Help me upgrade my computer

[nocthesis]

 

 

 

Thanks for the advice. I do use LOOT.

 

Damn though the 1080 is hella expensive. Would a 6gb 1060 be any improvement? It isn't much more expensive then the 970, and obviously that's another 2gb of vram. Is there anything less than a 1080 that will let me go through Boston without 25fps with mods? lol

 

It is an improvment, 6gb, no slower ram and so on, but rly depends on your goal and future plans.

 

Do you wanna play @ 1080p? Or do have plans to go wild with 1440p/144hz or 4k?

 

Alternatively, 1070 / 1070 ti. You can get a evga sc black for ~ $450.

 

Really I'd just like my setup now to play properly. I run it at a standard 1920 x 1080 resolution - my monitor isn't great, but I don't have massive sums of money rn. I do generally like how my game looks right now - I generlaly use a lot of 2k (and the occasional) 4k texture, and this really runs fine outside of the big cities. Just not having it dip below the 40s at the very least would be nice.

 

Also honestly on the matter of coolers I'm completely clueless. I don't know what I have now but my computer gets ridiculously hot. How expensive are they?

 

 

If you wanna stick to 1080p@ 60hz (60 fps) the 1060 is fine enough with 6gb and 192-bit.

But you may still need some ini tweaks and via the nvidia control panel for a smooth/smoother gameplay.

Beth's engine is sometimes a hit and miss in performance.

 

Cooling, well check your temps while gaming, heat can/will throttle the performance.

And you could open your case and take a look what u have inside.

Since you have the i7 non-k, possible you have the intel stock cooler, basic, nothing special.

 

A good one for example Cryorig H7 or be quiet pure rock~ $35

A case cooling setup with at least 1x intake and 1x exhaust would also help a lot. Most brands like corsair offering a fan pack with 2 or 3 Fans for ~ $25-$30

 

 

To make things a bit easier..

 

Is it a custom or pre-build pc?

 

And what's your budget?

 

Only running mods or stuff like enb and or reshade too?

 

It was pre-built, but I bought the graphics card and the SSD myself.

I'd say budget wise I don't want to really spend more then £200 in surplus (meaning I'd of course sell my 970, which should get me back at least 100 quid or so). The 1060 is within my budget, and if I can get a cooling system to stop my sweltering when I'm playing that would be a bonus.

 

I do run an ENB, Subtle ENB. Turning it off really had no effect on my FPS, which wasn't surprising seeing as though it's only a (subtle, lol) change.

 

I'm also noticing my textures don't seem to load sometimes. In conversation with Preston I noticed my armour was really, really low-res.

[nocthesis]

 

 

 

Thanks for the advice. I do use LOOT.

 

Damn though the 1080 is hella expensive. Would a 6gb 1060 be any improvement? It isn't much more expensive then the 970, and obviously that's another 2gb of vram. Is there anything less than a 1080 that will let me go through Boston without 25fps with mods? lol

 

It is an improvment, 6gb, no slower ram and so on, but rly depends on your goal and future plans.

 

Do you wanna play @ 1080p? Or do have plans to go wild with 1440p/144hz or 4k?

 

Alternatively, 1070 / 1070 ti. You can get a evga sc black for ~ $450.

 

Really I'd just like my setup now to play properly. I run it at a standard 1920 x 1080 resolution - my monitor isn't great, but I don't have massive sums of money rn. I do generally like how my game looks right now - I generlaly use a lot of 2k (and the occasional) 4k texture, and this really runs fine outside of the big cities. Just not having it dip below the 40s at the very least would be nice.

 

Also honestly on the matter of coolers I'm completely clueless. I don't know what I have now but my computer gets ridiculously hot. How expensive are they?

 

 

If you wanna stick to 1080p@ 60hz (60 fps) the 1060 is fine enough with 6gb and 192-bit.

But you may still need some ini tweaks and via the nvidia control panel for a smooth/smoother gameplay.

Beth's engine is sometimes a hit and miss in performance.

 

Cooling, well check your temps while gaming, heat can/will throttle the performance.

And you could open your case and take a look what u have inside.

Since you have the i7 non-k, possible you have the intel stock cooler, basic, nothing special.

 

A good one for example Cryorig H7 or be quiet pure rock~ $35

A case cooling setup with at least 1x intake and 1x exhaust would also help a lot. Most brands like corsair offering a fan pack with 2 or 3 Fans for ~ $25-$30

 

 

To make things a bit easier..

 

Is it a custom or pre-build pc?

 

And what's your budget?

 

Only running mods or stuff like enb and or reshade too?

 

It was pre-built, but I bought the graphics card and the SSD myself.

I'd say budget wise I don't want to really spend more then £200 in surplus (meaning I'd of course sell my 970, which should get me back at least 100 quid or so). The 1060 is within my budget, and if I can get a cooling system to stop my sweltering when I'm playing that would be a bonus.

 

I do run an ENB, Subtle ENB. Turning it off really had no effect on my FPS, which wasn't surprising seeing as though it's only a (subtle, lol) change.

 

I'm also noticing my textures don't seem to load sometimes. In conversation with Preston I noticed my armour was really, really low-res.

[nocthesis]

Since you have 16GB of system RAM, try ENBoost. It fools the game into "thinking" that system RAM is V-RAM.

 

Rule of thumb for the enblocal.ini RAM settings is System RAM + V-RAm - amount of RAM the operating system needs, which is around 3GB. In your case that would be 16+4-3=17GB that can be allocated to the game, but setting it to 12288MB should suffice to cover the 10GB RAM spikes encountered in the game.

 

Also be aware that the game is so badly optimised that everybody, even owners of a 1080 or 1080ti, experiences serious drops in fps in Downtown Boston, Boston Commons, Freedom Trail and in other unspecified places. I'm running on a Vega64 and have the same appaling results. It's just the nature of the game. Don't be fooled by those who claim they have a constant 60fps everywhere or even over a hundred. Not possible in FO4...

 

Getting an SSD for FO4 won't help either as FO4 is maybe the only game around that doesn't benefit from an SSD because of the switch from direct rendering to in-game streaming Bethesda introduced with version 1.3 or 1.4 of the game. The streaming slows down RAM flushing and the speed gain of the SSD is neutralised through the slow buffering/flushing of the RAM. It also makes for textures staying murky for a while or even constantly when RAM stops flushing altogether. FO4 is also very badly optimised for RAM use supervision, you see.

Would I have to install that separately? I'm already using Subtle ENB, so can I go straight ahead and modify enblocal?

 

My computer was prebuilt, but I bought the card and the SSD myself. The SSD has helped with loading screens - which used to be horrific, but I'm still noticing low-res textures. In conversation with Preston my characters armour looked really damn ugly and low-res.

 

EDIT: oops, not sure what's happened there lol, seems to have reposted a few times. Sorry.

Edited June 2, 2018 by nocthesis

[EyMi]

It was pre-built, but I bought the graphics card and the SSD myself.

 

 

 

I'd say budget wise I don't want to really spend more then £200 in surplus (meaning I'd of course sell my 970, which should get me back at least 100 quid or so). The 1060 is within my budget, and if I can get a cooling system to stop my sweltering when I'm playing that would be a bonus.

 

I do run an ENB, Subtle ENB. Turning it off really had no effect on my FPS, which wasn't surprising seeing as though it's only a (subtle, lol) change.

 

I'm also noticing my textures don't seem to load sometimes. In conversation with Preston I noticed my armour was really, really low-res.

 

 

Go back to page 1, last post, should help you.

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/6695612-help-me-upgrade-my-computer/&do=findComment&comment=60600932

 

 

But I'm wondering.. you have the same fps with and without the enb.

I have a at least a difference between 5-20 fps.

 

 

Anyway if u wanna upgrade, a pre-built could be a bit tricky, case size, psu may is an itx or other form and so on.

Would also check the psu, chances are high it's a basic/low-end oem psu with low watts.. nothing I would use for gaming.

A quality one is ~ 60 bucks.

 

But before going to upgrade try some tweaks first and the enb boost.

[JimmyRJump]

No, you can change the existing enblocal.ini.

An SSD helps with loading screens, sure, because, apart from the rotation and changing text, they're static pictures. There's no layers involved that need to be rendered in a certain order with umpteen amounts of textures for each layer.

[nocthesis]

Guys enboost has definitely made a difference - the most notable being textures are actually loading now properly. In terms of FPS it's still a bit of a mess - walking around the Boston Common it was at a solid 60fps, but then I turned down the street and it started stuttering and fell the 20s before picking back up at around 35. Thanks for the tip though, it has made a definite difference.

 

If enboost utilises my full memory, wouldn't that invalidate the benefits of getting a new card? If that's so, are there any more practical ways I can reduce the choppiness?

 

Yeah I've already came into problems with it being prebuilt. I had to disconnect my disk drive to connect my SSD because I didn't have enough ports.. :sad:

 

Like I said my PC does get incredibly hot though.. when I went off game my cores were averaging around 50c, and that's after a while to settle down. I have all my windows open and I'm still sweating like mad. You said you reckon that can negatively affect performance?

Edited June 2, 2018 by nocthesis

[JimmyRJump]

For a processor/CPU, 90°C is the absolute max to keep things safe, 80°C is my personal limit. An average of 50°C isn't that high when gaming, especially when considering the ambient temperature in the room. Lower is better, of course.

 

A GPU can take temps up to a 100°C.

 

And yes, pre-built brand PCs have several shortcomings, the most explicit one being that the power supply is always a specimen that has just enough juice to keep the boat floating as you bought it. Add an item that needs more power and you need to replace the PSU

 

Secondly, the lay-out of the inside of the case is often done in such a way that you can't even add an extra hard drive

 

Third, the mainboards are mostly from known manufacturors, but built to the specifications of the brand selling the PC. One thing that suffers is the BIOS, which often gets trunkated with overclocking options being unavailable. This is usually for computers that are sold as workstations.

 

Fourth, most brands like Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Alienware actually don't manufacture any of the components inside the computer, not even the enclosure.

 

Fifth, speaking of enclosures, a case from a brand PC is often generic and doesn't have many options to add extra case-fans for cooling purposes, let alone space for water cooling, should you opt to go that route.

 

Buying components and assembling a computer yourself is a bit more expensive than buying a pre-built brand PC, but it has the advantage you can buy according to budget at whatever time you want and can upgrade whenever you want, as long as you stay within the same form factor (usually ATX) and socket type (the footprint in which the CPU fits).

 

To ameliorate the gaming experience, use as little 4K textures as possible. That GTX970 can handle 2K without a problem though. Also have a look at optimised texture packs like the Vivid series from Hein84.

 

At this point in time, I don't think there's a GPU in existence that will run FO4 in an acceptable way because of the sloppy work Bethesda did in porting FO4 to PC. It's the same mess we got with the initial 2011 Skyrim release. I've been running the game ona Vega64 GPU since a few weeks now and the results are more or less the same as with the much less powerful RX470 (MSI GamingX 8GB) I used before.

[EyMi]

Guys enboost has definitely made a difference - the most notable being textures are actually loading now properly. In terms of FPS it's still a bit of a mess - walking around the Boston Common it was at a solid 60fps, but then I turned down the street and it started stuttering and fell the 20s before picking back up at around 35. Thanks for the tip though, it has made a definite difference.

 

If enboost utilises my full memory, wouldn't that invalidate the benefits of getting a new card? If that's so, are there any more practical ways I can reduce the choppiness?

 

Yeah I've already came into problems with it being prebuilt. I had to disconnect my disk drive to connect my SSD because I didn't have enough ports.. :sad:

 

Like I said my PC does get incredibly hot though.. when I went off game my cores were averaging around 50c, and that's after a while to settle down. I have all my windows open and I'm still sweating like mad. You said you reckon that can negatively affect performance?

 

Heat can/will affect the performance, the cpu and gpu will lower the peformance to cool a bit down to avoiding damage.

50c avg. is okay, only worry about when the temps reaching above 70-80.

But as I said a good cooling setup and airflow will do wonders.

 

+ Jimmy's post above.

 

Your options are limited with pre-builts, u see, u alrdy had probs with the ssd.. that's not so cool if u wanna upgrade it :s

 

 

Hmm, well you could do one thing, since you have ~ 200 bucks, buy a decent atx case, a quality psu and a cpu cooler (That's stuff you can reuse over and over (up to one point)) and put the current hardware in it.

 

For example

Fractle Design Focus G (2 Fans inlc. so u can use it for 1x exhaust back and 1x intake front) or a nice modular case from be quiet like the pure base. But case is up to you since its more or less a personal taste, just skip the cheap basic line.

CPU Cooler Cryorig H5

Seasonic Focus 550w, fully modular that's a nice feautre.

That's ~ 160 bucks.

 

Save the rest for future upgrades like a new mobo, cpu and ram/maybe new gpu.

On the other hand, the 4th gen i7 is still good, just the oem mobo is meh ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

[nocthesis]

Thanks for the advice, I really do appreciate you guys trying to help me.

 

I was doing a bit of research and you guys really are right about optimisation. I was watching someone with a 1080 play through downtown Boston and their frames were just about the same as mine. I must just have to live with framedrops.

 

Quick question, I use "insignificant object remover", but I've heard that it actually damages performance via breaking precombines. Is this accurate?

[sopmac45]

Since you have 16GB of system RAM, try ENBoost. It fools the game into "thinking" that system RAM is V-RAM.

 

Rule of thumb for the enblocal.ini RAM settings is System RAM + V-RAm - amount of RAM the operating system needs, which is around 3GB. In your case that would be 16+4-3=17GB that can be allocated to the game, but setting it to 12288MB should suffice to cover the 10GB RAM spikes encountered in the game.

 

Also be aware that the game is so badly optimised that everybody, even owners of a 1080 or 1080ti, experiences serious drops in fps in Downtown Boston, Boston Commons, Freedom Trail and in other unspecified places. I'm running on a Vega64 and have the same appaling results. It's just the nature of the game. Don't be fooled by those who claim they have a constant 60fps everywhere or even over a hundred. Not possible in FO4...

 

Getting an SSD for FO4 won't help either as FO4 is maybe the only game around that doesn't benefit from an SSD because of the switch from direct rendering to in-game streaming Bethesda introduced with version 1.3 or 1.4 of the game. This was done to alleviate stress on the GPU, but the streaming slows down RAM flushing and the speed gain of the SSD is neutralised through the slow buffering/flushing of the RAM. It also makes for textures staying murky for a while or even constantly when RAM stops flushing altogether. FO4 is also very badly optimised for RAM use supervision, you see.

 

 

I do agree with JimmyRJump ... he nailed about everything and I would like to add ( to support what he said ) that I do have a Nvidia 1070, i7-6700, Z170 mobo, SSD, 16gb RAM and a Viewsonic 27" 165Hz ( I keep it at 144 though ) and even though I gain in a lot of places more than 60 fps, they are not constant and they vary even from 35 to 144 depending on where I am.

 

If you are trying to upgrade your computer, go with the 1080ti ( it is expensive ) or wait for the next Nvidia video cards. Your rig is not just about the video card but a combination of a lot of things ( hardware ) that must match all together to get the best out of your video card. With a 60Hz monitor and the Nvidia 1080ti, IMHO, it is not worth it. There are other games that run very nice and smooth above 60 Hz and the next generation of games will run above 60 fps so I think it is necessary for you to think about buying a new monitor and if you wait while saving, we will have soon in the market new monitors that are a dream.

 

This game and Skyrim are the best out there but as JimmyRJump said, their engine is crap and not matter how good your rig is, you will never get a constant fps above 60 and you will never avoid sometimes, to have some kind of stuttering and CTD's. Their engine really sucks because I have been playing for example The Witcher 3 and Dark Souls III for months and I have never had any CTD playing in Ultra settings. Save money as much as you can and jump directly to either the 1080 or the next video card generation. Happy gaming !