GPU for a short term upgrade on a very old system

[douglasb]

The OP by the fact they still use a Q6600 and an HD6870 is a person who keeps their hardware for yonks.

That wasn't intentional, more a result of my circumstances. I first put the computer together while I was at school, then through my 5 years of uni I didn't have any spare cash to put into it. Now that I'm working I'm finally in a position to make some upgrades. I don't plan on having a computer last as long as this one has with no changes in future!

On the GPU front I trawled eBay & other forums looking for used 2gb gtx 950s & 960s, the going rates for both looked to be about £130 - I'm sure you could find cheaper ones if you were patient & really hunted but since new 2gb 960s start about £150 I decided to check them out & eventually found an ex-display factory overclocked gtx 960 4gb for £150 (reduced from £180) so have gone with that. Considering it's only another £20 for a "new" card & extra 2gb I'm happy to pay the little extra plus resale should be higher if I'm looking to upgrade at the end of the year.

Thanks for the advise guys & steering me away from the 980 Ti, your help is much appreciated as always!

[gupsterg]

Plus Kaby Lake will be out too so I expect a few deals on Skylake chips too.

I'll be waiting to catch them like Devils Canyon dropped when Skylake came out .

Plus during the time period,you could get R9 290 cards on clearance for under £200.

Very limited deals which ran out very very quick, I doubt many people got them.

Did you note that skus of 290/X were being delisted a long time prior to 390/X being launched? I only noted limited models / amounts of 290/X being sold off at a lowered price.

I also expect cards like the R9 390X,GTX980,maybe even Fury and the GTX980TI to drop in price once the new ones are out.

I have been thinking about this but can't see them "tumbling", more like perhaps a slight drop, which if I got one prior to the drop I would think I've had x period of use out of the card?

The advances on Polaris aren't even theoretical or rumoured: AMD have shown working Polaris silicon matching GTX 950 performance with power draw > 50W lower.

I am aware of that info on the web .

If it is as good as it is in the "preview", I see the performance SKU being priced as such that it would be equal in price or perhaps slightly more than current high end GPU (may that be AMD or nVidia).

Anyhow I will agree to disagree with you guys on my post .

@douglasb

Enjoy your new card .

[badass]

All this talk of prices dropping. Usually people expect a big drop of existing kit when "future" kit is released. With Graphics cards, so far with every generation the same thing has happened for years.
The "existing kit gets steadily cheaper long before the launch of the new kit and the new kit comes in more expensive. It makes waiting worthless unless you are after the new kit.

With CPU's it's a little harder to call. With Intel dominating the high end, high end CPU's followed a similar path to Graphics cards with the exception that the discounting of the current is far less so prices are creeping up faster than Gfx cards.

AMD need to make money off Zen to survive. if they price their CPU's too cheaply, they will be capacity constrained and will lose the opportunity to make a lot more money that will be a lifeline to them. If they price the same as equivalent performance Intel CPU's, they will probably not sell quite enough to use their manufacturing capacity and lose potential customers.

I predict that Zen CPU's will be cheaper but only slightly than their equivalent performance Intel CPU's and Intel's pricing will not change by any more than it would have if Zen never existed.

That is, of course if Zen delivers both the IPC boost and runs at a decent clock speed.

[EndlessWaves]

I'll be waiting to catch them like Devils Canyon dropped when Skylake came out .

It did, but that was because it was the run up to Christmas and everything dropped in price. It didn't get down to the cheapest price it had been the previous year and now it's gone back up in price.

I wouldn't expect any discount on Skylake beyond the usual unless Zen turns out to be reasonably competitive.

[gupsterg]

It did, but that was because it was the run up to Christmas and everything dropped in price.

And the discounted price was?

All this talk of prices dropping. Usually people expect a big drop of existing kit when "future" kit is released. With Graphics cards, so far with every generation the same thing has happened for years.
The "existing kit gets steadily cheaper long before the launch of the new kit and the new kit comes in more expensive. It makes waiting worthless unless you are after the new kit.

With CPU's it's a little harder to call. With Intel dominating the high end, high end CPU's followed a similar path to Graphics cards with the exception that the discounting of the current is far less so prices are creeping up faster than Gfx cards.

AMD need to make money off Zen to survive. if they price their CPU's too cheaply, they will be capacity constrained and will lose the opportunity to make a lot more money that will be a lifeline to them. If they price the same as equivalent performance Intel CPU's, they will probably not sell quite enough to use their manufacturing capacity and lose potential customers.

I predict that Zen CPU's will be cheaper but only slightly than their equivalent performance Intel CPU's and Intel's pricing will not change by any more than it would have if Zen never existed.

That is, of course if Zen delivers both the IPC boost and runs at a decent clock speed.

Agree.

If I recall what I read, the IPC gain on Zen will bring it up to levels of Haswell? as the gain is versus Excavator. Then there's the gain of Skylake to catch up and perhaps again Kaby Lake. The Stilt is an overclocker involved with AMD, his post.

So I reckon it's gonna be Kaby Lake vs Zen due to release dates? then also by my reckoning Cannon Lake is out 2H 2017. So would that not be again something that Zen has to compete with?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

All this talk of prices dropping. Usually people expect a big drop of existing kit when "future" kit is released. With Graphics cards, so far with every generation the same thing has happened for years.
The "existing kit gets steadily cheaper long before the launch of the new kit and the new kit comes in more expensive. It makes waiting worthless unless you are after the new kit.

With CPU's it's a little harder to call. With Intel dominating the high end, high end CPU's followed a similar path to Graphics cards with the exception that the discounting of the current is far less so prices are creeping up faster than Gfx cards.

AMD need to make money off Zen to survive. if they price their CPU's too cheaply, they will be capacity constrained and will lose the opportunity to make a lot more money that will be a lifeline to them. If they price the same as equivalent performance Intel CPU's, they will probably not sell quite enough to use their manufacturing capacity and lose potential customers.

I predict that Zen CPU's will be cheaper but only slightly than their equivalent performance Intel CPU's and Intel's pricing will not change by any more than it would have if Zen never existed.

That is, of course if Zen delivers both the IPC boost and runs at a decent clock speed.

The GTX780TI ended up being £250 instead of £550 and the GTX780 ended up going down to like £175 and this price was there for a while.

Even with the CPUs,people foget that BOTH the Phenom II X4 and X6 CPUs essentially limited the prices of the Q9550 and Core i5 700 series CPUs they were competing with. Their prices were circling each other - if one decreased in price,so did the other.I should know having helped out with so many builds here over a decade.

You also are forgetting one thing - AMD is moving to 14NM and the Zen chips won't have an IGP. That means even with chipset and caches,they can probably be for once not selling massively bigger dies than Intel.

Look at the Haswell Core i7 die - over HALF of it is the IGP. Intel could have made a six core Haswell Core i7 and it would still be probably smaller if had no IGP.

The Core i7 6700 die size is 122MM2!! AMD is selling 315MM2 die size chips for as low as £50 in the FX4000 series and the APUs are like 250MM2.

An FX8350 which is a space inefficient design with widely spaced cores and lower density cache than Intel would be probaly well under 200MM2 today on 14NM. You only have to look at the APUs,to see how little of the die is the CPU.

If they get to say IB level IPC and with similar clockspeeds to now ,but have a six core chip,it will be less than the IPC difference between the Phenom II and the first generation Core i5 and Core i7 chips.Looking at some of the results for Excavator its close to K10/K10.5 level IPC already and that is with a tiny 2MB L2 cache. That was easily limit the price of the socket 1151 Core i7 chips,and due to the fact that most retailers are selling Core i7 K series chips between £250 to £300.

Even the cheaper Xeon E3 alternative which was under £200 has been artificially limited to Intel server chipsets.

AMD could easily price Zen at £225 and it will still be £50 to £75 cheaper than the Intel chips.

Then you add the fact Intel does not even ship coolers with their K series chips anymore,which adds another £15 to £25 to the price - the Wraith cooler seems to be able to effectively cool a 125W TDP FX8370 made on an ancient process. All the Zen SKUs at launch are meant to be 95W TDP CPUs.

Everytime AMD has had any CPU which is reasonably competitive Intel and retailers do respond to it.

Its been the case for the last 12 to 13 years or so.

Plus there is news from the channel that the AM4 chipsets seem to be quite feature rich too.

And look at it this way - if retailers are selling Core i7 6700 chip at close to £300 when AMD has not released an enthusiast class processor for years,what do you think will happen when they have much faster CPUs with a much more competitive platform??

Tried looking for any mini-ITX or mATX AM3+ motherboards?? Only one of the latter exists and it took years.

More mini-ITX and mATX motherboards and one socket only will alone make AMD more competitive as an option.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

And the discounted price was?



Agree.

If I recall what I read, the IPC gain on Zen will bring it up to levels of Haswell? as the gain is versus Excavator. Then there's the gain of Skylake to catch up and perhaps again Kaby Lake. The Stilt is an overclocker involved with AMD, his post.

So I reckon it's gonna be Kaby Lake vs Zen due to release dates? then also by my reckoning Cannon Lake is out 2H 2017. So would that not be again something that Zen has to compete with?

Because you are believing that a Cannon Lake core i7 for desktop will all of a sudden replace the Kaby Lake Core i7 chips within a year.

I remember when IB was shown off people were thinking IB would replace SB in a year. Did not happen. Neither did Haswell replacing IB happen in a year.

What you are going to see is 10NM debut for the next Atom chips late next year and then a trickle of ULV Core i3 parts for premium thin and light laptops. I expect then a paper launch for Cannonlake desktop chips at the end of next year and then actual availability in 2018.

Also,expect Intel to state that they have chips in the channel to sell,hence the delay.

Remember,the HEDT platform is one generation behind in uarch and process node to even the consumer socket chips. Hence we will still be on Broadwell-E even next year.

Why do you think that is the reason?? Yields and costs. I expect its cheaper for Intel to use an older and better yielding process node for desktop chips(and those targetting much thicker laptops),since power consumption is not as an immediate concern for that market. They then prioritise the newer nodes for mobile,and then when its cheaper move over the other lines.

The desktop is getting less and less priority for cutting edge tech from Intel - that is reserved for tablets and the premium thin and light market.

[EndlessWaves]

And the discounted price was?

For which one?

IIRC the 4790k was down to around £235 minimum and the 4690k about £155 minimum.

[douglasb]

The gtx 960 I'd ordered arrived yesterday. I got it all set up & opened up fallout which went and automatically set its graphics to ultra & 1680x1050 very happy with the purchase & thanks everyone for all your help!

[74Saturn]

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.

My setup has a q9650 and it bottlenecks the heck out of my 295gtx.
From stock to 4ghz I get about 10k more marks in 3Dm03.

[MasterSpryce]

Well, you could go for 380X 4G for about £185 or get a 290X for the same price Used(I recommend the 290X is heat not an issue) Also with a PSU like that you should be alright.