Updating my Athlon X4 620 rig.

[Pete Puritan]

Hi All,

I've been playing Landmark in Closed Beta (so not optimised code yet) and have been punished for it by getting a measly 3-7 FPS on my current Athlon X4 rig. As result, though I don't really need to upgrade, I've been looking at the following:

CPU - Xeon E3-1220 V3 (3.1 Ghz)
RAM - Corsair Vengeance Pro 8Gb (2x4Gb) DDR3-2133
MB - Asus Maximus VII Ranger

From the old rig I'd take the case and:

SDD - 2x Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb
PSU - CoolerMaster RS-850 850W
MON - 2x 24" LG W2442PA

I'm happy to keep my current:

GFX - Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 6850 1Gb

or replace that with

GFX - XFX Radeon R9 280 3Gb Black Edition Double Dissipation

because I'm hearing that this XFX unit is quite quiet. (excuse the multiple aweful puns) Low noise levels are important to me, which is why I significantly overspecced the PSU in the current machine so that it would never break a sweat and heat-up and need to run the fan at maximum. However, with newer and more taxing games I'm finding that the 6850 gets quite loud...

My general use is as a 'workstation'. I do a lot of Virtual World stuff with OpenSim, some 2D vector design stuff, some PHP coding and some photography - colour correction and cropping. In other words the Athlon X4 is fine, but upgrades are always fun!

Budget is around the £500 mark. Im not looking for future-proofing, rather for a significant speed bump over the current rig.

Your thoughts please

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would get a cheaper motherboard. Also XFX has poor RMA at many retailers. A number of the Seasonic PSUs also can run semi-passively too.

[DanceswithUnix]

Have you tried turning the graphics right down and see if it still runs like a dog? I'm sure the Xeon would be a lovely upgrade, but would be nice to know how much the graphics card is limiting you.

Looking at the benchmarks (for the 7950 as Anandtech Bench doesn't have actual R9 280 results but should be close enough) there is quite a difference between the two cards.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1077?vs=1033

But if it still runs like a dog with the graphics turned right down, then the Xeon is going to be a must.

[Firejack]

All SOE's Forgelight games are CPU limited at this moment in time. So thats Planetside 2 & EQ Landmark + H1Z1 and Everquest Next when they appear in a few months. Its why I'm looking to replace my AMD CPU also.

[DanceswithUnix]

All SOE's Forgelight games are CPU limited at this moment in time. So thats Planetside 2 & EQ Landmark + H1Z1 and Everquest Next when they appear in a few months. Its why I'm looking to replace my AMD CPU also.

Blimey, so my 8350 would be on par with an i3 in Planetside, and yet they are aiming to get this running on a PS4? lol. I think some devs need their i7 toys taken away from them for their own good, and some lectures on things like computational complexity and cache tiling. So yeah, if Landmark is the same as this then I guess you need that CPU upgrade.

http://www.hardwarepal.com/planetside-2-cpu-benchmark/

[scaryjim]

... if Landmark is the same as this then I guess you need that CPU upgrade.

Or just wait until they do proper code optimisation and see what the final release runs like. Sure you miss out on the open beta fun, but is it really worth a £300+ upgrade just to play a poorly optimised beta? Imagine how you'd feel if you upgrade your CPU now, then the final release runs faster on an Athlon X4 + R9 280 than on your Xeon + 6850.

If you genuinely feel like you need the upgrade now for other reasons then fair enough, but I would not be sinking that much money into upgrades just for playing a closed beta....

EDIT: based on the graphs DwU provided, I do wonder how a Pentium dual core would perform. I guess the biggest issue would be the lack of turbo - might hold back the obviously key single thread performance. It looks to me like the best value processor for those games might be the i5 4460, tbh - £135 + a cheap compatible motherboard is a much more reasonable outlay, and overclocking/hyperthreading doesn't seem to add much to game performance.

OTOH, if you haven't done so yet it's got to be worth overclocking your Athlon X4 - if you're running it at the 2.6GHz stock speed then it's going to really struggle for single threaded performance (which seems to be what those games want more than anything). Get it up to 3GHz+ and I bet you'll see an improvement immediately....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would probably say a Core i5 4440 for £127 is better value:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-3-10GH.../dp/B00EF1G8XI

Edit!!

The OP should look at this thread:

https://forums.station.sony.com/land...-vs-gpu.26719/

Interesting despite the issues the OP says they have now,their other half gets a similar experience with an FX6300(they have a Core i5 4670K).

[Pete Puritan]

Hi All,

Thanks for your comments so far, in particular CAT-THE-FIFTH for looking up the Landmark thread @sony.com and scaryjim for poking me to perhaps get off my btm and look into overclocking

[Firejack]

Blimey, so my 8350 would be on par with an i3 in Planetside, and yet they are aiming to get this running on a PS4? lol. I think some devs need their i7 toys taken away from them for their own good, and some lectures on things like computational complexity and cache tiling. .....

In some situations PS2 on PS4 is exceeding PC performance on Ultra. The huge advantage of having a set hardware specification is making optimization much easier then the PC version.

Performance in Forgelight has been an issue since the start. The development process has been long and brutal for SOE. They learned the lessons and have been able to consistently improve performance. Even if at times its been barely noticeable changes. Other changes like Smoothing and the 64bit client have made more dramatic improvements.

Personally I'm looking at something a little faster then an a E3-1220v3. Either an E3-1231v3 or i5-4690k. Or maybe a i7-4790 if I can stretch that far. Still waiting on more 4690k overclocking results to help decide if its pricetag is worth the potential extra performance or if its going to be too much hassle.

[Firejack]

I took the plunge with a i5-4690k and the difference is clear in PS2. Minimum FPS is around 20 FPS higher with much higher average FPS in all situations. Very pleasing result. I'd expect similar performance improvements in other Forgelight games.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Planetside 2 is probably going to get more and more multi-threading updates as time progresses - the last tranch in 2013 really improved performance on my Core i5.

I took the plunge with a i5-4690k and the difference is clear in PS2. Minimum FPS is around 20 FPS higher with much higher average FPS in all situations. Very pleasing result. I'd expect similar performance improvements in other Forgelight games.

Not as much as I expected,since you went from an ancient Athlon II X4 at 3GHZ with no L3 cache to a higher clocked Core i5 4690K which cost around three times more in real terms. What graphics card are you using ATM?

I find Hossin really pushes my card with full effects now including fog shadows.

Looking at my mates own upgrades from Athlon II X3 and X4 CPUs to FX63** CPUs on the same motherboard,they got much better performance in games like WoW,even when compared to 4GHZ Athlon II X3 and 3.4GHZ Athlon II X4 CPUs.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had a look at that PS2 test and it says the following:

First of all the GPU usage in Planetside 2 was horrible, where the game wasn’t capable of utilizing the full potential of our standard graphics card dedicated for testing CPUs, the Nvidia GTX 770. No matter what in-game settings we tried the GPU usage was always around 50% (even with Vsync Off!). In order to get the game to fully use the potential of our GPU (100%) we had to go to the game’s ini.file and make custom settings in order to get stable GPU usage and frame rate on all of the platforms and processors. In order to find this ini.file you will need to go to your games installation directory which is placed in \Sony Online Entertainment\Installed Games\PlanetSide 2 where you will be able to find UserOptions.ini file where we had to considerably buff the settings in order to get the graphics card to work as it’s suppose to.

Read more: Planetside 2 CPU Benchmark http://www.hardwarepal.com/planetside-2-cpu-benchmark/

[Firejack]

You can see my full system on my profile to the left. I just updated it while posting my previous message.

Unlike the OP, I had my Athlon II unlocked to a Phenom II X4 @ 3GHz. I was getting down to around 26fps on Hossin.

I also use a customized UserOptions.ini file for maximum performance leaving out many of the higher graphical effects.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can see my full system on my profile to the left. I just updated it while posting my previous message.

Unlike the OP, I had my Athlon II unlocked to a Phenom II X4 @ 3GHz. I was getting down to around 26fps on Hossin.

I also use a customized UserOptions.ini file for maximum performance leaving out many of the higher graphical effects.

I have a Core i5 2500 equivalent CPU and a GTX660,but even at 1680X1050 in Hossin I can see framerates dip down to mid 30s (might be worse but usually at those points I am concentrating on not being one shotted by the NS and VC with their overpowered weapons).

A lot of the higher graphical options are more GPU taxing - things like the highest particle settings use PhysX and crater performance.

I am running almost at most max settings - funnily enough running at medium settings made things worse!

Edit!!
You only have got a proper Phenom II X4 if you did tests to verify the L3 cache being unlocked though! One of my mates had one do that,but another one got a Phenom II X4 but no L3 cache.

You can ask Bagnaj97 on these forums - he had the usually high clocking Athlon II.

However,regarding the game the OP is running(which is not PS2),it looks to be nowhere as mental as PS2, with 100+ people in one tiny area fighting for a base as an example, and is a 3rd person perspective game.

I expect it will probably be a bit less taxing overall than PS2 especially after looking at the thread on their forums. What seems to be more of an issue is inconsistent performance due to the fact it is a Beta still. I still will continue with my Core i5 recommendation but I think the OP should overclock their CPU as much as they can and wait until it gets out of Beta to see what kind of money they should be spending.

By then performance should have hopefully stabilised and websites like GameGPU will have tested the final game.