Start from scratch or upgrade?

[markspeed]

Afternoon all,

With recent purchases including SWTOR and BF3 I realise more than ever than my current system (see below) needs some serious upgrading (or total replacement).

Case: Antec P180

Graphics Card: 1GB Sapphire HD5850

PSU: 650W BeQuiet Modular PSU

Memory: 2x2GB Dual Channel DDR2

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz

Motherboard: Asus P5B Deluxe

Monitor: Dell 2408WFP (1900x1200)

I have considered replacing the motherboard, CPU and memory with the following:

I7 – 2600k

8GB 1,600MHz DDR3

Asus Maximum IV Gene-Z

But I am not sure how well my case will house the system (i.e. sufficient cooling), if the PSU will provide enough juice, whether the GPU needs to be upgraded (is the rest of my system limiting its performance in current games?).

So I ask the forum for its wisdom. Would you upgrade (if so what) or would you start from scratch? If I have to start from scratch I would have a limit of around £1000. I have no intentions of buying a new screen or peripherals. I also have a spare copy of Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

Thanks for reading.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You could get a secondhand Q6600 and overclock it a bit - this will help a reasonable amount in most games.

[dfour]

I7 2600K is pointless for gaming over the I5 2500K as the hyperthreading does nothing and in some cases slows things down or causes crashes.

i5 2500K
Z68 motherboard
8 gig 1600
cooler hyper 212 + or evo or gelid tranquillo (stock cooler is rubbish)

That will make the biggest difference along with a 120gig SSD as a boot and primary game drive.

[markspeed]

Thanks for your comments.

I swapped my CPU for a Q6600 I was able to scrounge off a friend. While the perform increase was good, I am still limited to playing the games at low to medium settings.

I'll now try and run my graphics card in a more powerful system. If it performs as well as I think it can I'll go ahead and replace the CPU, motherboard and memory (I may even throw in a SSD).

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks for your comments.

I swapped my CPU for a Q6600 I was able to scrounge off a friend. While the perform increase was good, I am still limited to playing the games at low to medium settings.

I'll now try and run my graphics card in a more powerful system. If it performs as well as I think it can I'll go ahead and replace the CPU, motherboard and memory (I may even throw in a SSD).

You should not be having an issue. My Q6600 at around 3GHZ with an HD5850 1GB could run Metro2033 at high settings at 1680X1050 and Crysis 2 using DX11 high settings at 1680X1050 too.

[ik9000]

are you gaming at 1900x1200 given your monitor?

[markspeed]

I'm gaming at 1920x1200 (my original post stated 1900x1200 - minor typo).

As I have neither Metro2033 or Crysis 2 I cannot comment but in the original Crysis the game runs fine on max (not ultra) settings. During most combat BF3 is < 30FPS while SWTOR struggles in cities and instances. I have tried reducing the resolution but it doesn’t appear to have any real impact.

[Pob255]

Try overclocking the cpu, getting it up to around 3ghz makes a noticeable difference.
Most games are still badly optimised for multi core use so a quad core doesn't make that bigger difference from a dual core, so without overclocking you've gone from a 2.4ghz dual core to a 2.4ghz cpu quad core that's still only really having two of its cores fully used
Get that up to 3ghz and you should notice the change.

What speed ram have you got? (make sure it's not running below a 1:1 ratio)

BF3 on ultra is very taxing esp in terms of texture size, I'd just not run it at that setting.

[whobi]

If you do overclock and the games are still not good enough then definately wait until Ivybridge- either choose IB because it will be more powerful or just to save£££ because when IB gets launched SB processors might (fingers crossed) end up dirt cheap

[Dragonstongue]

Hyper 212+ with a second stock bladmaster fan, is an excellent low cost cooler, I have had one now for awhile, and it works very very well.

Also, I know you stated you are running BF3 at 1920x1080 but what settings are you using.

My recomend.

Blur off(I hate it )
AA post off
AA 4x or lower
AF 4x or lower
HBAO/SBAO off
the rest more or less between medium to high.
Shadows and terrain set to medium rest is high
FOV is set to 80

I have an overclocked 6870 1gb running 965 core 1135 memory.
AA post and AA as well as mentioned HBAO/SBAO are the hardets hitting towards Radeons, I use 12.1 preview drivers which have helped, but, generally the 5850 and 6870 are around the same performance level.

I average around 70FPS and will dip to around 56 at lowest, this is with 955BE at 4.2Ghz.

So, yes your cpu maybe a bit of a performance hit, clock it up, it should help alot. If anything, I think maybe you just have the in-game options in regards to video/graphics not where they should be

holding ctrl+alt+s will show a little screen where you can see the fps and such
also
by hitting tilde to bring up the console you can type in
render.drawfps 1
this will bring a constant FPS meter on the right side of the screen, this can help you maximize the frame rates and may help you show how much you are gaining performance wise with different clock speeds and such.

And finally, just through my experience, the thing that generally gains the most performance on Radeons is a higher core speed then a memory speed. I like to try to get my core the highest I can and then get the memory the highest it will go. It is a fine balance though, but it seems at least with my older 4870 and newer 6870, they gained the most performance from a higher core clock then memory with all the games I play, and, having a high core speed compared to memory also seems to push out less temperatures, I think the memory takes alot of juice or they just push alot of heat.

Do remember to keep an eye on your temps, and turn the fan speed up if need be, I use openhardware monitor to do this, it will let you know the highest temp it go, this way here you can adjust accordingly if need be, best of luck.

[markspeed]

I appreciate all your comments and have some questions.

If I were to opt for an i5 2500k, would a cooler, such as Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced, keep the CPU cool (and quiet) if I overclocked to 4.5GHz+? Or would a water cooler, such as the Corsair H80, be required?


I read the CPC review of the Asus Maximum IV Gene-Z and it seemed like a pretty good board. My only concern is it's a m-ATX board and I'm not sure how well things will fit (Xonar DS sound card + Dark Rock Pro Cooler).

What are the benefits of 16GB memory over 8GB? (I am currently considering 16GB because memory is very well priced).

Would a Corsair 120GB Force 3 be a good choice for a SSD or should I be considering something different (e.g. OCZ Vertex 3).

Thanks for your suggestions. I will try tweaking the in-game settings and overclocking my GPU (have been running stock clocked for some time).

[shaithis]

If I were to opt for an i5 2500k, would a cooler, such as Be Quiet! Dark Rock Advanced, keep the CPU cool (and quiet) if I overclocked to 4.5GHz+? Or would a water cooler, such as the Corsair H80, be required?

If it's stable at 4.5GHz, I doubt any cooler is really going to keep it "cool and quiet" (at least under load). Your adding 30% clockspeed and some extra voltage.....it's going to run noticeably hotter.

What are the benefits of 16GB memory over 8GB? (I am currently considering 16GB because memory is very well priced).

For gaming? NIL.

Would a Corsair 120GB Force 3 be a good choice for a SSD or should I be considering something different (e.g. OCZ Vertex 3).

SSDs will not help at all with framerates.

[Dragonstongue]

Well, to get the cpu up to 4.5 isnt that tough, but overvolting/clocking is definately going to up the temps overall. I do not believe a Corsair H unit will be any better cooling overall, nor quiter then some of the better air coolers out there. Corsair H series coolers while very good, can also be very loud when they need to ramp up their fans.

The mentioned Hyper 212, Dark rock cpu cooler, or some like the Nocuta heatsinks like DH-14 are reasonable for thier noise level, and are not "loud" but if you are looking for quiet, then no good cooler is going to provide very low levels of noise and good cooling at the same time. Noctua might be the closest to that concept, however, if you can stand a resonable amount of noise, then the cooler I mentioned Hyper 212+ or the one you mentioned in "most" computer cases are resonable noise/cooling performance, and the H coolers are not worth the added cost overall(unless you were to be using a known high power cpu such as the i7 900 series, Sandy-E, or even bulldozer)

I myself avoid M-atx boards for various reasons, mainly spacing concerns, not to mention pricing, it is not a low cost board, you can easily get just as good, if not better, for less cost and not have to worry about any spacing concerns. ASUS P8Z68-V or -v Pro are examples of this, excellent boards as is P67 Sabertooth Rev3. The board, is not a bad board by any means, but if you have a choice for getting a regular sized ATX board, I would go for a regular sized board.

SSD will help the overll system be snappy in regards to loading games(if you choose to put some on there) or allowing the OS/boot times, background tasks be super fast, it will help the overall system show its true potential. ANY current gen SSD such as OCZ 3 series(agility, Vertex, Solid) Corsair Force/Force GT, Crucial M4 are already super fast, the difference in thier speeds being so close would be hard to tell the speed difference in anything but benchmarking. The difference might be for certain file types. GENERALLY SSD are best served for OS use anyways, they see the best benefit of the low latency/fast reads.

I would go for as low capacity as you can use(60Gb is ample enough for OS use, as long as you use it properly) 120GB is prefered and is "Usually" the best in regards to price/capacity. Crucial M4, OCZ Agility 3, or Corsair Force would all be very similar overall, so I would just do some reviews on them, comparisons, but most importantly, price, to decide what is best for you.

I have an Agility 3 60gb OS use, I have 24+gb remaining on it, cause I trimmed the fat sort of speak. I put my favorites, documents, pictures, download folder on my "game" drive, and leave the "required" files on the SSD, 58gb usuable space after format and still have 24gb left, so it is more then possible, and believe me, the OS, launching programs, running virus checks, changing system settings is more then fast enough.

16gb for a "gaming" computer is far more then anyone uses, exception is if you rip movie, play a game, and such all at the same time, or you are heavy into editing or something, but for a "gmaing" maching 8gb is plenty. Just do make sure you set you paging files per drive I do 9000 initial 17500 maximum per paging file, just to make sure it never runs out of virtual memory, this is per drive, of which I have 3. 2.5x initial 3.5-4x maximum of currently installed memory is what is normally recomended.

[markspeed]

Thanks for your posts. When I said that I wanted my CPU cooler to be quiet I meant 'relatively quiet' i.e something that doesn't sound like a hair dryer.

I've spent a fair amount of time looking at different motherboards, CPU coolers and SSDs and these seem to be pretty good bets.

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 (only £80 and has everything I need)

CPU Cooler - Thermalright Silver Arrow (expensive), Gelid Tranquillo (cheapest), Hyper 212, Noctua NH-D14 (most expensive)

SSD - 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS Edition (~£180) and any of the other 120GB SSDs at around the £120 mark.

I've been put off the Corsair H-series CPU coolers due to their noise levels and the fact that they are no better than air coolers for i5 2500k.

I will get 8GB of memory. It seems pointless getting 16GB even at its current price point.

I intend on using the SSD to load the OS and maybe 1 or 2 select games. Everything else will go on my old hard drive. (I am not familiar with setting up a RAID - I don't know if I just plug them both in and away we go?)

If anyone has any further comments it would be great to hear from you.

[shaithis]

Hyper 212 gets good reviews for the money. I am personally a fan of huge heatsink + PWM fan with either the mobo or SpeedFan controlling the fan speed based on temps.

SSDs....I really feel that SSD prices are being artificially raised due to HDD shortages atm.....I could not bring myself to spend 180ukp on a 120GB drive when we are multiple generations down the road now.

You cannot (or at least should not ) raid HDD with SSD. No no no!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Has the OP tried overclocking their CPU though. 3GHZ+ should be doable with a reasonable motherboard.

Before you upgrade monitor your CPU usage and GPU usage using Windows Task Manager and MSI Afterbruner.

If you CPU usage is at 100% and your are not getting 100% usage on your GPU it usually indicates you have a CPU bottleneck.