PC and next upgrades (advice wanted)

[Rennn]

I currently have:

 

2GB GTX 660 GC (factory overclocked)

AMD Phenom II 955 X4 at 3.2Ghz

8GB Gskill Ripjaw RAM at 1600mhz

750w Antec Earthwatt modular PSU

Asus M4N68T-M V2 micro ATX motherboard

Asus Xonar DG sound card

1TB Hitachi HDD at 7.2Ghz

 

 

I'm looking at upgrading, for many reasons. I suspect the motherboard is failing after a poorly advised overlock, I want to switch to an Intel CPU, and I need to upgrade my CPU since it's continuing to bottleneck me in some games. Also, my current HDD is notoriously unreliable and I don't want to still be using it if/when it fails. One of my requirements is a regular ATX motherboard, not micro ATX again. There's no space to move my fingers when I install stuff on my current board. I also need a mobo with USB 3.0 support, since my case has several built in USB 3.0 slots that I can't use right now. I've planned upgrades before, but the money always got sidetracked to some emergency or something. :blink:

But within a few months I think I'll finally be able to upgrade, so I'm putting together a final plan.

 

I'm looking at these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148910

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157370

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116898

 

I particularly want to know if that CPU is has a good cost/performance ratio. I considered going for an i7, but I suspect that would inflate the cost without much of a difference in game performance. True/false?

Any suggestions to lower the price while maintaining as much performance as possible, or increase performance for a small price increase?

Edited February 8, 2014 by Rennn

[Thor.]

That cpu of yours could use a upgrade, the quads where good for the time.

 

the 8350 is a good cpu, great for everyday use.

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284

I also recommend hybrid ssd's, they are tad faster then your average drive.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340

Edited February 9, 2014 by Thor.

[Rennn]

That cpu of yours could use a upgrade, the quads where good for the time.

 

the 8350 is a good cpu, great for everyday use.

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284

I also recommend hybrid ssd's, they are tad faster then your average drive.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178340

 

The i5 I linked to is the same cost as the FX you linked, but the i5 benchmarks faster in core per core performance and virtually no games use more than 4 cores. Many only use 2 still. The motherboard I chose is for Intel CPUs, and I also said in my post that I'm not getting another AMD CPU.

 

The drive you linked is a 2.5" version for laptops, and it won't fit in my HDD rack. :/

Edited February 9, 2014 by Rennn

[Thor.]

You can get 3.5 extension bays for your case if you look online.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998052

 

It will fit, most new cases have 2.5 laptop drive bays, depending how old the case is. if anything jerry rig one :teehee:

 

The 8350 is a good cpu, if you want future proof, and believe me you would notice the difference. The old amd cpu's did not have hyperthreading at the time, though highly oc able, I owned a 900 series black edition with my first quad setup back in the day. It was good but even skyrim you would notice some sluggish game play. Horse power isn't everything, scalability means a lot.

Edited February 9, 2014 by Thor.

[Werne]

The i5 I linked to is the same cost as the FX you linked, but the i5 benchmarks faster in core per core performance and virtually no games use more than 4 cores.

Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, Far Cry 3, just off the top of my head. A lot of software is abandoning serial and going for parallel scaling as well.

 

And to clarify something Thor there seems to miss, 8350 is kind of an "overclocker's choice" processor. The 8320 is a lower-binned 8350 with lower out-of-the-box clocks than 8350 which costs $160, may not reach the same level of overclock but costs $50-60 less and it's also unlocked. Enable one core per compute unit (improves per-core performance by ~10% by removing resource sharing) and raise the frequency to some 4.2-4.5GHz, you basically get an i5 with an unlocked multiplier and enabling all cores means you have 8 cores if you need them for games that do scale. Depending on binning, 8320 should reach 4-4.3GHz on stock voltage with 8 cores, 4.1-4.5 with 4 cores, no fear of frying the mobo either if you dsable the modules since power draw drops by ~40%.

 

But to be honest, I keep mine at 4.2GHz with all cores enabled (stock voltage) and, I'm yet to see a game other than Starcraft II to be running under 60FPS because of the CPU, I'm GPU-bound in everything with a 7770. Thor runs a GTX 780 Ti so he may have more info on how the CPU alone performs. My 8320 only flops in strategy games with my setting, but even Intel's i7s tend to struggle with those since RTS are completely serial, they only use one core, so you'll get 45FPS instead of 60FPS which doesn't seem to be that much of a difference to me in those kinds of games. I went i5-3570K to FX 8320, can't say I see any difference other than in software compile and 3D render times which benefit from more cores.

 

With a GTX 660, difference between an FX-8320 @4.2GHz (or 8350 on stock) and i5-4670 in games other than RTS falls within a margin of error, you'd be GPU-bound since 660 is on-par with Radeon 7870 which is a last-gen mid-range card (nearly 2 generations behind looking from Nvidia side, with Maxwell coming up soon and all that). If I recall correctly, you keep your games locked to 30FPS, or am I mistaken? If you're capping them, you may as well get the 8320 and keep it on stock, it'll definitely run anything at over 30FPS, now and in the future. If not, a small bump in clocks and you're at 60FPS in anything other than RTS (again, due to serial processing).

 

For an AMD CPU for low cost, I'd go with this combo:

 

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P - $80 - It's a 4+1 and not an 8+2 but it has VRM cooling, it's got 6x SATA 3 ports, 2x USB 3.0 and 6x USB 2.0.

CPU: AMD FX 8320 - $160 - It's a solid unit, overclocks decently, and cheaper than 8350 while being pretty much the same except for stock frequency.

Total price - $240

 

 

 

But if you're determined to go with Intel, I'd suggest an H87 board, they are cheaper and you don't really need the overclocking features for a locked CPU. And I'd also get an aftermarket cooler if I were you, Ivy Bridge and Haswell are toasty even on stock, my old i5 would run at 86^oC on a stock cooler and around 72^oC with Arctic Freezer 13, Haswell runs even hotter than Ivy from what I hear.

 

Also, here's a big, fat note - Haswell are touchy when it comes to power supply units, it may run on yours but the general consensus is to get a "Haswell certified" PSU. So yeah, you may need to get a new PSU, with an "unsupported" PSU you basically BSOD every now and then, and maybe even f*** up your PC since the 12V rail goes bonkers. Here's a list of compatible units, 750W Earthwatts Green falls under "has not been confirmed". New PSU is an additional expense but it's better than having problems or dead components down the road. My recommendation is XFX, those are re-branded SeaSonic units and are regarded as great quality units.

 

As for the rest, 1TB and 2TB Seagate models I've seen all had some issues, ranging from firmware problems to being DOA. I generally recommend Hitachi or WD for large drives, more expensive but they seem to be more sturdy and stable. Personally, I don't really see the point of HDDs larger than 1TB other than for static storage, I'd rather take a 120GB SSD instead and a 1TB drive since it would make a bigger overall difference than the CPU, unless you actually need 2TB of storage.

Edited February 9, 2014 by Werne

[Thor.]

No word on maxwell just yet, or the latest 880 desktop models, Maxwell might be a generation later, coming from rumoured sources on the web.

 

The new gtx790 is confirmed to launch this month.

[Werne]

No word on maxwell just yet, or the latest 880 desktop models, Maxwell might be a generation later, coming from rumoured sources on the web.

 

The new gtx790 is confirmed to launch this month.

Yeah, Maxwell is like Steamroller was, maybe soon maybe not. But my point still stands, there's not a lot of difference between FX 8320 @4.2GHz and i5 4670 on a GTX 660, if any. Most games are GPU-bound and those that aren't will run fine anyway.

 

As a sidenote, Tek Syndicate did some benches with a GTX 670 between the 8350 and 3570K and the difference was not much, except when overclocked. It's a reason I went with 8320 after my i5 blew up (mobo failure, CPU was de-lidded so my warranty was f***ed). Both run pretty much the same with a difference in some games due to the way games are made and optimized but I can't say either of them would be a bad or good choice, it's pretty much a personal preference. For me the selling point was more threads, I use Linux which uses all threads.

 

BTW, yeah, Tek Syndicate used a 3570K, but the Haswell is ~10% faster which isn't much of a factor, 3 frames in gaming provided that you're not GPU-bound.

Edited February 9, 2014 by Werne

[obobski]

I currently have:

 

2GB GTX 660 GC (factory overclocked)

AMD Phenom II 955 X4 at 3.2Ghz

8GB Gskill Ripjaw RAM at 1600mhz

750w Antec Earthwatt modular PSU

Asus M4N68T-M V2 micro ATX motherboard

Asus Xonar DG sound card

1TB Hitachi HDD at 7.2Ghz

 

 

I'm looking at upgrading, for many reasons. I suspect the motherboard is failing after a poorly advised overlock, I want to switch to an Intel CPU, and I need to upgrade my CPU since it's continuing to bottleneck me in some games. Also, my current HDD is notoriously unreliable and I don't want to still be using it if/when it fails. One of my requirements is a regular ATX motherboard, not micro ATX again. There's no space to move my fingers when I install stuff on my current board. I also need a mobo with USB 3.0 support, since my case has several built in USB 3.0 slots that I can't use right now. I've planned upgrades before, but the money always got sidetracked to some emergency or something. :blink:

But within a few months I think I'll finally be able to upgrade, so I'm putting together a final plan.

 

I'm looking at these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148910

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157370

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116898

 

I particularly want to know if that CPU is has a good cost/performance ratio. I considered going for an i7, but I suspect that would inflate the cost without much of a difference in game performance. True/false?

Any suggestions to lower the price while maintaining as much performance as possible, or increase performance for a small price increase?

 

Honestly I can't say I'm surprised about the hard-drive - they've been known as "DeathStars" since the 1990s for a reason (and every time the division gets sold, it usually gets worse; first it was IBM, then Hitachi, now WD (as "HGST a Division of WD")). Go with Seagate or WD - consistently more reliable, and they'll replace the drive if it comes DOA. I would be very leery of "hybrid" drives - you're lashing an SSD to a mechanical drive, so now you have the reliability concerns of both all rolled into one, and it lives or dies as one. If you want an SSD, get a separate SSD - you're using a desktop, and you have no reason to need to fit everything into a single 2.5" bay (like a laptop would).

 

On the rest - no reason not to go Intel if it's what you want. 4670 should have no problems whatsoever. ASRock makes good boards, but I don't have experience with that specific model - I'd assume you shouldn't have problems though. You may also want to consider a board with more larger PCIe slots - not necessarily for graphics cards, but for other kinds of expansion cards (x4 and x8 cards aren't as rare as they once were, and boards with an x4 or x8 slot wired into an x16 physical aren't that rare either - means greater compatibility with whatever you might need to hook up).

 

On the PSU compatibility thing - I'll defer to werne; I'm not very familiar with the issue.

 

Gaming performance, as Werne points out, is generally GPU limited - sure if you had a really really terrible CPU (like a first-generation Athlon64) it would be a big bottleneck, but the GPU makes a much bigger difference at the end of the day (e.g. if you put a GTX Titan with said Athlon64 it would still probably have a chance, whereas if it had a GeForce 6200 it'd have no chance - but having a newer CPU along with that Titan would be the best situation; by contrast having an FX-9590 with a GeForce 6200 would still have no chance). I'd look at upgrading the graphics card if/when possible - wouldn't worry so much about "generations" (unless major technical changes (e.g. API updates, major hardware fixes (like GF6->7 was a big deal), etc) happen, it's mostly marketing in action - sure "newer is faster" is often true, but by how much and whether or not it's worth the money is another story); just look for something faster. GTX 770 for example (which is basically a GTX 680 under all the branding - its clocked a nudge faster) would be faster, so would one of the higher-spec Radeon R9 cards. If you aren't playing at very high resolutions + the very newest games, you may not need this upgrade however (that doesn't mean ignore replacing unreliable/failing parts).

Edited February 9, 2014 by obobski

[Rennn]

 

The i5 I linked to is the same cost as the FX you linked, but the i5 benchmarks faster in core per core performance and virtually no games use more than 4 cores.

Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, Far Cry 3, just off the top of my head. A lot of software is abandoning serial and going for parallel scaling as well.

 

And to clarify something Thor there seems to miss, 8350 is kind of an "overclocker's choice" processor. The 8320 is a lower-binned 8350 with lower out-of-the-box clocks than 8350 which costs $160, may not reach the same level of overclock but costs $50-60 less and it's also unlocked. Enable one core per compute unit (improves per-core performance by ~10% by removing resource sharing) and raise the frequency to some 4.2-4.5GHz, you basically get an i5 with an unlocked multiplier and enabling all cores means you have 8 cores if you need them for games that do scale. Depending on binning, 8320 should reach 4-4.3GHz on stock voltage with 8 cores, 4.1-4.5 with 4 cores, no fear of frying the mobo either if you dsable the modules since power draw drops by ~40%.

 

But to be honest, I keep mine at 4.2GHz with all cores enabled (stock voltage) and, I'm yet to see a game other than Starcraft II to be running under 60FPS because of the CPU, I'm GPU-bound in everything with a 7770. Thor runs a GTX 780 Ti so he may have more info on how the CPU alone performs. My 8320 only flops in strategy games with my setting, but even Intel's i7s tend to struggle with those since RTS are completely serial, they only use one core, so you'll get 45FPS instead of 60FPS which doesn't seem to be that much of a difference to me in those kinds of games. I went i5-3570K to FX 8320, can't say I see any difference other than in software compile and 3D render times which benefit from more cores.

 

With a GTX 660, difference between an FX-8320 @4.2GHz (or 8350 on stock) and i5-4670 in games other than RTS falls within a margin of error, you'd be GPU-bound since 660 is on-par with Radeon 7870 which is a last-gen mid-range card (nearly 2 generations behind looking from Nvidia side, with Maxwell coming up soon and all that). If I recall correctly, you keep your games locked to 30FPS, or am I mistaken? If you're capping them, you may as well get the 8320 and keep it on stock, it'll definitely run anything at over 30FPS, now and in the future. If not, a small bump in clocks and you're at 60FPS in anything other than RTS (again, due to serial processing).

 

For an AMD CPU for low cost, I'd go with this combo:

 

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P - $80 - It's a 4+1 and not an 8+2 but it has VRM cooling, it's got 6x SATA 3 ports, 2x USB 3.0 and 6x USB 2.0.

CPU: AMD FX 8320 - $160 - It's a solid unit, overclocks decently, and cheaper than 8350 while being pretty much the same except for stock frequency.

Total price - $240

 

 

 

But if you're determined to go with Intel, I'd suggest an H87 board, they are cheaper and you don't really need the overclocking features for a locked CPU. And I'd also get an aftermarket cooler if I were you, Ivy Bridge and Haswell are toasty even on stock, my old i5 would run at 86^oC on a stock cooler and around 72^oC with Arctic Freezer 13, Haswell runs even hotter than Ivy from what I hear.

 

Also, here's a big, fat note - Haswell are touchy when it comes to power supply units, it may run on yours but the general consensus is to get a "Haswell certified" PSU. So yeah, you may need to get a new PSU, with an "unsupported" PSU you basically BSOD every now and then, and maybe even f*** up your PC since the 12V rail goes bonkers. Here's a list of compatible units, 750W Earthwatts Green falls under "has not been confirmed". New PSU is an additional expense but it's better than having problems or dead components down the road. My recommendation is XFX, those are re-branded SeaSonic units and are regarded as great quality units.

 

As for the rest, 1TB and 2TB Seagate models I've seen all had some issues, ranging from firmware problems to being DOA. I generally recommend Hitachi or WD for large drives, more expensive but they seem to be more sturdy and stable. Personally, I don't really see the point of HDDs larger than 1TB other than for static storage, I'd rather take a 120GB SSD instead and a 1TB drive since it would make a bigger overall difference than the CPU, unless you actually need 2TB of storage.

 

 

Haven't personally tried BF 4, but Crysis 3 recommends a quad core and Far Cry 3 recommends a dual core. I mean, do you have a source for FC3 using more than 4 cores? It's one of my favorite games, if it really does use 6 that might be worth going for an AMD octa-core. But my CPU hits 48-50% load and locks there every time my framerate drops in FC3, so that seems to indicate it does only use 2 cores, which would make an i5 more effective. :s

 

I'd rather not overclock...

I do cap at 30 fps, specifically so I don't have to overclock or upgrade as often.

A stock 660 benchmarks 10% faster than a 7870 Ghz, and a 660 GC benchmarks more than 20% faster than a stock 7870. There is a significant difference. I know because I compared 7870s and 660s a lot before I decided on a 660.

 

I'll look at Western Digital HDDs, there was one a bit more expensive I was considering instead of the Seagate one I linked to.

[Rennn]

 

Gaming performance, as Werne points out, is generally GPU limited - sure if you had a really really terrible CPU (like a first-generation Athlon64) it would be a big bottleneck, but the GPU makes a much bigger difference at the end of the day (e.g. if you put a GTX Titan with said Athlon64 it would still probably have a chance, whereas if it had a GeForce 6200 it'd have no chance - but having a newer CPU along with that Titan would be the best situation; by contrast having an FX-9590 with a GeForce 6200 would still have no chance). I'd look at upgrading the graphics card if/when possible - wouldn't worry so much about "generations" (unless major technical changes (e.g. API updates, major hardware fixes (like GF6->7 was a big deal), etc) happen, it's mostly marketing in action - sure "newer is faster" is often true, but by how much and whether or not it's worth the money is another story); just look for something faster. GTX 770 for example (which is basically a GTX 680 under all the branding - its clocked a nudge faster) would be faster, so would one of the higher-spec Radeon R9 cards. If you aren't playing at very high resolutions + the very newest games, you may not need this upgrade however (that doesn't mean ignore replacing unreliable/failing parts).

 

 

Most of my games are limited by my graphics card, but those I can all keep above 30 fps anyway. The only games I really need the improvement for (the ones that drop below 30 sometimes) are CPU limited, or strongly hint that they're CPU limited. Like Oblivion, which uses one CPU core. Or Borderlands 2, as the framerate dives as soon as I switch PhysX to CPU processed.