM drivers, is something I can't say I've ever observed - of course with "hacked" or "modded" drivers anything is possible though), Sentinel should still function.
Without more information wrt warranty, fan condition, other hardware condition, etc its really tough to make any good judgment about this system or what it's doing, other than "not working." That PSU is on the "too small" side for this kind of hardware as well, and it doesn't matter if it measures very well - near 100% output on a long-term basis is no good for reliability. Without more information, this sounds to me like there's a lot of hardware involved that needs thorough testing, and some of it will likely need to be replaced, with more care/attention given to configuration and part selection at that time (e.g. if our goal is FX-9590 and 780 Ti or 290X SLI/CrossFire, a larger PSU is appropriate, and significant attention needs to be paid to cooling).
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I just noticed everyone has dots under their user name - what do they mean/represent? There isn't the same number of dots for all users, which is why I'm curious.
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The GPU is a Sapphire R9 270x 4GB, sorry for missing the information. The system is 64 bit and the resolution 1080p. The ram is in dual channel. The drivers are all updated, I run Driver Booster 3 every week (and I download beta drivers for the GPU manually).
Should I get another GPU? How much ram do you suggest I should get? Is the CPU good enough?
Another question: I read SSD are good for games, they reduce the loading time, is it correct? I love the fact that, having the OS on the SSD, when I turn on my pc I'm on the internet in 10 seconds, so if it will reduce loading time on games too, I may get a bigger SSD for games.
You could upgrade from the 270X to something more robust, like a 280/290/390 or GTX 960 (I'm not a huge 970 fan due to the memory bug), the CPU is basically as good as you're gonna get (see the links I posted). On the SSD, yes it can help load times IF the application is stored on the SSD. In other words, if you installed FO4 on the SSD, it would improve load times if they're disk-bound; its just a faster storage device so anything that will be constrained by storage speeds (e.g. load times) can benefit from it. It won't do anything for frame-rates, or other computationally-bound features, so you'll have to decide exactly how much you think "fast boot up" or "fast load times" is worth, as SSDs can get pretty expensive (and represent an awful $/GB proposition).
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On GPU upgrades, I'm not a big 970 fan due to the memory bug; I'd go with GTX 960 or a Kepler (if the prices are low). For AMD, the 290 and 390 are the same thing, so whichever is cheapest today is what I'd get; the 280 shouldn't be overlooked either. Unless there's *tons* of other peripherals, the 650W PSU should be fine with any of these cards - the 290/390 do not consume 300W+ 24x7 (and that 300W+ number is from a review that ran the card with Furmark and something else to like 110% TDP just to get that number); they're very power efficient in real-world usage.
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To answer the original question: Yes, a driver can kill a video card, but it is rather rare and requires an extreme move by the driver maker (Nvidia is this situation),
such as forcing the fan to power down and allowing the gpu to build up heat to the point of failure.
Except, and here's where we're picking at nits, no nVidia GPU since NV30 (GeForce FX) will allow itself to overheat in that manner - they all have a feature known as "System Sentinel" that will clamp on thermal over-limit events. This feature is independent of the drivers - it is meant to save the hardware in the event of fan or cooling system failure, or PSU failure (if the card stops receiving power via the auxiliary inputs it will also clamp). I have multiple GeForce cards that have been saved by this mechanism over the years, either due to fan failure, or other hardware failure. For extra "fun" you can even run the card with no heatsink, and Sentinel will save the board (I tested this on an already damaged board; I don't suggest you try it on something you care about). Same as any modern CPU.
If the fans are simply failed (do they spin up?) its likely the card isn't allowing itself to engage full p-state - this is fairly typical behavior of Sentinel in action (on some lower power cards they can dance in and out of full p-state and stutter their way through 3D applications, but a 780 Ti is not one of those cards). I would again strongly suggest looking at a warranty claim as opposed to just throwing these in the trash, even if it is just to replace the fans.
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Something I forgot to add: have you updated your graphics drivers since Fallout 4 came out? I know this has been a significant factor for performance with previous Bethesda games, and usually AMD (and nVidia) are pretty good about releasing driver updates that improve performance (and this can go on for quite a while - iirc nVidia didn't "stabilize" Skyrim optimizations/performance until early 2013, for example).
And on the 4770/4790:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9320/intel-broadwell-review-i7-5775c-i5-5675c/9 (and Broadwell for the heck of it; some Haswell-compatible boards support Broadwell
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/16 (and Skylake for the heck of it; Skylake requires a new platform)
I wasn't kidding about "won't do much better (if at all)" - it's not worth the $300+ by any stretch of the imagination imho.
Extra memory won't do anything unless we're running out of memory, which I'm skeptical is the case here. Would need more information about that.
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What graphics do you actually have? "200 Series" is too vague - it will have a specific name, like R9 290X, R9 280, R9 295X2, etc. Also, what resolution are you trying to run at?
Anyways: you won't do much better (if at all) than the 4690 as far as the CPU goes, barring an overclock (and that's entirely "up in the air" as to what you get). Broadwell and Skylake just haven't brought that significant of a performance increase (we're talking like 1 FPS or less in most games, per Anandtech's benchmarks). If that's a 290 card in there, you won't do a whole lot better than that either - Fury, Titan X, Titan Z, 980 Ti, etc are somewhat faster, but not orders of magnitude, and certainly not worth the price (and if its a 295X2, you already have the fastest graphics card on the market). A 280 is somewhat slower, but I'd still expect reasonable performance in newer games.
On the RAM: is that properly set-up in dual channel, or is it running as single channel?
I'm assuming you have a 64-bit version of Windows as well.
Overall, I don't see much that you could do apart from CrossFire, but even that wouldn't be leaps and bounds, and can cause issues in some games.
On the storage: *facepalm* The SSD doesn't benefit anything that's not computationally bound, or stored on it, and there's no point in having it as an "OS drive" - the sole benefit of an SSD is increased read/write speed and lower latency, but that's only for data it contains. In this case, it means the computer will load Windows (on start-up) quickly, which is of little utility beyond being a neat party trick. It has absolutely no benefit for games, or other applications, because they're not stored on it. It's small though, so you probably can't load much else but Windows on there anyways. Oh well, live and learn... :mellow:
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Any of these cards will be bottlenecked by the 9590 - 390 isn't a bad card though. I'd strongly consider a bigger PSU - the 9590 is 200-300W (actual measured) and the 390s will be around that as well - that leaves something like 100W (at most) for hard-drives, fans, the motherboard, other peripherals, etc and assumes the PSU running at 100% (or near to it) output when under load (which is not a good idea even with a high quality PSU).
As far as the 780s - do they have a warranty you could claim? Honestly I'm kind of surprised when you say "drivers killed them" - in some twenty years of working on computers I've never seen a driver legitimately kill a piece of hardware. It can render a machine unusable by being unstable or incompatible, but actually "kill" a piece of hardware is like the million-dollar shot. That said, if you're running all that on the same 1kW PSU, I wouldn't be surprised if the PSU is in not-so-great shape after powering all of that under heavy load. Can you, or have you, tested the cards individually and/or in another machine?
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You'll be largely CPU bound in many games, and that's just unfortunately the reality of the FX platform (even if you got a 9590 and dealt with the cooling and power requirements, assuming your motherboard could even run that chip). Upgrading the graphics card to a GTX 960 or 970 (or AMD equivalents, like the R9 270/280/290 series) wouldn't be a bad idea, per se, but the performance improvement won't help the CPU. To upgrade the CPU, that means a new motherboard, and (depending on your licence situation) new copy of Windows, not to mention the time for a total new build. If you're going that route, I'd go Intel Haswell with Z97 or Z97x; should let you re-use your DDR3 RAM and other peripherals at least. Honestly though, I can't imagine an FX-8350 + 660 Ti being that bad with modern games; I was using a Core 2 Quad Q9550 + GTX 660SC up until December/January without much complaint, and your system should be better than that across the board. Just my 2c.
SSD will do nothing for computationally bound tasks.
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Any reason you can't just roll back to an older, working, nVidia driver?
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Thanks for the reply obobski, I didn't know why my laptop broke down until you mentioned cheetah blood does that, I was sure that couldn't be the reason but hey, the more you know. Like I stated I am new to building my own PC Rig, so I thought people would be able to tell me of their own personal preferences and what they have used themselves in the past, then I could look it all up and compare them all one piece at a time to see what would be the best bet, I am sorry that I asked such an intensive question, it was never my intention to make people think that they had to work excessivly hard to answer my queries.
Skyrim is a most definite on my new Rig, however I also, at some point, wish to see about getting the new Fallout game, Fallout 4, onto it as well, and I was wondering if the price range you suggested, $1300 would be good enough of a budget to run it on fairly high specs and garner no lag?
As to RAM, thank you again for telling me about it, I was unaware that 32GB of RAM was overkill, my assumption was that the more RAM you had the faster your PC went, not to cheetah blood speeds, but just a little bit faster with each GB. Ill be investing in only 16GB of RAM thanks to your helpful suggestion and information.
As to the Intel CPU, I looked it up and do you suggest that the higher the 'i', as in i3, i7, etc, would make for a better CPU? Or does it not matter over all?
As to nVidia and AMD, I'm pretty sure I'll be heading the nVidia route, I've heard that Steam now runs better with nVidia, as do a lot of games, though thats just from forums I have visited for information, I may be mistaken. Thank you for the recommendation towards AMD though. The GeForce 960 looks good, though would you recommend anything a bit better, I have always had the most trouble with the graphics, sound and motherboard parts of the Rig as I am not well versed in them all, and there are so many to choose from.
Finally, Windows 8 would be my pick as the OS as Windows 10 has been getting a lot of negative press everywhere I look, perhaps in the future when the reviews pick up I may look into upgrading.
mark5916: Thank you for the help, I await your response eagerly, however thanks to obobski's reply I now know that I am asking too much of you. If you could provide a list of parts that fit well with say, $1500, then I would be more than happy, thank you so much for your time.
Didn't see your reply until now (I admittedly don't check Nexus consistently every day), here's my reply:
- It's not so much "excessively hard" as it is "excessively tedious" - a completely open-ended build question has a legitimately unlimited number of possibilities. As far as brands I've used and liked, however:
For motherboards: Asus, ASRock, Intel (they make their own motherboards), Biostar, and Gigabyte from time to time. I avoid MSI (awful customer service and reliability IME), and no-name/new-to-market brands (nothing comes to mind off-hand but basically I don't like being the guinea pig)
For graphics cards, nVidia: EVGA and PNY
For graphics cards, AMD: Sapphire, XFX, and PowerColor
For sound cards: Creative (historically Razer and M-Audio were good, but neither still makes sound cards that I'm aware of - lots of stuff on ebay though (you can probably still find Razer AC-1 cards for cheap on ebay, and as long as they have the breakout HD-DAI cable, they're a steal - assuming you get a motherboard with a PCI slot))
For PSUs (and I can't stress enough how important a quality PSU is): PC Power & Cooling (today they're "FirePower Technology" but they'll always be PC Power & Cooling imo), Antec, and Enermax; there are other good suggestions here and in general I'd say read jonnyguru and pick something that measured/tested well
For cases: Silverstone, Lian-Li, Antec, and believe it or not, Rosewill
For RAM: G.Skill, Kingston, Corsair, and Crucial
That should get you started in the right direction at least - ofc there are many other manufacturers that may (or do) make great products; I haven't tried every single product or every single brand under the sun, and admittedly I have a preference to find a brand that makes quality stuff at reasonable prices and stick with them, vs experimenting with every build.
- On Skyrim, yes $1300 should be more than good enough. To give you some perspective, my old rig (used it up until last December) had a Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8GB of DDR3-1333, and a GeForce GTX 660 (which replaced a Radeon HD 4890 after its cooler died), could run Skyrim on Ultra with FXAA quite nicely (the 4890 could almost do this too) - that's mostly 2008 hardware. Skyrim is not really that demanding of a game - it's not "lightweight" (e.g. it isn't WoW or CS that will run on positively anything), but you don't need a modern $10,000+ machine with Titan X SLI and 512GB of RAM and 96 CPUs and so forth to get good frame-rates. You can totally mess with the performance by adding mods (especially if you get into texture/mesh mods and other graphics "enhancements"), and I'd say that really just has to come down to a judgment call on your part. IMHO I'm fine accepting more or less vanilla graphics and/or accepting turning down some settings to get better performance vs throwing a mountain of money at it.
- On the RAM, the "more RAM = faster PC" is a myth that's older than time itself. I still remember when CompUSA would try to sell people that line directly. It's just not true. Applications basically don't care how much RAM your machine has, as long as it has enough - anything extra is just wasted surplus capacity. Skyrim itself can never use more than 2-4GB of RAM, and that's true of many other games too (conventional Win32 limits are 2GB; with LAA flags they can use 3GB on x86 and 4GB on x64 - that's "up to" btw, not "will always require"). I'm sure if you asked people, plenty of them were playing it back in 2011 on machines with 2-4GB of RAM, not 32-64, but memory gets progressively cheaper (per capacity) as time goes on. There's no downside to 32GB of RAM aside from cost - if your goal is gaming, 16GB is a good choice imho because its around the sweet spot for pricing right now (and to do 32GB you're doing 4 DIMMs, so you could always add another 16GB in the future), and will give you more than enough memory for contemporary 64-bit games too (I'm assuming you're going with a 64-bit version of Windows), which generally request/specify 6-8GB of system memory on their boxes.
- On the Intel CPU, yes and no. Intel has tried to simplify their marketing and branding in recent years by doing the "i" thing but ultimately I think it just ends up being confusing in new ways. Technically speaking the "i7" series is top of the line, but for gaming performance there's no point - top-tier i5s will be just as good (we're talking <5% differences in benchmarks, usually fractions of an FPS or less), and in many cases top-tier i3s can be perfectly suitable as well. Generally, today, i3 means dual-core, i5 means quad-core, and i7 means quad-core with HyperThreading - a lot of games still favor single-threaded performance (and this is why AMD falls so far behind; CMT favors high multi-threaded performance), so there's plenty of cases (e.g. Skyrim) where a fast dual-core can be perfectly competent. i5 is a good place to be, price-wise, and unless you're doing something that can actually drive some benefit from HyperThreading (e.g. Handbrake encodes) I'd just save the $100+ on the i7. Ditto for Broadwell/Skylake - they're showing basically el zilcho in performance increases for gaming, but you'll spend more to get that; why not save the money?
- On the GPU. nVidia is *extremely* popular on many forums (like to the point of having a borderline Apple-esque following). This doesn't mean nVidia is "good" or "bad." "Steam runs better with nVidia" sounds like such an Apple-esque statement: Steam isn't a game, Steam isn't even a 3D application - it's just a digital content delivery service. It will run fine on all manner of hardware, be it a top of the line nVidia/AMD graphics card, the rinky-dink Intel IGP in an Ultrabook, or even my cannot-game-to-save-its-life 3DLabs proline card. As far as games being better/worse with nVidia - I'd say its a mixed bag. nVidia has "held games hostage" with things like Gameworks and PhysX (these are SDKs that nVidia owns and pushes on developers, and often these games run worse or without some features on non-nVidia hardware; I'm trying to say this in the least conspiracy-theorist-sounding manner I can), and if you're after games that rely heavily on nVidia IP then you're going to be forced into their ecosystem (see where the Apple comment is starting to make sense?). Skyrim is not one of those games, however; it has run great for me on multiple cards from nVidia and AMD. As far as what I'd suggest, I like bang-for-buck - the GTX 960 is not a bad example there (just like the 760 and 660 before it), but moving up in price I'd probably switch to AMD with the R9 290/390 series (its the same GPU - just go with whatever is cheapest) since they'll generally keep pace with the higher-tier nVidia cards and tend to cost $100+ less (and lets not even get started on Titan). For Skyrim, I'd feel generally confident saying: "none of this matters" - Skyrim will run (more or less) maxed out on high-end cards from 2008, and will (no joke) run on cards even older than that (Ultra on a 7900GTX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXTrK_GtG60 - before "man its so laggy!" - this card came out in 2005*, and the game is on maximum settings; if you dropped things down it'd become much more playable, and consider that even midling cards today are orders of magnitude faster than 7900GTX). However if we're going to talk newer games, like Fallout 4 or whatever else, you will need to give graphics more thought - I still think the 960 is a good starting place, and then decide if you want to go cheaper (and probably somewhat slower) or more expensive (and somewhat faster). Depending on what kind of monitor you're hooking up to, the 960 may even be overkill (e.g. if your monitor is <1080p that's a very different story than if your monitor is 2560x1440). I will add that both manufacturers can, and have, made excellent products (and I own and use examples of both), but I wouldn't want to chain myself one way or another, because neither of them makes a consistently better (or worse) product. Currently (and for the last few years) they've been pretty well tied, ignoring nVidia's (arguably) anti-competitive tactics, and I'd just go for bang-for-buck at this point.
- I haven't tried Win10, but I have no complaints about Win8.1 when I've played around with it. My main gaming PC still uses Windows 7 mostly because I don't like constant upgrades; I still have some secondary machines running Vista without complaint as well. I've read about Win10's mandatory updates, and this is where I'd be somewhat leery of going Win10 + nVidia, as nVidia has kind of a nasty history of breaking game support with successive driver updates (back to "its a mixed bag") - sure it may improve performance in some new game, or some game that current reviewers are fixated on for benchmarking, but it may break playability, features, performance, etc in some old game. Example: the Gameready driver updates that improved Watch_dogs performance (which was used in a lot of reviews to benchmark) broke shadows in The Sims 2. Other example: the driver family that introduced and improved SLI performance broke most Lithtech-based games. If you don't generally worry about games more than a year or two old (excepting iconic titles (e.g. Skyrim, WarCraft III, StarCraft, etc stuff that will often be specifically singled out for support)) this probably wouldn't be an issue, but if you're looking at a wide and diverse range of games, being forced into nVidia driver updates is unappealing imho. This isn't to say AMD drivers are flawless, but IME the general trend over the last 16 years has been one of improvement, while nVidia is one of periodization. So if I were being forced into mandatory driver updates, I'd probably rather go with AMD. Or just go with Windows 7/8 and completely circumvent the problem - by 2017/2020/2023 (when Vista/7/8 go EOL, respectively) I'm hopeful that Microsoft will have rethought/improved mandatory update model, that driver-providers will have further improved their game, or that a third-party platform (e.g. OS X) will be able to really counter for Windows for gaming. I'm not anti-update, just anti-avoidable-system-breaking-stuff.
* EDIT for nitpicking: 7900GTX itself came out in early 2006, but its a refresh of the G70 (GeForce 7800) which was released in early 2005, and is directly based upon NV40 (GeForce 6800) released in early 2004 (they are quite similar, internally). The GeForce 6's primary competitor, the Radeon X (for the 6800, this would be the X800 and X850), is incompatible with Skyrim (it doesn't support SM3.0), but the GeForce 7's primary competitor, the Radeon X1000 (X1800, 1900, and 1950), would work with Skyrim (it does support SM3.0, and there are boards with 512MB) - I couldn't find a video example though.
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You used to be able to get the add-ons from the Bethesda website (some of them were free, some of them weren't), but I don't know if that's still a "thing" these days. What add-ons are you actually missing from the anthology? (I understood it to be complete)
As far as crossing from Steam to non-Steam games, that may be a problem - iirc they're somewhat distinct builds due to Steam's DRM. I know that Steam will not let you "install over" a non-Steam game, so at the very best you'd be downloading the entire thing from Steam and then picking bits of it out for your disc install, and that still may not work. Honestly if you're going to the trouble of downloading the whole thing via Steam, I'd just go with that install moving forward.
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Re-install Steam on the new machine, and just copy-paste the Skyrim folder (the entire thing) on the new machine in its Steam directory. You may have to point Steam at the copy-pasted directory (it's been a while since I've had to do this, but its very common-sensical once you're actually looking at it). If the machines are significantly different there may be some quirks, e.g. if you're going from WinXP to Win7 you may have to "take ownership" of the folder once its pasted (http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/add-take-ownership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/), and you'd be wise to let the auto-config re-run and write you a new .ini based on the new machine's capabilities and environment. You should, however, be able to transfer savegames without a problem (I've done this much more recently - as long as the overall game + mods is the same, its just a straight-across transfer).
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Asking for 3+ configurations per respondent is relatively "needy" - why don't you try putting something together yourself and then ask for critiques? I'm not at all trying to cast aspersions towards you, more trying to get you to recognize you're asking for a considerable time investment on other people's part with no compensation/etc on the backend.
Given your budget, what you want is entirely possible - I'd personally go with an Intel CPU, DDR3 memory, and your choice of nVidia or AMD graphics (I have a slight preference towards AMD these days, but it doesn't matter too much either way). If Skyrim is your goal, you could easily do this build for more like $1000-$1300 (and if you have parts you can "recycle" from a previous machine you may save more, e.g. if you don't have to buy a case, drives, monitor, operating system, peripherals, soundcard, power supply, etc etc). If we/you have an idea of what parts you have, what parts you're looking at, etc it can be tremendously helpful in guiding you.
As far as the RAM, 32GB is a total waste for gaming; 16GB is also overkill but given current memory prices is probably a healthy place to be. For the whys and wherefores: the vast majority of games, including Skyrim, are 32-bit applications - they will NEVER use more than 4GB of RAM (no matter if you rub the engine with cheetah blood or what) as that's a limitation of 32-bit applications (and out of the box, Skyrim and other games don't have LAA flagged, which means they're confined to 2GB). While 64-bit games are trickling out, I've seen nothing that has system requirements higher than 8GB of memory (the 64-bit games I've seen thus far usually say 6-8GB for overall system memory); 16GB is overkill but without being excessive. 32GB is just ridiculous. That isn't to say there aren't *other* kinds of tasks for which 32GB could make sense, but gaming just isn't really one of them. If you're doing a lot of DCC stuff, or running a lot of VMs, or other memory intensive tasks like that (that will either have 64-bit applications, or multiple "big" 32-bit applications) the extra RAM can be useful - it really comes down to what you need. For Skyrim alone, 8GB of RAM is more than good enough, along with a decent Core i3 or Core i5, and current mid-range (or better) graphics card (e.g. GeForce 960). But like I said, given current memory prices, unless you're on a very tight budget (or just want to save money), going with 16GB isn't a big problem.
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NVIDIA and "Gameworks" is nothing new - they've been doing this same racket since the "Way It's Meant To Be Played" campaign a few years ago (which, as far as I know, was born out of the unholy alliances ATi was forming with a lot of devs back in the day, that led to tons of super-ATi optimized code that ran like junk on multiple generations of NV cards)). Where it's gotten "off the deep end with greed" (and I do agree 100% with that) is when NV is deliberately doing stuff that breaks non-NV systems, for example using PhysX and Hairworks and so forth - I remember reading a presentation recently that showed a newer game generating tons of superfluous (non-drawing) polys that would wreak havoc on AMD and Intel GPUs, but the NV driver was designed in such a way as to ignore that little "gift" and voila, "NVIDIA HAS SO MUCH PERFORMANCE." It's also been demonstrated a few times they use PhysX in this way, with "CPU PhysX" deliberately using the least optimized, worst performing paths available (and the "GPU PhysX" isn't even fully done on the GPU - the GPU does part of the work, and the rest is done via optimized SIMD instructions on the CPU; basically the graphics card is acting as a DRM key to push NV hardware sales and providing some computational assistance, but it's nothing like the original "full hardware offload" that Ageia promised us back in 2005). They've also started holding various features "hostage" - things like DSR or power management - want a new feature? Gotta keep buying GeForce cards. Sure some of it is architectural, but a lot of it is just artificial lock-outs to try and push sales (and this is an unfortunate shift from how they used to do things).
This isn't saying ATi/AMD haven't had close relationships with developers recently too, but I can't think of an example where a game that takes a lot of AMD tech (e.g. a Mantle game) is deliberately knee-capped without an AMD graphics card in the system. They also haven't gone down the road of feature lock-out with their currently supported cards (but they've dumped a lot of relatively recent stuff a lot more quickly than some people would like (e.g. I think the HD 4800 series only got like two years of full driver support, and the 2000/3000 series were completely left in the cold when it came to video acceleration and compute support)).
Another thought I had though, regarding why we see GTX 400/500 series and Radeon HD 7000 series as minreq for a lot of games: AMD really only supports GCN going forwards, and the VLIW4 and TerraScale GPUs (HD 2000 thru HD 6000) series have largely been left in the dark. NV, by contrast, aims at like a 5-7 year lifecycle for all of their products, and Fermi (400/500 series) is still under that. Same thing is happening with DirectX: NV has listed Fermi and higher for DX12 compliant driver support, but AMD is only worrying about GCN and up (and it's entirely possible some of their older DX11 cards could work, but it'll never happen because they're not being supported). So it may be that Bethesda (or other devs, because I've seen that GTX 400/Radeon HD 7000 listing on other games recently as well) is basically saying "we're only going to officially support platforms that are currently officially supported with driver/software updates" instead of going down the slippery slope of trying to validate EOL (or nearly EOL) hardware. A random example: Skyrim can (believe it or not) be run on GeForce 7 (not 700, 7 - you can go look this up on YouTube if you want to see it; it isn't pretty but it does work) as long as the card has sufficient memory (there's a few that do), but Bethesda lists GeForce 8 as the official requirement. That makes complete sense: GeForce 8 was on mainstream support until very recently, while GeForce 7 was axed in early 2013 ("but obob, there are 2015 drivers" -> those are mandatory security patches for Vista/7/8), and I'm guessing that big developers like Bethesda probably have some sort of heads up as to what hardware is and isn't getting the axe, so knowing that GF7 was going the way of the dodo within (roughly) a year of Skyrim's launch, it makes sense to just omit it. That *could* be what's happening with the GeForce 400/Radeon HD 7000 thing on some fronts.
My point is, it's really unfortunate if this is the case, because ultimately the consumer loses - even if you have the "right" piece of hardware. It'd be nice if "they" (being NV and AMD and so forth) would go back to trying to kill each other with better performance, better features, lower prices, etc instead of just trying to sabotage and destroy each other and using games to do it.
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Oh, I fully expect to see the "your mod trashed my game", etc, threads very shortly after mods become available for consoles...... A fair few of those folks are purely console players, and have never dealt with modding a game in the lives..... They aren't going to have the faintest idea what they are doing, stuff a whole bunch o' crap into their game, and then its going to be the modders fault for making their game unplayable. :smile: Should be fun to watch......
Because this never, ever, happens with PC players? :psyduck:
I do agree, I've wondered about the various texture/graphics/etc mods for consoles - even if the Xbox/PlayStation could run the "base game" on full max ultra, that doesn't mean they'll handle the N+3 year Ultra Realistic Photomagic ENB Deluxe FX with all 4K textures and 20GB of additional textures and meshes to give you 7300 varieties of hair and on and on (the same reasoning applies to PCs). But unlike PCs, the Xbox/PlayStation can't be upgraded. OTOH, having things like "Unofficial [whatever] Patch" or other vanilla-resources mods shouldn't be much of a problem (again, same reasoning taken from PCs), and may actually be of benefit to all sides (e.g. fixing bugged quests, non-working scripts, broken AI packages, misplaced objects, etc etc) where previously that didn't exist for console players. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds for sure.
To the original point, in reading that I did have kind of an alternate interpretation (and no I'm not a lawyer and I'm not trying to "divine the contract" or anything): by setting themselves as the owner of the such content, it may give them (Bethesda) a mechanism to take down content that would be objectionable/not allowable for something like Xbox Live; e.g. they could more easily kill pornographic content since they can say "we have sole rights to this, we're submitting a takedown notice." (and this is all a PR shuffle - the press will absolutely hold the publisher/developer accountable for a third party's actions (has been proven time and again) so it makes sense that publishers/developers want some stronger mechanism to guard against it) Or something along those lines. More broadly, I'm thinking this kind of language probably does have more to do with Xbox/PlayStation licencing and "mods for consoles" than anything else...
HELP WITH FIRST PC BUILD!
in Hardware and software discussion
Posted
Performance differences between Windows XP thru Windows 8 should be largely insignificant for Skyrim (I'dve included "and Windows 10" but I haven't seen benchmarks to actually confirm or deny that, and Windows 2000 should generally be included too but it has enough quirks and sometimes one of them will jump up and bite you on the tookis) - there's no issue with any of them from a performance standpoint for any DirectX 9 game. Windows 8 (and later) have significantly rewokred how DDI8 and lower are handled, which can impact performance heavily (this matters if you play older games, like Morrowind), and Windows XP (and older) of course don't support DirectX 10 and above (and are fully EOL and don't receive security updates, so I wouldn't suggest them for a machine that's web-connected (I still have an XP machine that lives, quite happily, offline though)). As far as support in terms of drivers and software, Vista and later are still current - Vista's support (from Microsoft) will end in 2017, with Windows 7 following in 2020, and Windows 8 in 2023. It will be interesting to see how "hard" of an end that is for Vista though - its so similar to Windows 7/8 internally that it may just continue plodding along (like Windows 2000 largely did alongside XP). Same goes for 7/8 with one another (and then there's always the possibility that Microsoft can kick those deadlines out, like they did for 2000 and XP, although that seems less likely).
I'm not really advocating for or against Vista, 7, or 8 - they're all equally capable of performing the same role today. The biggest questions are how you feel about Internet Explorer (since Vista is explicitly blocked from receiving IE updates, but you can still use Firefox or Chrome or whatever (and I assume most people do)), and Aero (Vista/7) vs Metro (8) for UI. They all support DX11 and are still covered for driver and platform updates though.
WRT the parts combo you requested, I'll go back to Core i3/i5 and a decent graphics card (e.g. GeForce 960, Radeon R9 280) - that should be perfectly doable within your budget. No guarantees on mods and performance (too many variables at play), but the vanilla game shouldn't have any trouble running on Ultra at 1080p on such a machine (my older Core 2 Quad and GeForce 660 can do that - this isn't a horribly demanding game by modern standards).
On the headset/headphones: noise cancelling, as in ANC, is something I'm generally leery of as many manufacturers do such an awful job of attempting to implement it (usually it doesn't do much of anything but add noise to the signal). Unpopular as it may be among would-be audiophiles, Bose is still the industry leader when it comes to ANC, but a pair of QuietComfort headphones is around $300. That said, there are plenty of closed-back headphones that cost a lot less than that and can provide excellent sound and good isolation, and if you need serious isolation from sporadic noises (e.g. dogs barking, kid sister screaming, etc) ANC would be the wrong choice anyways (it really only works well with continuous noise, like HVAC or airplane engine noise) - IEMs would be the ideal choice there, or just go with a closed-back monitor headphone (which will do no better or worse than the QuietComfort).