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On December 09 2015 00:51 bluegarfield wrote:@Icystorage:Alright, the APU 5800K is apparently quite old (sorry I don't keep myself updated with AMD CPU), and even a 750Ti should totally beat it, like may be double the performance. So, your upgrade path - in term of increasing performance, and of course increasing price - is 750Ti < GTX950 (~20%^ better than 750Ti) < GTX960~R9 380 (~15%^ or more). So look up the price and see what fit your budget. For actual FPS number, check out here, all the GPUs in consideration are there, and they even have Dota2 benchmark T__T. So, as for if a GPU is worth it or not, honestly I don't follow AMD CPU enough, but seem like your CPU will bottleneck sooner or later, and you probably will feel the need to upgrade to new CPU soon, depending on your budget and your tolerance running game at low fps. A GTX960- R9 380 will last you probably 2-3 years at least, playing light games like dota2 at max setting, or newest heavyweight like fallout4 at medium/low setting, still better than nothing. Those 2 cards can fit well into your potential CPU upgrade as well. The 750Ti is the cheapest among the bunch, but in 1-1.5years time when you upgrade your CPU, 750Ti may not cut it anymore. So the more expensive card is a better investment. However future-proofing is something not to overdo. edit: I actually went to consider upgrading to Broadwell for both CPU+iGPU performance. But while CPU performance is good, the iGPU performance increment is not significant to justify the huge cost. so nevermind that T_T
hi, thank you for your thoughtful reply and I will research more based on your suggestions  youve been very helpful. sorry for the late reply
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
You never want your PSU to run near its limit, it's recommended for the computers full load to not draw more than 75% of what the PSU is specced for
For a bad PSU, maybe. You can use ~80-90% of rated continuous power without worrying.
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Yes, even for overclocking. A 960 is half of a 980 and only one third of a Titan X - they consume about 100/200/300w at moderate clocks or 125/250/375w at very aggressive voltages for 24/7 OC's. A lot of the factory OC cards use high voltages out of the box - my 970/980 used 1.225v which is basically the maximum voltage settable and that drastically inflates stock power consumption numbers which can then stay very similar as you add clock speed but little extra voltage
You can comfortably overclock a 6600k and a 960 with little power consumption; in the ~200-300w range depending on how aggressive you are with OC's. That's when power-stress-testing with everything at simultaneous 100% load
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On December 09 2015 10:49 IceHism wrote:Show nested quote +On December 09 2015 09:18 Craton wrote:
Tom's Hardware puts the load of a 960 well below 200W under a torture test and close to 100W under a gaming load. 350W is probably a little low for the rig, but I doubt you need more than 500W, probably less. even for overclocking though?
Tom's Hardware puts the 6600K at 53W draw under a gaming load and 73W under a torture load with a 91W TDP. I believe this was at stock, but I didn't see it explicitly said since there was some talk about them spending time overclocking the CPUs.
In any event, you're not going to reach simultaneous torture loads on both and even in gaming situations it's been my experience that only one of the two (CPU or GPU) is under full load at a time.
So, if we take a gaming load for both and somehow overclock enough double the power consumption*, you're still only talking 200W + 100W = 300W. The rest of the system is going to use a fairly small amount of power combined (<50W I'd wager). My custom NAS only uses 100W total from the wall, (i.e. counting inefficiency -- CPU, 6 HDDs, ~6 fans).
*I couldn't find numbers for the 6600K, but the 6700K was only increasing its power consumption by <50% from stock to 4600 Mhz (Anandtech).
The numbers just don't speak to needing more than 500W to me.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
6700k stock uses 1.32v (4ghz) and 1.43v (4.2ghz turbo) on my CPU and many others so you can't really judge the power consumption from that. People are running to 4.6 - 4.7ghz, reducing voltage by 0.03v from stock and getting no change in power consumption, others are undervolting and dropping consumption by 50 watts at stock. 6600k's are at much lower clocks and voltages out of the box however so they have been mostly spared from intel's inability to set appropriate voltages.
A 6600k at 1.4v draws about 140w from the PSU in a CPU load like x264 encoding with 100% CPU. So take that, add 125w on the GPU and you're still struggling to find enough parts in the system to approach 300w from the PSU under combined 100% load.
Decent 350w PSU wouldn't be an issue, i'm not really a fan of buying that size though because 450-550w are not that much more expensive and are more capable of taking huge hardware upgrades (with the connectors and meat to support a big graphics card, even a used last gen one as they can get cheap). A good PSU can also be kept for multiple cpu/gpu upgrade cycles, along with other parts like the case and SSD. If that's not a big concern, it'd work fine.
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On December 09 2015 13:05 Cyro wrote:
For a bad PSU, maybe. You can use ~80-90% of rated continuous power without worrying.
You misunderstand, it's inefficient with power when it gets to the levels you mention, not forgetting degradation which reduces its capabilities in time which might be fine if you have more than you need but not if you're on the edge. There's also the inability for future upgrades unless you want to upgrade both the PSU and whatever else that was in mind.
So while you're technically about its ability to run his other components, something that I never even argued, it's still a terrible idea and I say again that he should get something better.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Even if you would stress a PSU that hard (which wouldn't happen) then it's fine.
For efficiency, the superflower golden green 450w has:
~88% efficiency at 20% load
~90% efficiency at 50% load
~88% efficiency at 100% load
so no significant difference there. And i'm pretty sure that no good PSU will degrade significantly when delivering 85% of its rated power, which would be a fair amount more than a system like that with overclocks would draw for the vast, vast majority of the time even when gaming etc.
Old+bad PSU's tended to lose a significant portion of their power capacity with age, that's not nearly as much of a thing now.
Not saying that particular 350w PSU is any good but there are plenty of great 450w units out there, maybe 350's too - and i won't hesitate to recommend a decent 350w unit to someone that will probably draw 250w full system power with CPU + GPU maxed simultaneously.
For the upgrade thing, i did write this:
Decent 350w PSU wouldn't be an issue, i'm not really a fan of buying that size though because 450-550w are not that much more expensive and are more capable of taking huge hardware upgrades (with the connectors and meat to support a big graphics card, even a used last gen one as they can get cheap). A good PSU can also be kept for multiple cpu/gpu upgrade cycles, along with other parts like the case and SSD. If that's not a big concern, it'd work fine.
I am no great PSU expert - there are some nice guys to ask on www.overclock.net about the finer details
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Thanks for the tips and the interesting discussion. I really appreciate it.
To make the discussion a bit more concrete, I seem to have a choice between the following four PSUs on this site:
Corsair CS450M (450W, 80 Plus Gold, 80 euros) link
Corsair CX500M (500W, 80 plus Bronze, 70 euros) link
Seasonic P-520 (520W, 80 Plus Platinum, 170 euros) link
Corsair RM550X (80 Plus Gold, 101 euros) link
Does Gold, or even Platinum, warrant the extra cost?
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Maybe I wasn't as up to date with PSU as I thought, efficiency curves does look better now. How about noise and such, that was also a concern back when I got my 650w gold one, worse power supplies were tested as very noisy at around or higher than 75%. I've always tried to target myself at 50% for efficiency and silence while still allowing for upgrades and be longer lasting.
@Ghanburighan:
Don't concern yourself about platinum rated ones, also I hear that the Corsair CX series is or at least was pretty damn bad. Don't know about their CS line but if it's alright then I would probably go for that 450W one at least.
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Damn, this thread is awesome!!!
Hello guys, I'm here to request some help since I'm going to heavily upgrade my PC, I built it around ~2011-2012, any responses are much appreciate!
What is your current build?
Intel i5-2500k
GTX 550 TI
16 GB RAM (4x4GB, 2133 mhz)
ASUS P67A-B3-D3
2 Kingstons SSD (120 Gb) and a 320 Gb hard drive that I'll most likely get ride of.
Power supply: Cooler Master GX Bronze 650 W
What is your monitor's native resolution?
My current monitor is 1680*1050 but I'm thinking of buying a new one in a 16 : 9 resolution (becuase of the black bars on twitch), 1920*1080 maybe?
Why do you want to upgrade? What do you want to achieve with the upgrade?
I only play 1v1 SC2, the main goal is to handle high graphic settings for SC2 and be able to stream in high quality resolution and high FPS (kind of like Neeb's stream or State's), basically, I want SC2 to run as smooth as possible.
Being able to play newer games like battlefront is good but not a priority.
What is your budget?
$1290 USD (900.000 CLP)
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Chile
If you have any brand or retailer preferences, please specify.
TT chile
PC Factory
In summary, I think I'm looking for:
- New CPU
- New GPU (my gpu is just really bad)
- New motherboard (if needed)
- New monitor
Thanks for taking the time of reading the post and also thanks in advance for any replies ^.^
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Is your 2500k overclocked? If you have a non-stock cooler for it, which is it?
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Hey Cyro!, thanks for replying, no it isn't and I don't have a non-stock cooler for it.
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Get a new monitor for sure. I use a the i5 2500k at work and really like that CPU. I would get a water cooling kit and see if that works well with those 2 additions. Cryo recommends the 4790k and will be able to tell you better what you should do. You dont need to do anything to your GPU for sc2 i believe
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
6600k not 4790k :D
and they're better, is just that you can get a good fraction of the performance gain (nearly half?) from taking 2500k to ~4.6ghz
much faster GPU would be good for other games
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I have 2x2GB Ram, can I just buy a 2GB ram so I have 6GB in total? I noticed that I can't play games from today because they need >6gb ram (minimum system requirement in many games).
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Most of the games that post that don't need it
you can go to 3x2GB but with a dual channel memory controller, that means running the last 2GB at half bandwidth. That's not neccesarily a huge problem but it can sometimes have significant impact on performance
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@Darkness2k11:
If you're determined to spend some of that budget here's what I would do. I don't think the 2500k even when overclocked will give satisfactory fps in sc2 when streaming at higher settings(60fps?). http://i.imgur.com/UlTrtHy.png - if newer graphical games like battlefront that you mentioned was a concern then just go higher in the nvidia gtx tiers (950,960,970). If you're willing to overclock the new platform then 6600k instead of the 6700k could be an option too.
Overclocking is sound advice if you are looking to get a little closer with spending little to no money but if getting the highest frames possible is a concern then the latest generation of Intel is really the way to go.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
i think 6700k is just bad ATM unless you want to throw more money at system, wouldn't benefit from better GPU and prefer more ST performance to more MT (5820k). Costs too much and even when it helps a lot (not at all for sc2 or battlefront) it's not be as much as the cost increase
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@Cyro:
The 550Ti doesn't play well with Sc2 on ultra according to http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/541 -- so I wouldn't mind the 950 if I was him even in that case. It sucks they didn't bench it at 1080p without MSAA(which is gone in later versions of sc2) but I'm not sure if it would keep it over 60 at all times.
Also streaming at very high settings which he mentioned, HT does help to bring some of the load off the Sc2 cores no? Honestly I just took him at his word when he said he wanted to get as smooth as possible and wanted to offer an option closer to that then the overclock advice did that's all.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
If you're trying to stream 1920x1080@60fps then you want nvenc 100% for performance, cpu encoding is fine for lower resolution + fps (a 6600k @4.5ghz is stronger than an fx9590@5ghz for encoding)
i can outright test HT on vs off with skylake for playing sc2 + live encoding ~720p60/1080p30 even
with a 550ti, minimum FPS will drop to be CPU bound on ultra but if you insist on max shaders etc then a bit better gpu would be nice
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Yeah I would assume 720p60 and 1080p30 would be the relevant settings as trying to stream 1080p60 is just not viable on Twitch with their bitrate limits and trying to do it with nvenc is even scarier. I still consider the former to be high settings though and 720p60 is personally a favorite of mine.
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EPT
