Upgrading my PC...

Author
Discussion

defblade

Original Poster:

7,392 posts

212 months

Tuesday 22nd July 2014
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I used to be really hot on this stuff, spent £000s every year on playing the latest and greatest games... but that's faded somewhat over the last decade and now I'm asking for a little help as I'm having to turn the graphics right down in World of Tanks (turning on the motion blur kills my system dead for seconds!!) and we can't be having that! wink

OS and games run from SSDs.

Current motherboard is Asus P7P55D-E which it turns out is now a dead socket, 1156, so CPUs are ebay fodder and not readily available new.

Current CPU is an i5 760, which gets a reasonable score on the Passmark charts still: 3624.
I can get that to 5163 for £70 with a Xenon or 5485 with an i7 870 for £110/120.

RAM is currently 4Gb, with 2 slots free.

Graphics card is a GTX460, still ranks 72nd on Passmark with a score of 2666; the 760 series looks like the sweet spot at the moment(?) with about double the score and price in the 150-200 range. I'm sticking with Nvidia, thanks. Or worth getting a matching card for SLI? Although I'm not sure there's room in my case...



So, what's going to be the best upgrades to get things running as nice as they can be again... with breaking the bank and starting from MB up again!

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Wednesday 23rd July 2014
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If it's "just" for the game, I'd look into first upgrading the graphics card and not minding the rest. Upgrading from an i5 to an i7 will make little to no difference, the money is much better spend on the GPU for your purpose.

Same goes for RAM, but a similar 4GB stick can be had for peanuts these days so might as well do it.

defblade

Original Poster:

7,392 posts

212 months

Wednesday 23rd July 2014
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I'm already man-maths-ing these upgrades! I can play WoT perfectly well as is; it ran Crysis/Far Cry just fine at fairly high levels... it's just knowing it could be better for not too much dosh wink


Edit: just spent an hour or so playing with passmark: while the results look like they can vary somewhat even with similar machines, by carefully selecting your benchmarks to compare against, you can see if changing one thing or another makes a big difference, or if it looks like something else in the system is the limiting factor. So I've found systems with the better CPU, more RAM and the different graphics cards... the one system that's closest to mine currently with just the GPU changed gets better GPU scores than 8Gb, i7 machines running the same card... so I think it's safe to say that upgrading the graphics shouldn't find it limited by anything else in the system.

Edited by defblade on Wednesday 23 July 17:50

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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I echo my previous statement, for the performance you're looking for, you're always going to get best bang for buck by putting your money in the GPU.

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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anonymous said:
[redacted]
I take onboard what Zes is saying though.
It's an older socket as well, you can only do that much and at what cost?

anonymous said:
[redacted]
Hmm, maybe not, but a £400 GPU will give him more than a £200 CPU and a £200 GPU will.

anonymous said:
[redacted]
Agreed, and as stated, they cost peanuts.

anonymous said:
[redacted]
Got to keep this in mind, not all PSU support all GPU. Though a decent PSU wouldn't cost you that much, it would just be a disappointment when the new GPU arrives and you have to wait for a PSU to arrive biggrin.

Randomthoughts

917 posts

132 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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What's an inert gas got to do with your Passmark score?

MissChief

7,095 posts

167 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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I went from a 460 (which was a great card at the time, lasted me two years) to a GTX 670 and nearly doubled my frame rates. If you don't mind second hand a good 670 can be had for around £100 and will be a worthy upgrade. I still have it (although am buying a new card soon) and it still munches through anything at 1080p, although I will admit without all the whizz-bang multiple level AA tools. BF4 runs great at 1080p on High settings for example. I've played World of Tanks a bit and it runs smoothly at maximum settings. Try and get a non-reference cooler version as mine is a reference based version and often hits 88-90'c at full chat and is rather noisy in the recent warm weather!

defblade

Original Poster:

7,392 posts

212 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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Randomthoughts said:
What's an inert gas got to do with your Passmark score?
Sorry, Xeon.

defblade

Original Poster:

7,392 posts

212 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
quotequote all
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Yep, 2x2GB. My overclocking days are long over now I can generally afford to just buy something that works (NB: this thread dedicated to replacing stuff that already works wink ) and can have enough trouble finding the time to play games, leave alone fiddle with the kit... So I'll probably add the same again.


PSU is a modular Antec beastie, same age as the other bits, with plenty of overhead - I like my computer to run quietly (especially when idle; I'll accept noise at full chat as the speakers/headphones will probably block it anyway!) and that means overspecing things like PSU and CPU heatsinks smile

tobster

653 posts

208 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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Defblade, if you're looking at upgrading your Motherboard and CPU then Intel have recently released their newest chipset (Z97). The new processors are easier to overclock and the cheap one which is a dual core pentium retails for about GBP 46 and can be overclocked to at least 4.5 GHZ.


Zad

12,695 posts

235 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
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Yes, don't throw good money after bad by spending £100 on a marginally faster processor which still has you locked in a dead end. Intel has recently done a processor refresh, which bumped the prices down by a notch or 2, introducing some new high end ones (which aren't much faster as it turns out). Bundles of K-suffix (multiplier unlocked) CPUs and motherboards start at £225 or so anyway.

I agree with the previous comments though, a new graphics card would probably make most difference.

defblade

Original Poster:

7,392 posts

212 months

Thursday 24th July 2014
quotequote all
Zad said:
Yes, don't throw good money after bad by spending £100 on a marginally faster processor which still has you locked in a dead end. Intel has recently done a processor refresh, which bumped the prices down by a notch or 2, introducing some new high end ones (which aren't much faster as it turns out). Bundles of K-suffix (multiplier unlocked) CPUs and motherboards start at £225 or so anyway.

I agree with the previous comments though, a new graphics card would probably make most difference.
I think that's pretty much where I'm at - new graphics card; probably an extra 2x2GB RAM as it's cheap and if that's not enough, both those things are portable into a new MB/CPU which looks like not too much more than an old 2nd hand dead end CPU anyway.

Thanks folks, you've cleared my thinking nicely smile

Randomthoughts

917 posts

132 months

Friday 25th July 2014
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CPU is of little use to a game, once you're at dual core ~2.5GHz - spend pennies on RAM and GPU.

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Friday 25th July 2014
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tobster said:
The new processors are easier to overclock and the cheap one which is a dual core pentium retails for about GBP 46 and can be overclocked to at least 4.5 GHZ.
?
I'm guessing this involves a liquid nitrogen setup, about 50x the cost of the CPU?

Efbe

9,251 posts

165 months

Friday 25th July 2014
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man maths = plan to sell the old kit on ebay. will add a bit more to your budget, even if you never get round to selling on ebay smile

defblade

Original Poster:

7,392 posts

212 months

Saturday 26th July 2014
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Efbe said:
man maths = plan to sell the old kit on ebay. will add a bit more to your budget, even if you never get round to selling on ebay smile
Amazingly, I hadn't thought of that. So about an extra £40 in the kitty, looking at completed listings beer

Shadow R1

3,798 posts

175 months

Saturday 26th July 2014
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That 670 for £100 will be a good boost to the system, its just finding one 2nd hand.

Get the best graphics card your budget will allow, then leave it at that. smile

If you want to go a bit more, I would put more memory in, if you have a 64bit os.


Shadow R1

3,798 posts

175 months

Saturday 26th July 2014
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ZesPak said:
?
I'm guessing this involves a liquid nitrogen setup, about 50x the cost of the CPU?
I don't think they are reading and understanding mate.
You were right in your first post. smile

mikef

4,821 posts

250 months

Saturday 26th July 2014
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Shadow R1 said:
That (6)870 for £100 will be a good boost to the system, its just finding one 2nd hand.

Get the best graphics card your budget will allow, then leave it at that. smile

If you want to go a bit more, I would put more memory in, if you have a 64bit os.
This. The i7-870 (or if you can find it the slightly faster short-run 875) is a good processor. Looking around the house we have six i7 machines including a hex-core extreme. My daily workhorse is a five year old Dell i7-870 box which really will run everything I throw at it (development IDEs, databases, photoshop, video, huge excel,files). I only turn to the faster boxes for running multiple VMs and as 3D render farms.
You have a quality MoBo and an SSD, Shadow's advice is spot on.

Shadow R1

3,798 posts

175 months

Saturday 26th July 2014
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mikef said:
Shadow R1 said:
That (6)870 for £100 will be a good boost to the system, its just finding one 2nd hand.

Get the best graphics card your budget will allow, then leave it at that. smile

If you want to go a bit more, I would put more memory in, if you have a 64bit os.
This. The i7-870 (or if you can find it the slightly faster short-run 875) is a good processor. Looking around the house we have six i7 machines including a hex-core extreme. My daily workhorse is a five year old Dell i7-870 box which really will run everything I throw at it (development IDEs, databases, photoshop, video, huge excel,files). I only turn to the faster boxes for running multiple VMs and as 3D render farms.
You have a quality MoBo and an SSD, Shadow's advice is spot on.
The 670 I was talking about is a graphics card, as in gtx670.
Misschief said he got one for £100 2nd hand.

If the op didn't want to go 2nd hand then get the best new card for the budget he wanted to spend.
A cpu upgrade in his case would be pointless.

The work you do would benefit from more cpu power, the op playing games and such, the gpu will play a much bigger part.