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As the title says really. My friend is speccing up a PC at the moment and currently has the 5750 selected for his new build. He has quite a restricted budget and this is what he has dedicated for graphics. I am sure he can get a better card for that money, but im not sure which would deliver the best bang for buck.
I have suggested to him stretching to £130 and picking up GTX460 768mb card, but he's not having it.
Your suggestions would be most welcome. :help:
Thanks,
Luke.
GTX 460 768mb for £120. Best deal in that price bracket.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/768mb...dvi-d-sub-hdmi
With free Scan shipping that's under £120. Have you told him that the GPU is the most important part of a gaming rig?
What's the rest of the build? A decentish CPU is necessary, an athlon II triple core is perfect for £55.
AMD X4 965 BE
ASUS M4A87TD/USB3
2x2GB Corsair XMS3
550w Corsair CMPSU -550VXUK
Is the current spec.
IMO, it's not any more.Quote:
Originally Posted by nibbler
It depends on what your playing....and if you play a range of titles, chances are the CPU is going to be equally important to the GPU.
There are so many badly designed console-to-PC ports on the market atm and they all suffer from completely overloading the CPU and not fully utilising the GPU. In a lot of cases these games will oddly use only 2 cores (I say oddly because they have been ported from XBox360 which has a triple core CPU), they need pure MHz, plus a lot of simulator/manager/economy/war games will scale exceedingly well with multiple cores.....so again, a cross section of games is pointing to a high-core/high-MHz CPU to "cover your bases".
Black Ops is just the latest title I've played that highlights this, it in fact highlights it better then anything else I have seen since GTA4.
With an i7 @ 4GHz and a GTS 250 I get better framerates then an i7@3.2GHz with crossfire 5870s (~130% CFX scaling with current CAP).
The problem is, it's becoming more of a trend....one I hate with a passion :censored:
Fair enough, interesting but surely it's wiser to invest slightly more heavily in a GPU especially if the guys getting an AMD 965 - worth the cash on the GTX460 rather than a 5750.Quote:
Originally Posted by shaithis
Get a 955 instead and with the savings, get the 1GB 460. Much easy and efficient to overclock the CPU a bit, then the GPU. You might even be able to save enough to stretch to the 1GB Gigabyte 460 OC, practically silent, extremely cool and comes with a very nice factory overclock and fancy cooling.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zyte
It's really hard to say...the problem with such a stringent budget is you almost need to tailor it to need based on the specific titles they play....or just accept some games may run a bit crap without some tweaking of in game settings or resolution.Quote:
Originally Posted by nibbler
That's an important point actually - it really depends on what games he plays, could we see a list?
Just out of interest though shaithis how important is cache in this matter because the real differentiating factors between the athlon IIs and the Phenom IIs is not mhz or cores it is cache.
Therefore taking your argument assuming that the only variable is the cpu within a system what would be better:
said system with a athlon II x4 640 3.0ghz or a phenom II x2 555 3.2ghz.
I reckon you could easily overclock the 640 to 3.2ghz in which case it is 2 cores with 7mb or cache vs 4 cores with 2mb of cache ... which would be better for most games?
Very curious to know the answer if anyone does!
Sorry to hijack your thread zyte ... imo you should either go for the cheapest 768mb GTX 460 you can find or get a 512mb 5770 for £60 in terms of bang for buck ... that will be the best and it is even below your price range.
Cache can be important (and normally is, to a point at least). Perhaps I should have used the term "per core grunt" or something instead of "MHz".,,,,because even MHz and cache doesn't cover the multitude of factors that determine a CPUs real-word performance.
As to how cache effects it, I cannot say unfortunately, I can't say I have ever recently had multiple CPU's from roughly the same architecture but with differing cache sizes to compare.
I do remember a discussion here not long ago about the newer Athlons, where it was shown the lower cache did hurt them in gaming IIRC (I remember it as it used to be the case that cache sizes didn't effect games much compared to cache speeds, Celerons @ +50% overclocks - ah the nostalgia:) )
i agree i have a phenom 550be Ati 4770 (i knw its old) blackops runs like crap!Quote:
Originally Posted by shaithis
yet im able to play over games in higher res with full detail... hmmm
He is a WOW head, but does like first person shooters.
I know he wants to get as much longevity from the build as possible. With much persuasion from me and this thread he now has the 768mb GTX 460 in his shopping basket. moving in the right direction :)
He is not particularly PC savvy so has selected the 965 purely because it has the higher clock speed. I doubt his system will ever get overclocked
I would get the M4A87TD EVO TBH as it is a very good motherboard IMHO. If you want to save some money I would get the following motherboard though:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/205849...edium=products
WoW used to be a complete CPU hog, over time it has started to use the GPU more.....in fact with Cataclysm you can even force DX11 mode and on a lot of systems this actually increases framerate, something I was surprised to hear because every other title with a DX10/11 mode seems to suffer horrendous FPS drops over DX9 mode.
I do believe that the DX11 mode currently offers nothing more then potential performance increases though, in beta you got extra effects but they obviously were not ready for a retail release.
WoW also has good use of multi cores these days, so I would say that a "middle of the road" quad would be better for it then a "massively overclocked" dual.
All-in-all, that system will make him a very happy WoW player. Both now and in the future when they start enabling all the DX11 extra features they are working on.
For FPSes the 460 should eat them up....the only potential issues will be those pesky console ports.....
BTW, you never said what resolution he plays in, if its 1920x1200, then the 768mb card will not run well with AA in a number of titles and I would expect that to get worse over time, so really twist his arm for the 1GB version. If he is 1680x1050 (or even below) and has no plans to upgrade his screen, then the 768mb version should last him quite a while.