GPU for a short term upgrade on a very old system

[douglasb]

I'm planning a new build but don't have the money at current so want a new GPU to tide me over till nearer the middle/end of the year when cash wont be so much of an issue. I installed Fallout 4 a couple of weeks ago & was gutted to see it set itself to low/medium graphics then proceed to still struggle at times!

I'm currently running:
CPU: Intel Q6600 (over locked to 3.0Ghz)
Mono: Asus P5K delux
Ram: 4gb DDR2 (can't remember the speed off the top of my head)
GPU: AMD HD 6870
SSD: 128gb Samsung 830
HHD: 2x 500gb
PSU: 520w corsair (can't remember which of their ranges it is)
Monitor: 1650x1050 non hd-ready (which isn't running at anything like that resolution)

For the new build I'm planning a GTX980 Ti but don't know whether to just get one know & stick it in the above system, get a second 6870 and run them in crossfire (power draw may be an issue with those options though) or just get a new slightly more powerful GPU as a temporary measure.

Any thoughts/suggestions would be much appreciated,
Thanks

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I seriously wouldn't be investing in a GTX980TI now especially with BOTH Polaris and Pascal probably being released from the middle of this year onwards.

I found that my Xeon E3 1230 V2/Core i7 3770 is fine at 1680X1050 with a GTX960 4GB running Fallout 4. It is reasonably CPU intensive though although it scales reasonably well with thread count.

The recent 1.3 path has improved performance on AMD cards too:

http://www.maximumpc.com/fallout-4-g...ited-patch-13/
http://gamegpu.com/rpg/rollevye/fall...-test-gpu.html

You should be OK with a GTX750TI though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynZaZqZhLig

Edit!!

Looking at those charts the R7 370 might be a better bet as it can be had for around £100,but I have not seen any tests with a Q6600 running a game yet.

The GTX950 starts around £120 onwards.

[scaryjim]

The 6870 is an interesting one, tbh - a decent card but probably now looking a bit long in the tooth.

A 980 Ti would, obviously, be horrific overkill for your 1680x1050 monitor and overclocked Q6600. Plus, if you're looking at not putting the new rig together until the middle of the year you might find that the new releases from both AMD and nvidia (due this summer, and AMD have shown working silicon already) make the 980 Ti look like a poor choice. I'd probably steer clear of buying a GPU now for a new rig six months away.

So, that leaves you with options for a temporary upgrade. I suspect the cheapest in terms of bang for buck would be a second hand 6870 off ebay for crossfire: there's a few available buy-it-now for around £50 - £60.

Other alternatives ... well, the best bang for buck new card at 1080p (which isn't many more pixels than your monitor) is the GTX 950, which is around £120 - £130. The Radeon R9 270/270X are a similar speed but aren't available new: you'd be looking second hand for those. The replacement R7 370 isn't as fast, but costs as much as the GTX 950 - not really worth considering less, apparently! (See CAT's post above). I wouldn't bother spending much more than that on a temporary card personally - and the only card really worth considering beneath that would (IMNSHO) be the GTX 750 Ti - the fastest bus powered card you can buy, it's around £90 new but can be picked up for £60ish second hand.

Remember that if you replace the 6870 you can always sell it to recoup some of the costs!

[Firejack]

Hold on guys. Is it worth replacing the graphics card in a system with a Q6600 and 4GB of memory? Surely whatever graphics card we suggest its going to be held back by the CPU/memory bottleneck in an open world game such as Fallout 4.

douglasb - Personally I commend the choice of parts in your current system as its proved to be a very wise purchase. However its come as far as it will go. I'd stick to low quality graphics for now in Fallout 4 and try and bring forward your new system, by avoiding spending money on a new graphics card now that will barely improve performance.

[kalniel]

Hold on guys. Is it worth replacing the graphics card in a system with a Q6600 and 4GB of memory? Surely whatever graphics card we suggest its going to be held back by the CPU/memory bottleneck in an open world game such as Fallout 4.

They won't be a problem.

edit: above was overly hasty - I would be very surprised if they were a problem, but then FO4 seems to behave quite oddly.

[douglasb]

I seriously wouldn't be investing in a GTX980TI now especially with BOTH Polaris and Pascal probably being released from the middle of this year onwards.

I had considered the new releases but I can't see either company releasing a top of the range card that would push the 980 Ti straight away & if they did prices would be rediculous! Although 980 Ti costs would drop which is a good reason to hold off now.

I suspect the cheapest in terms of bang for buck would be a second hand 6870 off ebay for crossfire: there's a few available buy-it-now for around £50 - £60.

Other alternatives ... well, the best bang for buck new card at 1080p (which isn't many more pixels than your monitor) is the GTX 950, which is around £120 - £130.

Remember that if you replace the 6870 you can always sell it to recoup some of the costs!

I'd spotted some 6870s on eBay & was tempted but at 151w each that's getting close to my 525w PSU so I think CrossFire is out.

Selling my 6870 for £40 - £50 would mean a £70 - £80 outlay could reach a GTX950 or a £50 outlay for an R7 370. Not very much to argue between the 2 it seems?

[jamiehard1989]

If you dont mind going used, what about a r9 280x or a gtx770

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had considered the new releases but I can't see either company releasing a top of the range card that would push the 980 Ti straight away & if they did prices would be rediculous! Although 980 Ti costs would drop which is a good reason to hold off now.

But the problem is that both Pascal and Polaris will have better DX12 performance,and as time progresses it will look old hat. Considering your build is more towards the end of the year,you will start to see the new generation cards being released.

[EndlessWaves]

I do wonder if your issue is a CPU limitation. The 6870 isn't particularly slow, I seem to remember it being marginally faster than a 7790/650ti so it should come pretty close to a 750 or 360.

AMD's drivers have been shown to have a bigger CPU impact so it might be worth considering an nVidia card instead which would give you two shots at solving the problem. You'd lose out on Adaptive Sync but that's not a big deal if you're replacing it in the Autumn.

Or just shelve Fallout 4 and play some other games until you're ready to upgrade. There's no shortage of them out there and your current system isn't going to struggle with very many.

[malfunction]

Also - OP - are you using the latest drivers and the latest patch for Fallout 4 or did you start playing a while back and then give up? The 1.3 and 1.4 patches improved performance a fair bit and the 16.1 and 16.2 drivers from AMD also noticeably improved performance too, to the extent where my 290X is now noticeably smoother than my GTX 970 for example - and both of those are running in first gen i7 systems so I don't have anything like the latest and greatest CPU either.

[douglasb]

I do wonder if your issue is a CPU limitation. The 6870 isn't particularly slow, I seem to remember it being marginally faster than a 7790/650ti so it should come pretty close to a 750 or 360..

Or just shelve Fallout 4 and play some other games until you're ready to upgrade. There's no shortage of them out there and your current system isn't going to struggle with very many.

Interesting to see a second person questioning the Q6600. To be honest I've not looked too closely at how hard everything is working mid game but I'll have a look tonight. Since the chip shouldn't have to last much longer I'm happy to overclock it to within an inch of its life if need be!

I'm very happy with how the whole system has lasted, apart for the HD6870 & SSD it's all 7-8 years old & still coping surprisingly well! It's very much due to the help & advise of Hexus members all those years ago when I put it together.

Also - OP - are you using the latest drivers and the latest patch for Fallout 4 or did you start playing a while back and then give up? The 1.3 and 1.4 patches improved performance a fair bit and the 16.1 and 16.2 drivers from AMD also noticeably improved performance too, to the extent where my 290X is now noticeably smoother than my GTX 970 for example - and both of those are running in first gen i7 systems so I don't have anything like the latest and greatest CPU either.

Fallout is a new install about a week or 2 ago via Steam so should be up to date & the 6870 I updated a couple of months ago, I'll check them both this evening though.

[scaryjim]

Crimson 16.1 launched mid January, so less than 2 months ago, and 16.2 is only a couple of weeks old. Well worth forcing a GPU driver update at the point and seeing what happens.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Q6600 was starting to hold back an AMD card, even at 3GHz: AMD's DX11 drivers struggle without good single-thread performance. If you do push the Q6600 further do report back: I've still got one kicking around that I'm considering giving one last hurrah

[EndlessWaves]

Interesting to see a second person questioning the Q6600. To be honest I've not looked too closely at how hard everything is working mid game but I'll have a look tonight. Since the chip shouldn't have to last much longer I'm happy to overclock it to within an inch of its life if need be!

There's still going to be a big gulf to the current popular CPUs, see these benchmarks of The Q6600, and 3Ghz Q9650, with a GTX 980 for example:
http://www.techspot.com/article/1039...red/page5.html

[douglasb]

I'm now running Crimson 16.2 and to be honest there's no difference at all.

Once I got Fallout going I kind of forgot to keep an eye on how hard the system was working but once I'd closed it Windows' resource monitor was showing the CPU as having being very fluctuant in terms of how hard it was working and occasionally topping out at 100%, RAM was pretty consistently at about 90%. It turned out I hadn't turned MSI Afterburner's logging feature back on so could only see the last couple of minute's worth of data and in them the GPU didn't look massively stressed, probably about 60-80% load however some of the last couple of minutes will have being used saving & quitting so won't have been too graphically intensive which may explain that.

Apologies for the poor quality of my load monitoring! I'm happy to redo it tomorrow & remember to use HWiNFO this time. Despite that though I'm pretty confident blaming the Q6600 & RAM rather than the 6870 so it's looking like I'll either have to wait on a new build or just put up with it.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far guys!

[malfunction]

It's probably worth monitoring the VRAM usage on the 6870 too - might be CPU, RAM or VRAM that's really holding you back (or all 3!)...

...though if you have the budget for a 980 Ti (£500+) and you want to spend some money *now* it's probably better to get a new CPU, motherboard and RAM and then either wait and see what your remaining cash buys when Pascal and / or Polaris are released or get a 970 or a 390 for ~£250 now. Either would be loads better than the 6870 and you can get the lot for ~£500 to £600 though obviously it greatly depends on which CPU, etc you go for, e.g.

If you go for a 6600K then you need a Z170 mobo and with 16GB of RAM you'd be looking at ~£350 from a quick check, which would take you up to £600 total spend with a 970 or 390.

If you aren't planning to overclock and you drop down to 8GB RAM then you'd only be looking at circa £260 (i5 6400, H110/B150/H170 mobo, 8GB RAM) which would bring you in at £510 with a 970 or 390.

I'd say that a new CPU, motherboard and RAM are less likely to become outdated in the short term than a GPU so that's where I'd start if I wanted to do it on a piecemeal basis, though with ~£500 you could upgrade the lot (though it's possible you'd also need to change PSU and likely you would need to change your CPU heatsink / fan depending upon what you have now).

You'd obviously also get some cash back for your existing kit - I'd guess around £75 for your existing CPU, RAM, mobo and graphics card though I haven't checked prices.

FWIW I have two gaming capable rigs - my main PC has a 970 and my HTPC has a 290X and both have first gen i7 CPUs (actually socket 1366 Xeons) which are overclocked at 3.6 --> 4.0GHz and 3.2 --> 3.8GHz depending upon load (turbo boost on the 1st gen wasn't great) and both of these will happily run Fallout 4 on ultra (with god rays manually set at ultra and HBAO on) at 1080 (though my main PC only has a 1680x1050 screen at the moment). As before the 290X runs better than the 970 since FO4 was patched and AMD pushed out new drivers. Before the updates both the 970 and 290X would occasionally get bogged down when there was a lot going on (typically when high up in a densely populated area) but now, while the 970 still gets bogged down on occasion, the 290X is smooth sailing all the way.

Also - see here:

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...axwell/?page=5

Even a 750 Ti out paces a 6870 it would seem so you don't need to go all the way to the top end to get significantly better performance. I'm not recommending the 750 Ti in and of itself but you get the point - a 980 Ti may well be overkill and is likely to give you buyer's remorse once the next gen GPUs are released.

FWIW I wasn't up to speed on the differences between the Z, H, B and Q chipsets but there's a nice article here that lists the differences:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...ifference-635/

...though the main ones still seem to be do you want to overclock (Z required) and do you want to run > 1 GPU at full PCIE x16


And finally... if FO4 is the main driver then look at some of the comparison articles. There isn't actually a massive difference between the different settings in FO4. It seems to be mostly draw distance for foliage and shadow quality that are affected (outside of being able to use AA at decent frame rates which does make a really visible difference). I think things have moved on a bit since the game was patched (e.g. since they added HBAO+) but from a quick glance over some comparison articles there are times when you can't really tell the difference between the settings - though I'm always a bit sceptical when it comes to comparison articles so I'll fire the game up and change settings at some point to compare.

[douglasb]

...though if you have the budget for a 980 Ti (£500+) and you want to spend some money *now* it's probably better to get a new CPU, motherboard and RAM and then either wait and see what your remaining cash buys when Pascal and / or Polaris are released...

I'd say that a new CPU, motherboard and RAM are less likely to become outdated in the short term than a GPU so that's where I'd start if I wanted to do it on a piecemeal basis, though with ~£500 you could upgrade the lot (though it's possible you'd also need to change PSU and likely you would need to change your CPU heatsink / fan depending upon what you have now).

That's pretty much the conclusion I'd come to as well, upgrade everything but the 6870 until new releases then change that over.

While I could recoup some costs by selling my current system I'm not sure it would be worth it, is there much of a market for kit that old & if so where is best to sell? Since it's a running system & the only thing I'm thinking about scavenging from it is the SSD (& 6870 short term) I may just pass it onto my brother & let him get a few more years out of it.