EPTComputer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 613
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
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SoulRiM
Germany53 Posts
According to cpu.userbenchmark.com the i5 is still a bit stronger (especially overclocked) as long as we're taölomg single to quad thread. I might just try it and see how it works. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
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Disregard
China10252 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
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XenOmega
Canada2822 Posts
Hey everyone! I just realized that my computer only have... 4 GB OF RAM Mobo MSI P67A-G43 (B3) GPU : R9 290 Corsair CMV4GX3M2A1333C9 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1333 Seasonic SS-600ET 600W EPS12V 24PIN Ultrawide resolution 2560x1080. RAM (2133) : I think that's the fastest my Mobo can support. Is it worth spending 100$ (for 16 GB ddr3-2133 ram, assuming my mobo can support it) for a Sandy Bridge build? Should I just save the money and spend it on a new build (when the next generation of CPU comes out)? Should I just buy some random 1333 ram to get a total of 8+ on my system? | ||
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
RAM speed has very little impact on performance. Amount of RAM can have a very big impact on performance... if you don't have enough. It's a case of if you have enough, more is useless. If you have too little, horrible slowdowns await. Does everything more or less run fine, but you're wondering if you're missing out? If yes, you're not missing out. Don't buy more ram. Every once in awhile, when you're doing a lot of stuff, does everything slow down to a horrible crawl that drives you mad, with just enough activity to convince you that your computer hasn't outright frozen? Then you have too little RAM, only 4GB is hurting you. More RAM will probably eliminate the bad slowdowns, but not help in other ways. I'm not sure how easy it is to mix & match RAM. But if you decide on a stop gap & can find a similar 2x2gb RAM set for cheap, that's probably the way to go. When I upgraded, I just went for 2x4gb though, as my CPU cooler covers a RAM slot. So I can't guarantee that'd work. I wouldn't spend more than necessary to get to 8gb in a reasonable fashion: if you choose to get a new build with a next gen CPU, you'll probably want DDR4, so won't be able to reuse RAM that fits in your current system. | ||
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Craton
United States17303 Posts
"Too little" RAM is actually a very broad statement. Operating systems are very good at swapping around RAM and when you have an SSD paging actually isn't that bothersome, depending on how much and what's being swapped. If you're totally running out playing a game with nothing else running then yes, you'll have a lot of issues, but for the most part you can have less RAM than you "need" and still not see that much of a performance hit in real-world usage. | ||
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XenOmega
Canada2822 Posts
By pushing the system to its limits, there seems to be some gains in FPS with faster ram. As for my own build, I'm not sure :S | ||
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
Just a communication issue. I consider a few FPS in some games/slightly faster loads in Photoshop or whatever to be "very little impact". I expect that also fits your description of "non-negligible impact". There IS a benefit from faster ram. Whether you consider that to be worthwhile is subjective. My description of slowdowns is pretty accurate though. I didn't have an SSD at the time, but I saw a major improvement in performance when I switched from 4gb to 8gb matching my description. Because HDDs are slow. Could I have eliminated that with a different usage pattern (shutting down Chrome before opening a game, keeping fewer tabs open)? Probably. But I didn't want to have a different usage pattern. @XenOmega I'll go ahead and assume their numbers are reliable, but they're playing with a lot of variables there. For example, a lot of times they're comparing a stock i5 with slow ram against an overlcocked i5 with fast ram. How do you tell if the improvement in performance comes from the overclocking (my assumption) or the RAM? You can't. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
I'll go ahead and assume their numbers are reliable, but they're playing with a lot of variables there. For example, a lot of times they're comparing a stock i5 with slow ram against an overlcocked i5 with fast ram. How do you tell if the improvement in performance comes from the overclocking (my assumption) or the RAM? You can't. They have some other videos and there are other benchmarks. They often list like 7 different benchmarks next to a sequence as well so you can compare stock with slow RAM vs fast RAM vs overclocked with slow or fast RAM etcetc. There are solid gains in quite a lot of games these days but the benefits are bigger and easier to see with Haswell and Skylake CPU's. In this case i would suggest buying 8GB or 16GB of ~2133+ RAM - whatever doesn't cost that much more than cheaper RAM. There's enough benefit to justify a cost difference but there's no point picking percentages with an i5 2500k as they'll get left in the dust by todays gen CPU's either way. 4GB of RAM just isn't enough today IMO, Belial used to argue for it in like 2012 but we're just going to need more memory over time and we're getting to the point where you can hit 4GB too easily with just windows 7 and a game open. Some games will take more than 4GB of memory alone, not counting the operating system and without being that badly optimized just because they've got a lot of shit open (I think i've seen Planetside 2 using over 5GB as they have a ton of things and an open world 64 square kilometer continent that you can fly across with aircraft). I think that you can make 8GB work fairly easily if you're paying attention to your usage, 16 allows for more careless use without worry and more is mainly for those guys who want to do something with a ton of RAM. http://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performance/page3.html This is one of the better digitalfoundry videos. The number on the left is current FPS, the one on the right is average FPS for the whole benchmark. Teal (stock, 2133) vs Red (stock, 3200) are the best two sets of data to look at, IMO, and although this video tops out at 3200mhz there's evidence that significant gains continue well past that point (in the link above and other sources) At the end of the first test on GTA5 they're at 72.6 vs 63.5fps. Some people will label that as "9fps better", i'd rather say +14.33% more performance because that's more accurate and easily comparable when you have people that may be playing the game at different framerates. That's just from switching from 2133 to 3200 RAM, probably both at ~c15 and ~c16. Frequency tends to help more than latency in general (but it varies game to game), even though there has also been a dramatic latency improvement here. A friend was benching tf2 and said that it didn't care much for frequency but liked a latency optimized preset, meanwhile i've seen benchmarks for starcraft 2 showing almost no response to latency improvements but large gains from increased frequency. The fast RAM test is using two 980ti's (so performance is comparable to the upcoming Titan / 1080ti / big Vega cards) though it is at 1440p - the Digitalfoundry tests are at 1080p i believe with a titan x (~gtx1070 performance). They're both relevant to actual gaming but may not apply as much or to as many games if your graphics card is weaker (more limiting at lower FPS) or you're favoring playing at lower framerates than they are testing. ------------ If the game is being held back by the GPU with your specific system, settings combination and whatever things you're doing in the game at that particular time, your memory or CPU speed changes won't improve performance. These benchmarks take care to push the non-graphics-card systems hard in order to find the limitations of their performance and then see how much they can be improved via CPU and memory performance increases. For an example (made up FPS) - if your GPU can manage 50fps, you won't see that faster RAM allows your CPU to handle 70fps instead of 60fps because you'll be stuck at 50fps in that test ------------ I hope this is as clear as possible - length helps to explain stuff, but it also makes it harder to read and understand. @ MisterFred there's pretty strong evidence for more consistent and larger gains from RAM perf now, that was not the case some years ago (: I hope that's sufficient for you to see. One of the best examples would be 8GB of ddr4 2133 vs 8GB of ddr4 3000 costing about $5 different iirc yet giving more than 10% FPS gains in some games - that's a 0.5% cost increase to a 1k system and a 10% FPS increase, well worth it by almost any measure even if it only applies to a fraction of the things you're doing. | ||
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Incognoto
France10239 Posts
On June 30 2016 21:16 Cyro wrote: I don't think the 7970 to rx480/970 upgrade is worth it. The performance upgrade is closer to 1.5x than to 2x. Paying $380 instead of $200 to gain over 2.75x performance instead of 1.65x performance (extremely rough numbers) actually makes some sense - the "performance gained per dollar" ratio is actually quite bad when you're upgrading to something that's relatively close to what you already have. The rx480 / 970 performance tier is also just pretty low in 2017 era. We don't have 14/16nm flagships yet and when they arrive for the generation you'll see the rx480 positioned in price and performance in a similar way that the gtx950-960 is now - as much as three to four times slower than the flagships. Pretty nice if that's what you want, but when they say "high end performance for $200" they're talking about high end in 2013 yeah that summed it up nicely really gonna wait another generation or so $200 for x2 over a 7970 would be nice, i'm not even playing GPU games these days e: they call me slowpoke | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
$200 for x2 over a 7970 would be nice, i'm not even playing GPU games these days It may dip that low in the next 6-12 months - or paying $250-300 for 2.5x - 2.75x might be possible, etc. 4 years worth of features may not be irrelevant to you as well, either. I'm pretty excited for Pascal NVENC since Nvidia is dramatically improving it every gen (doubled h264 performance, more stuff) The h265 performance is coming along too - http://i.imgur.com/g2p7bbS.jpg - CPU used here is a 3570k. Of course CPU encoding is dramatically better quality but raw speed and freedom of use is hard to ignore - 8x faster than x265 Faster, 14x faster than Medium and just on the GPU free for you to utilize. Right now i live record days of gameplay @720p120 - grab the stuff that i want to keep, delete the rest, re-encode after w/ x264 or x265 for archiving. | ||
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
Great RAM lesson, thank you. I'm certainly biased to a more conservative strategy of "if it's more or less working ok, save up for that big upgrade when you're buying 16gb of fast DDR4". But that sure doesn't bring immediate gains. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
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Craton
United States17303 Posts
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Sholip
Hungary422 Posts
On July 07 2016 06:00 Cyro wrote: + Show Spoiler + On July 06 2016 05:24 Sholip wrote: Hi everyone, I am currently planning on buying a new computer because the old one is getting... well... old, and I also share it with my brother, so I really need a new one. What is your budget? About $900 worth of HUF. What is your monitor's native resolution? 1920×1080 What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings? Starcraft 2 and Overwatch on the best settings. What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming? Nothing in particular at the moment. Maybe FEM simulations later down the road, but it's not top priority. Do you intend to overclock? No. Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire? No. Do you need an operating system? No, I already have Windows 10. Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget? Yes, but it's not part of the budget. If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify. Not really. What country will you be buying your parts in? Hungary. If you have any retailer preferences, please specify. None. I'm fine with going with a prebuilt computer as I don't really know much about the building stuff sadly. I was originally thinking of an i7-6700 and a GTX970, with 8 or 16 GB RAM. However, after looking around, I found that I couldn't fit both the i7 and the 970 in the budget. Alternatively, I could go with i5-6500 or i5-6400 and GTX960, I guess? Do you guys think those specs are realistic given my goals and budget in the first place? If so, which one would you rather choose, the i7 or the 970? Do I need 16 GB RAM at all (I guess it's not the most expensive part in the end)? These are really questions that if answered would help me start out at all. Any help is much appreciated!  You shouldn't be sacrificing stuff to get i7, especially when overwatch and sc2 won't benefit (overwatch may, but only if you're trying to maintain an extremely high fps like over 200.. sc2 doesn't benefit at all from HT) 8GB of 16GB RAM just depends what you'll want to use, there's no correct answer and it's fairly cheap either way Thanks for the tips (and sorry for responding this late)! After looking around for prebuilt PCs in local webshops, I found the following build which I think comes closest to my goals and budget: Motherboard: MSI H110M PRO CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 4x3,3Ghz RAM: 8GB DDR4 2133Mhz HDD: 1TB SATA GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX970 4GB OC VGA/HDMI +Optical drive This totals about $780 (223k HUF). However, it does not specify what PSU the build has. But since it's prebuilt, it's safe to assume it has an adequate PSU, right? Also, for some reason, this build seems to be significantly cheaper than other companies' prebuilt ones. There isn't something obviously fishy here, is there? Do you think it would be a good buy? Thanks in advance! | ||
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20345 Posts
The other thing i'd be looking out for would be exactly which version of the 970 it has. The cooler that's on a graphics card makes up for the majority of the noise in a system while gaming and choices in cooler and card design can impact performance and longevity. It's generally a bad idea to buy the cheapest graphics card coolers but they show up in prebuilts like this because of people who only look at the "970" part and the $$ number. No SSD is also weird and cheap in <current year> as they have so much impact on general system performance, snappyness, loading times etc | ||
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