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On January 21 2017 05:58 Chewits wrote:
Can anyone help me as to what processor and gfx card I can get to upgrade my machine? I am looking at running Elite Dangerous on Ultra.
What is your current build?
M/B - Asrock P67 PRO3 SE Motherboard (Socket 1155, Onboard Sound and LAN)
GFX - Sapphire 11179-09-20G HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
CPU - Intel® Core™ i5 2500K 3.30GHz Socket LGA1155 - Retail.d
RAM - 2x Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
PSU - Corsair CX 500W V2 ATX2.2 80 PLUS® Power Supply
What is your monitor's native resolution?
currently 1920x1080, may go bigger at a later stage.
Why do you want to upgrade? What do you want to achieve with the upgrade?
Want to run Elite Dangerous on ultra maxed out if possible!
What is your budget?
No fixed budget as I have no idea how much I need to spend. I am hoping just a CPU and GFX card upgrade.
What country will you be buying your parts in?
UK
If you have any brand or retailer preferences, please specify.
No pref
A GTX1060 3GB/ RX480 4GB for 1080p, or the 6GB and 8GB version respectively if you're going for 1440p. The 1070 would be recommended for playing at max settings at 1440p, though a 1060 should be able to handle Elite Dangerous.
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Northern Ireland1200 Posts
I forgot to say I am very interested in running Star Citizen maxed out and smooth. Are you saying just upgrading my GFX card will be sufficient ?
Cheers
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Processors haven't changed much, your i5 2500k will deal with mostly all games very well. If you want to stream games while playing them in 1080p or even 720p if it's a fairly CPU intensive game, you'll want a better processor, otherwise, fine the way it is.
The only thing that's crazy to me is how you're surviving with 4GB of RAM, and I think that would be a valuable upgrade, though you'd be having to buy DDR3 RAM, while DDR4 RAM is better, but not compatible with your chipset. If it was me, I'd probably buy 8GB of DDR3 RAM and I think both the GTX1060 and GTX1070 will treat you fine, for example Star Citizen cannot be maxed out on a single graphics card in 1440p, so you'll have to make some sacrifices... And just let your budget decide that for you, if an extra 40%~ performance is worth that extra cost.
Your PSU can handle it, and in my opinion you'd want to do the GPU upgrade now, and the RAM upgrade as a bit of a bandaid solution for like $50-60USD. Then maybe 3-4 years down the road do an upgrade on the CPU, which means motherboard too, RAM, and by that point you'll be reaching 10 years on the PSU, so a new power supply wouldn't hurt either, and blah blah, the whole system but the graphics card.
But for what you've explained you do in the short-term, yes a GPU upgrade along with 2 sticks of 4GB RAM is what you'd want.
If you'd want to upgrade your whole system, it'd be another $500-600USD for the hardware, and then if you're wanting to finally upgrade to an SSD (SSD's were fairly expensive when I was building my Sandy Bridge CPU), that's another $200~USD right there.
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Northern Ireland1200 Posts
On January 22 2017 00:23 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Processors haven't changed much, your i5 2500k will deal with mostly all games very well. If you want to stream games while playing them in 1080p or even 720p if it's a fairly CPU intensive game, you'll want a better processor, otherwise, fine the way it is.
The only thing that's crazy to me is how you're surviving with 4GB of RAM, and I think that would be a valuable upgrade, though you'd be having to buy DDR3 RAM, while DDR4 RAM is better, but not compatible with your chipset. If it was me, I'd probably buy 8GB of DDR3 RAM and I think both the GTX1060 and GTX1070 will treat you fine, for example Star Citizen cannot be maxed out on a single graphics card in 1440p, so you'll have to make some sacrifices... And just let your budget decide that for you, if an extra 40%~ performance is worth that extra cost.
Your PSU can handle it, and in my opinion you'd want to do the GPU upgrade now, and the RAM upgrade as a bit of a bandaid solution for like $50-60USD. Then maybe 3-4 years down the road do an upgrade on the CPU, which means motherboard too, RAM, and by that point you'll be reaching 10 years on the PSU, so a new power supply wouldn't hurt either, and blah blah, the whole system but the graphics card.
But for what you've explained you do in the short-term, yes a GPU upgrade along with 2 sticks of 4GB RAM is what you'd want.
If you'd want to upgrade your whole system, it'd be another $500-600USD for the hardware, and then if you're wanting to finally upgrade to an SSD (SSD's were fairly expensive when I was building my Sandy Bridge CPU), that's another $200~USD right there.
I have 2x 4GB RAM. I also have a 256mb SSD for programs/games and a standard 1tb drive for stuff.
Thanks for advice. Going to have a solid look then at GPUs. Any particular reason why the GTX range? What are the other competitors doing?
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On January 22 2017 00:52 Chewits wrote:Show nested quote +On January 22 2017 00:23 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Processors haven't changed much, your i5 2500k will deal with mostly all games very well. If you want to stream games while playing them in 1080p or even 720p if it's a fairly CPU intensive game, you'll want a better processor, otherwise, fine the way it is.
The only thing that's crazy to me is how you're surviving with 4GB of RAM, and I think that would be a valuable upgrade, though you'd be having to buy DDR3 RAM, while DDR4 RAM is better, but not compatible with your chipset. If it was me, I'd probably buy 8GB of DDR3 RAM and I think both the GTX1060 and GTX1070 will treat you fine, for example Star Citizen cannot be maxed out on a single graphics card in 1440p, so you'll have to make some sacrifices... And just let your budget decide that for you, if an extra 40%~ performance is worth that extra cost.
Your PSU can handle it, and in my opinion you'd want to do the GPU upgrade now, and the RAM upgrade as a bit of a bandaid solution for like $50-60USD. Then maybe 3-4 years down the road do an upgrade on the CPU, which means motherboard too, RAM, and by that point you'll be reaching 10 years on the PSU, so a new power supply wouldn't hurt either, and blah blah, the whole system but the graphics card.
But for what you've explained you do in the short-term, yes a GPU upgrade along with 2 sticks of 4GB RAM is what you'd want.
If you'd want to upgrade your whole system, it'd be another $500-600USD for the hardware, and then if you're wanting to finally upgrade to an SSD (SSD's were fairly expensive when I was building my Sandy Bridge CPU), that's another $200~USD right there. I have 2x 4GB RAM. I also have a 256mb SSD for programs/games and a standard 1tb drive for stuff. Thanks for advice. Going to have a solid look then at GPUs. Any particular reason why the GTX range? What are the other competitors doing?
Ah, you said 2x2GB initially, yeah 8GB will still be fine for a few years. And fair enough, we're reaching a price range where an SSD by itself will be sufficient at a reasonable price, but certainly your setup does just fine for now.
Well the RX480 is the best Radeon card there is from the competitors, and it's weaker than a GTX 1070. You could use two and cross-fire them, but you get losses to it not being optimized, it's pretty much always better to get a single card, than multiple cards in SLI/Crossfire. We've had discussions here of the RX 480 and GTX 1060, and overall their performance is very similar. Like so similar it doesn't matter, buy the card that is cheaper where you live, and potentially check the benchmarks for games you would like to play, since Nvidia and Radeon have drivers that have strengths in different areas, for example, the AMD cards are doing better in DirectX12 games, but usually worse elsewhere.
So yeah, you're pretty much narrowed down to 5 cards since that's all that exists at this level, and current generation is so much better than the last generation. So take a look at the benchmarks for the 1060 3GB, 1060 6GB, 480 4GB, 480 8GB, 1070 8GB. The only current generation cards that can beat them out would be the GTX 1080 and the Titan X Pascal, but those are not only extremely expensive, but also not good value per dollar. I'd recommend a new PSU if you're going to go higher than the GTX 1070 as well. Also your mobo only has PCIE 2.0 x16, which means that you'll sometimes be getting diminishing returns on the GTX 1080 due to insufficient transfer speeds (maybe 3-5% average performance drop over PCIE 3.0). A GTX 1070 should be fine though.
As for deciding to go for MSI, EVGA, etc... In my opinion it doesn't matter much. After you decide on one of those 5 cards... Most people still don't OC their graphics cards, I would just buy the cheapest one per clock performance. What I mean is if you're looking at a GTX 1060, it's base clock is 1708Mhz, so if you find that for say $250, and a OC'ed one to 1800Mhz for $260, get the second one. Temperature and noise wise, they will all be very similar... Particularly the Nvidia cards, they run very quiet and cool, hard for those aftermarket guys to mess up the fans on a card this simple. The only other thing you want to check is that each company puts different IO ports on the card, so just make sure it has all you need if you're going to do a multimonitor setup, or check that you already have all the cables, most should have what you need though. The base card comes with I think 3 Display Port, 1 HDMI, and 1 DVI I believe, but some like to skimp out and remove a few of those.
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Hey everyone! So im sick of getting low fps in sc2 and i'd like to build a new computer. Currently, I have a AMD FX-6300 Six core processor with a Nvidia GTX 950 GPU. So basically this is my media machine I would use for playing games and watching movies
What is your budget?
500-700 CAD
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1920x1080
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
Starcraft 2 mainly with some other games on the side. I'd like it to run on medium but with no fps drops in big late game fights.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Watching movies and browsing.
Do you intend to overclock?
Dont really care for overclocking but not agaisnt it either.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
no
Do you need an operating system?
no
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
no
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
For CPU I'd like to go for Intel since I heard they have better individual core performance and that its good for SC2
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Im in Canada.
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Nope
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On January 22 2017 05:54 Cosmoz wrote:
Hey everyone! So im sick of getting low fps in sc2 and i'd like to build a new computer. Currently, I have a AMD FX-6300 Six core processor with a Nvidia GTX 950 GPU. So basically this is my media machine I would use for playing games and watching movies
What is your budget?
500-700 CAD
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1920x1080
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
Starcraft 2 mainly with some other games on the side. I'd like it to run on medium but with no fps drops in big late game fights.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Watching movies and browsing.
Do you intend to overclock?
Dont really care for overclocking but not agaisnt it either.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
no
Do you need an operating system?
no
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
no
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
For CPU I'd like to go for Intel since I heard they have better individual core performance and that its good for SC2
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Im in Canada.
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Nope
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On January 10 2017 14:34 TT1 wrote:
Im making a budget PC as a gift for a friend. Im getting all the parts from NCIX (i want to have them assemble it so i can ship it to his house) so that limits my options somewhat. Ended up with this, thoughts?
CPU Intel Pentium G4560 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor $90
Motherboard: ASRock H110M-HDS Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard $50
GPU: GIGABYTE Radeon RX 460 2GB 145$
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB(2X4GB) 2133MHZ $80
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO SSD 500GB 219$
Case: Cougar Spike Micro ATX 50$
PSU: EVGA 430W 80+ 50$
Total: 680$ CAD
On January 10 2017 13:00 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Also, budget PC gaming looks super sick with Kaby Lake... There might not have been great improvements recently processors at the top end, but when you can build a system like this in $CAD:
CPU: G4560 (will give you 80%+ the performance of a 7700k in like every game)- $90~
Mobo: H110M PRO-VD M-ATX - $80
GPU: GTX1050 2GB (high or ultra in everything at 50fps+ at 1080p for modern games, stuff like SC2, Lol, Dota, CS, Overwatch it'll crush on highest settings) - $160
RAM: 8GBx1 Kingston Valueram DDR4 2133Mhz -$60
PSU: 430W Thermaltake or EVGA - $50
SSD: Blue Series SSD 500GB - $190
Case: Anything - $45
This $675 CAD bad boy will blow anything that cost $1200+ CAD 5 years ago.
With exchange rates, I'd expect the equivalent system to be around $500 (or a couple dollars north) in USD.
^ Few ideas for great gaming budget builds (in CAD). You're gonna want to build something around the G4560 tho. Main thing is to look for discounts w/ budget builds, the ASRock H110M-HDS Micro ATX is on special on NCIX (if you're willing to mail in the rebate). Samsung 850 EVO 250GB is currently 50$ off on NCIX which is a great deal (instead of going for a 500 GB SSD w/ no HDD), you could add a HDD with it.
Look for cost efficient RAM, decide if you want a 1050 or a RX 460 (1050 has ~18% better performance, RX 460 is 10-20$ cheaper).
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1) Pentium G4560 - $90
2) Cheapest H110M mobo you can find - $80
3) GTX1050 2GB - $160
4) 2x4GB 2133Mhz DDR4 RAM -$80 or 1x8GB for $10~ less
5) 1TB HDD, 250GB SSD and 1TB HDD, or 500GB SSD (decide based on budget, Evo 850 is my recommendation here) - $70 to $230
6) 430-500W PSU (based on what's cheapest, most of the brands making them have been around for a while), - $45
7) Any case -$45
Grand total: $580 with HDD up to $740 with SSD.
Damn, TT1 beat me to it.
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I've got a Sager NP9172, everything mostly works great but I've come into problems with RAM when working in Zbrush and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions with regards to RAM, I've got 16GB of DDR4, and I'm looking to go up to like 32GB. I've got 4 RAM slots so I don't need to replace what I've got, just add on.
I'm not particularly sure what compatibility is like with RAM, if I throw in two more 8GB sticks of DDR4 is there gonna be anything unfortunate going on? Should I absolutely stick to whatever is inside my laptop at the moment or would it be okay to go with something else (I've been recommended Corsair, so thats where my minds at now.)
Also, any general recommendations for RAM people have?
Thanks in advance. <3
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Problems meaning a lack of RAM?
There aren't really compatibility issues with RAM, so you can just throw in two more sticks.
I can't remember how having different timings interact on different channels. Worst case it'd just reduce everything to the lowest setting, assuming they're not the same to begin with. Performance-wise I don't think it'd be very significant.
There isn't much difference from one brand of RAM to the next.
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Yeah I was reading that nowadays they work well together.
They'll just choose the lower of the two clock speeds and lower of the two timings. 95%~ of all RAM is manufactured by 3 companies (Samsung, Micron, and Hynix), so they've gotten pretty good at the collusion and making their products work well together... And yet somehow giving an illusion of choice.
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Thx for the reply guys. So I went and researched about the G4560 and it looks pretty damn good for the price. I heard that on some motherboards the bios wont support it tho ? Also worried about this being kind of a sidegrade to my fx 6300.
As long as it gives me more than 60 frames in long sc2 games im happy tho
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On January 23 2017 02:25 Cosmoz wrote:
Thx for the reply guys. So I went and researched about the G4560 and it looks pretty damn good for the price. I heard that on some motherboards the bios wont support it tho ? Also worried about this being kind of a sidegrade to my fx 6300.
As long as it gives me more than 60 frames in long sc2 games im happy tho
Well the next upgrade to that would be a i5 7600 ($90 vs $320 in Canada), that would give you around a 50%~ improvement in performance in CPU bottlenecked games like SC2, but it's significantly more expensive, and not really compatible with the budget you gave us.
And yeah, that's technically true. But I was under the impression that the updates for support are rolled out very quickly, and it should work fine, just plug in everything and update BIOS. When in doubt, check the manual or the tech specs of the exact motherboard you're looking at to see whether the processor is listed as one of the compatible ones. But anyway, hard to recommend a specific motherboard, because it really depends on where you live and what sale you have going on at the moment.
I think you'd be getting roughly 30% improvement in fps in SC2, which I agree isn't gigantic, but you're updating a one-two year old rig with more or less the same budget you had last time. By buying what you bought, you didn't leave much room for upgrades without tearing it all down and starting over.
I suppose you can keep your HDD, PSU, GPU, and case.
But you need a new mobo, since AMD processors don't really get better for gaming, and just spend all the money on a i5 7600 + mobo + SSD maybe... A GTX1050 is what, like 15-20% faster than a 950?
SC2 is a horribly optimized game, I believe on the highest settings on everything a i5 7600 will get you around 85fps average, with the 1% minimum at around 65fps... So in gigantic 200/200 battles, especially in team games, you'll see you fps drop below 60.
Multiply all those numbers by 2/3 to roughly gauge what you'd get with a G4560. It's up to you to decide if you're willing to turn down a couple settings to make it happen. The 7600, or more specifically the 7600k and 7700k are equally the best processors on the market at any price range to play SC2 at the highest settings, simply because there's no other processor that has the single core performance of them.
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Thanks for the detailed response. I guess I could get the G4560 and then easily upgrade down the line right ? Im leaning towards that I think. Getting an all new rig sounds pretty nice for that price.
Thx again !
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Canada16217 Posts
anyone know if z87 gd65 supports nvme drives as the boot device with an expansion card?
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United Kingdom20342 Posts
Well the next upgrade to that would be a i5 7600 ($90 vs $320 in Canada), that would give you around a 50%~ improvement in performance in CPU bottlenecked games like SC2
There is no such significant upgrade over a kaby lake pentium for sc2, the AVX instructions do not help and going from 2c4t to 4c4t doesn't count for much if anything at all. RAM performance helps a lot which leads to the weird builds like pentium on z207 with 3466mhz RAM if that even works
Anything recent Intel is so much faster than FX for sc2, like twice as high minimums and averages
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On January 23 2017 09:43 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +Well the next upgrade to that would be a i5 7600 ($90 vs $320 in Canada), that would give you around a 50%~ improvement in performance in CPU bottlenecked games like SC2 There is no such significant upgrade over a kaby lake pentium for sc2, the AVX instructions do not help and going from 2c4t to 4c4t doesn't count for much if anything at all. RAM performance helps a lot which leads to the weird builds like pentium on z207 with 3466mhz RAM if that even works Anything recent Intel is so much faster than FX for sc2, like twice as high minimums and averages
Z270 right? And yeah, at that point it gets a little silly, since your rig starts to get pretty expensive even with only a Pentium, so at that point, might as well just get a bit of a better CPU in case you're doing some other tasks in the future, or playing other games, etc.
And I remember I looked at i3 vs i5 benchmarks in SC2 back in the day, and there definitely was a difference... The G4560 is essentially an i3 as far as I can tell. I'm finding it difficult to find comparisons right now for SC2, but in more or less all games, the i5 outperforms the i3.
As far as I know, 1c2t at best can match 2c2t, and at worst be half the performance of it (assuming all else equal) based on the task that it's doing. SC2 never uses more than 4 threads (correct me if I'm wrong), and hence an i5 performs the same as an i7. The improvement is dependent on the type of computations being done and how well they can be parallelized, but I think 50%~ is the rough average for most tasks.
Looking at CPU benchmarks for other CPU bound games, that 50% extra performance on the i5 seems pretty spot on to me, but I don't have a specific SC2 benchmark to look at for this processor.
On January 23 2017 05:44 Cosmoz wrote:
Thanks for the detailed response. I guess I could get the G4560 and then easily upgrade down the line right ? Im leaning towards that I think. Getting an all new rig sounds pretty nice for that price.
Thx again !
Yes, you could get the G4560 with a H110 motherboard, and it would allow you to upgrade to i5's or i7's in the future. The only issue you'd have is that you wouldn't be able to purchase overclocked processors, unless you bought fancier mobos with are maybe $60-70 more. Overclocking is overrated though (imo).
I'd recommend getting 1x8GB stick of 2133MHz DDR4 RAM (single and dual channel is very similar performance), to give you an option of upgrade to 16GB very far down the line. My opinion is that we haven't had CPU performance gains in the last 5 years, and likely we won't likely have many major in the near future (sorry Ryzen fans)... And so a computer built now will be able to last for a long long time (say 8 years).
This will be a cheap build, and will allow you to still have a top-end PC years down the road if you choose to update the processor (you'll have to get one that supports the LGA1151 chipset, but since the 7700k is only like 20% better than the 2700k from 5 years ago, that's fine, since the 7700 likely wont be much worse than the new stuff from 2019. A PCIE 3.0 x16 slot will be able to support the performance equivalent of a little bit more than a Titan X Pascal, which is a $1600CAD GPU, so maybe the performance equivalent in 3 years if you choose to upgrade will be $700-$1000CAD, probably more than you'd be willing to spend, so you're fine there.
I believe the H110 support m.2, so you'll be able to get insanely fast PCIE SSDs, rather than SATA SSD's if you ever choose to upgrade. Just make sure you get a slightly stronger PSU to be able to handle any potential upgrades (like 530-550W). Futureproofing is tough, and usually not advisable since it's difficult to foresee everything, but outside of DDR5 RAM in 2020, a well built PC now should be possible to upgrade in the future without needing to replace anything and still keep great performance.
Feel free to post your parts list once you've found everything, and no problem 
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United Kingdom20342 Posts
The main game simulation and the vast majority of the CPU load is on one thread.
AFAIK there's significant scaling when you add a second core because of the stuff that can run on other threads (which every CPU will have anyway), minimal scaling if any when going up to 2c4t or from 2c4t to 4c4t and then none beyond that
A significant driver of performance gap between some gens of i3 and i5 for sc2 and some similar games is actually the frequency, on sandy bridge for example the cheap i3 runs at exactly 3.1ghz while the i5-2500 turbos up to 3.7ghz (~19% faster). When the i5 then performs ~18% higher on a bench it is unsurprising.
Z270 right? And yeah, at that point it gets a little silly, since your rig starts to get pretty expensive even with only a Pentium, so at that point, might as well just get a bit of a better CPU in case you're doing some other tasks in the future, or playing other games, etc.
That's still a jump from a $64 CPU (2c4t pentium @3.5ghz) to a $192-$242 CPU (4c4t i5 at ~3.8 to 4.1ghz). It's just funny to me that a highly effective dedicated sc2 system could be z270 board w/ pentium and super fast RAM 
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On January 22 2017 10:42 Craton wrote:
Problems meaning a lack of RAM?
There aren't really compatibility issues with RAM, so you can just throw in two more sticks.
I can't remember how having different timings interact on different channels. Worst case it'd just reduce everything to the lowest setting, assuming they're not the same to begin with. Performance-wise I don't think it'd be very significant.
There isn't much difference from one brand of RAM to the next.
Sweet, thanks. :D
And yeah, whenever I try and Dynamesh my topology in Zbrush and the mesh is past the million poly mark it sometimes causes Zbrush to declare "NOT ENOUGH RAAMMM" and crash, so I'd like to fix that
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Canada16217 Posts
On January 23 2017 08:59 NovemberstOrm wrote:
anyone know if z87 gd65 supports nvme drives as the boot device with an expansion card?
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EPT
