Reply With Quote
Yeah I think I posted that before they revealed the scaled down engine tooThat game turned out to be about the biggest GPU killer out there
Yeah I think I posted that before they revealed the scaled down engine too
Who didn't love Shinobi for that?
Going to take the plunge and replace my old game computer. I would really like to get a solid state one, any recommendations anyone?
It's impossible to give any recommendations until you answer the following questions:
1. How much is your budget?
2. What games are you trying to play? Recommendations would be far different if you tell me League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, World of Warcraft, Minecraft (e.g., very easy to run games) versus say Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 4, Assassins Creed Unity, etc. (very hard to run games)
3. What resolution are you trying to play them at?
4. Do you want to play them at 60 frames per second? 120 fps? 30 fps?
5. Do you like a big case? A small case?
6. Does energy consumption matter to you at the cost of performance? What about at the cost of higher price? Or do you want balls to the wall performance?
I can only help you if you want to build your own system, which is comically easy for anyone with a room temperature IQ.
Also RandomGuy, what kind of gaming computer are you replacing? Maybe you can recycle the RAM, the hard drives, the case, like that.
SSDs are nice, they make your computer feel fast as for general usage, but for gaming they do jack other than cause you to load in 15 seconds instead of 25 seconds. If you're on a somewhat tight budget I personally think they're worth doing without, for best performance you want to put most of your money into the GPU and CPU. Still, you can get good quality 256 GB SSDs for less than $100 and good 500 GB ones for around $180. I'd personally recommend 500 GB in the days of lots of games being 60 GB.
I am replacing a creaky 6 year old desktop that had a couple of video upgrades.
I have mostly been playing older games, but now even the older games are starting to make the thing creak. New games are out of the question. Been saving for a house and working wife through college. Budget isn't much of a consideration, although I would like to keep it less than $1400.
I used to build computers for a living in the mid-nineties, so I am somewhat more literate than the average joe when it comes to such things, but most of my technical knowledge is obviously out of date.
Going through, in order:
About $1400. I would go higher, but would have to do some tap-dancing with my wife of 20 years.
Probably going to run a few easy games, like minecraft, and may use it as the house server, so I can play with the kids, but I am itching to get into the harder newer games.
I have a fairly large HD monitor now, so I am going to run them at a pretty high resolution, with as high of a fps as I can manage.
Don't really care about the case. I have a buddy who can probably get me one for free, any size i want.
Energy consumption is not an issue. I am a grown-ass man with a grown-ass job, and a new house built to be efficient.
I figure I am going to need a in' graphics card that will consume most of the budget. Most of the pre-packaged jobbies tend to run about 4GB of memory, so I am going to hold that as a minimum.
The monitor is HD as in Full HD, e.g., 1080p? Does your monitor support 120 Hz or 144 Hz refresh rate, or is it 60 Hz? Because for a 1080p 60 Hz system, $1400 is an extremely high budget. Here is what I would consider a monstrously strong 1080p 60 Hz system for that kind of money: I think it would be a waste of money, though the CPU is really strong. It's a hexacore with hyperthreading that you'll probably be able to overclock to at least 4.2 GHz on the cooler I recommend.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor ($378.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X61 106.1 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($114.99 @ B&H)
Motherboard: Asus X99-A ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($239.99 @ B&H)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($104.95 @ Adorama)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($159.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: MSI Radeon R9 390 8GB Video Card ($329.98 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: EVGA 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($99.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $1428.87
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-09-17 16:52 EDT-0400
Assuming you have some old hard drives to use for data storage and that you can get a free case that can support a 360mm radiator in top for the CPU. You get an extremely strong CPU out of this as well as a really high end cooler. This is the best watercooler on the market unless you want to spend $200-$300 on the new ekwb all-in-one coolers coming out this month.
If you have a 120 Hz 1080p or a 60 Hz 1440p monitor, then definitely go higher end on the GPU, lower end on the CPU. Something like this would be much better for that use case, as it has much more graphical horsepower. I went a little over budget to fit in the cooler, which you'll want with a 4790k since it runs 4.2 GHz on all cores under load at stock speed. You can probably get it up to 4.4 GHz on all cores using a Hyper 212 EVO, but any higher and you're looking at liquid coolers most likely, and even the best coolers (like the one in the first build) probably won't get you any higher than 4.7 GHz.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($327.99 @ NCIX US)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($24.89 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Asus Z97-E ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($92.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($74.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($159.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ Video Card ($669.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Antec High Current Gamer 620W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($78.50 @ Amazon)
Total: $1429.32
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-09-17 17:31 EDT-0400
Still, I'd feel bad not suggesting a strong bang for your buck 1080p 60 Hz system: this would be a really strong 1080p 60fps system for way under budget. The CPU is a quadcore (no hyperthreading) that runs 3.5 GHz on all cores when under load. This is a really incredible CPU for $184. No overclocking though.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
CPU: Intel Core i5-4590 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($183.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H97-D3H ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($91.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($37.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($159.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SSC ACX 2.0 Video Card ($319.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Antec High Current Gamer 520W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($54.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $848.93
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-09-17 17:36 EDT-0400
For 1080p 60 Hz gaming I think the MSI R9 390 is the best GPU out there, though the GTX 970 trades blows with it and uses 100W less power. For 1440p 60 Hz or 1080p 120 Hz gaming there is nothing that touches the GTX 980 Ti. For 4k 60 Hz gaming you'd need two GTX 980 Ti, which is impossible on a $1400 budget.
I'm always leery to buy the really high end GPUs though. For instance, in November 2013 Nvidia released the GTX 780Ti at $700. In September 2014 Nvidia released the GTX 970 at $330 that trades blows with the 780 Ti when they moved to from the Kepler architecture (GTX 6xx/7xx series) to the Maxwell architecture (GTX 9xx series), which are both 28nm. In mid-to-late 2016 Nvidia should be releasing cards based on the Pascal architecture at 16nm, and such a large process shrink often means a lot more performance. Plus they're likely to be using HBM2 memory that they're likely to run at much lower clockspeeds while still having larger bandwidth, leaving more room for upping the core clock while staying within their power usage targets. So seeing what they were able to do with Maxwell without a process shrink and using the same GDDR5 video ram, you can imagine what Pascal could end up looking like next year. And you may feel like a real sucker spending out the ass on the highest end card right now.
I wouldn't even look at the 12GB an X. For $1000 it's a re ed card now that the GTX 980 Ti came out and is barely cut down from it with 6 GB of vram instead. Even 6GB is overkill for 4k, much less 1440p or 1080p. The an X makes absolutely no sense. With 12GB of vram you'd think you might run three or four of them in SLI to game on three 4k panels at once, but even 4 an X's wouldn't run that well. So the 12GB is pretty much useless, especially when Maxwell sucks for double precision computing and thus you wouldn't want it for scientific applications.
Last edited by baseline bum; 09-17-2015 at 04:48 PM.
Though getting a cheap case might not be the best idea, since you'll want something with good airflow to keep from cooking your GPU. This is what I use in my system and it's a ing joy to build in and keeps things pretty cool:
It's a pretty large case but awesome if you want to run a full ATX board, and I think it's way underpriced at $100. There isn't a case less than $200 I'd personally choose over the Enthoo Pro for a gaming build. The build quality is great, this is a solid mother er. It looks awesome. It's really easy to build in thanks to all the cable routing options, the velcro straps, and the inch and a half of room behind the motherboard tray for cable management. I can't imagine replacing this case in the next ten years unless I badly want a really small micro-ITX system or the motherboard standard changes so that I can't use it anymore.
RG, here is how the GPUs out there stack up right now, where percentages are given based on average framerate in techpowerup's test suite of games, normalized so the R9 Fury Strix is at 100%. I chose the Fury Strix since it's the most recent card they have reviewed.
1080p
1440p
Surprisingly they have the GTX 970 over the R9 390 at 1080p, which doesn't agree with some of the other benchmarks I have seen though. In most benchmarks I have seen the R9 390 and GTX 970 trade blows in games (e.g., 970 wins in GTA V and Witcher 3, R9 390 wins in Far Cry 4, Shadow of Mordor), but it seems like when the R9 390 wins it wins by a significant margin whereas when the 970 does it's still pretty close.
If you follow this link you can see how they stack up in individual games.
Ok, wow.
That is a lot of good, exactly on point information. Looks like I owe you a beer for the time.
It's kind of a weird time to buy right now though. All the CPUs I recommended are 4th generation Intel Core series processors (Haswell, which launched in 2Q 2013), and right now Intel is on its sixth generation. But the 5th generation Core series (Broadwell) was horribly delayed and has gotten an extremely limited launch on the desktop. It officially launched a few months ago but I have still never seen a Broadwell CPU for sale at newegg, Fry's, Microcenter, etc, though you can overpay on amazon to get ones imported from Europe where apparently Broadwell got a larger desktop release. You can get laptops with Broadwell though, and they're pretty awesome because of the low power consumption and much stronger integrated graphics than Haswell, Ivy Bridge (3rd gen, 2012), and Sandy Bridge (2nd gen, 2011). Intel just launched the unlocked Skylake chips (6th generation Core series) within the last couple of months and they have somewhat stronger IPC (instructions per clock cycle) than Haswell chips, but they're really only slightly superior to Haswell for gaming and they're more expensive, their boards are more expensive, and the DDR4 RAM they use is more expensive than the DDR3 used by Haswell/Broadwell/Ivy/Sandy. The Core series has really stagnated since the incredible Sandy Bridge release in January 2011, to the point if you have a Sandy Bridge or newer i5 or i7 and it works, it's a complete waste of money to buy any newer processor for gaming unless you're running a 120/144 Hz panel or perhaps trying to push 90fps in the Occulus Rift. For 60 fps gaming Sandy Bridge CPUs are still incredible. It's the complete opposite of the late 90s - early 2000s when I bought a 200 MHz CPU that was so fast, 2.5 years later they were at 1GHz, I bought a 1.5 GHz CPU that was so fast, and then 2-3 years later they were at 3 GHz.Ok, wow.
That is a lot of good, exactly on point information. Looks like I owe you a beer for the time.
Steer completely clear of AMD for CPUs. They have absolutely nothing that makes any sense except at the very low end. 15 years ago they were amazing when Intel was just chasing clockspeed at all costs because buyers thought more MHz means faster CPU. Now AMD is the one doing that, to the point they have a CPU out now (FX-9590) that does 5.0 GHz at stock, and which performs slightly worse than a 3.2 GHz Core i5-4460 for gaming. That AMD CPU also consumes 225W vs the i5-4460 that is an 84W CPU, so the FX chip requires a really high end motherboard and liquid cooling.
Speaking of AMD, damn they have been in some huge turmoil. 2014 was such a disaster for them. In late 2013 they released their high-end GPUs, the R9 290 and R9 290x, with unbelievably bad stock coolers.
These coolers made the fans run really high speeds and the core was still at 95C, causing the thing to throttle while also sounding like a jet engine. This got AMD the reputation of having really hot running cards that consumed a ton of power even though Nvidia's current line of GPUs did too. AMD really ed up cheaping out on the cooler for this card, though their OEM partners released much better cooled versions that performed awesome.
And they were great values, the 290x was $500, the 290 $400, and they weren't too far behind Nvidia's $700 GTX 980 Ti. But they didn't get into gamers' hands, because cryptocurrency miners found out AMD's GPUs were outstanding for computing hashes (and thus generating bitcoin, litecoin, etc) while Nvidia's sucked at it. So the miners bought these like crazy and the prices shot up to $700+ for these cards. At those prices you'd be nuts to not get a GTX 780 Ti instead. So you had a bunch of people buying their cards to run 24/7 at 100% load generating cryptocurrency, and naturally failure rates shot through the roof (though a lot of that can also be attributed to the terrible cooler AMD designed as well as the pretty lousy ones designed by Asus and Gigabyte). Then around mid 2014 it became unprofitable to try to generate litecoins and such with GPUs (now you have to buy dedicated ASICs) since these currencies are designed so that every new coin takes more computational power to mine than the previous one. So eBay became flooded with cheap used R9 280x, R9 290, and R9 290x, so AMD wasn't selling as many new ones now that the street price had finally fallen to the MSRP.
And then September last year just as AMD cards were starting to drop to the suggested MSRP, Nvidia did something really cutthroat: they released the GTX 970, which slightly outperforms the R9 290x at 1080p and slightly loses to it at 1440p, for $330, while also consuming significantly less power. It was a much stronger card relative to its compe ion than the GTX 770 they released in the previous generation for $400. So now AMD has this reputation as the Mount Vesuvius of heat, their cards are more expensive than Nvidia's game-changing 970, and they don't perform quite as well. They had to drop the R9 290 from $400 to about $250 within a couple of weeks of the 970's release, and the 290x dropped from $500 to $340 or so. By November last year it was common to see R9 290s selling for $220, and even some of the best ones were going for $200 at Thanksgiving (don't expect anything like that this Black Friday since 2015 has seen nothing game-changing like the GTX 970). So AMD is getting mid-tier GPU prices for their high-end , which is damn near as good as the $330 GTX 970. Their upper mid tier GPUs like the R9 280 started selling for $160, I mean that was the price of the low end Nvidia like the GTX 750 Ti that the R9 280 completely destroyed. They (allegedly) had to cancel the release of their R9 285x because there was no way they could sell it at $275 when they had to sell the better R9 290s at $240. They also ended up firing their CEO.
This really bad string continued into 2015, and they lost enormous market share to Nvidia on the desktop GPU front, and it was even worse in mobile since Nvidia's new architecture was much more power efficient. In February Nvidia came out with their an X at $1000, but AMD has a monster GPU of its own in development that they were going to position as the halo product to kill the an revive their brand name. So this June, maybe 3-4 days before AMD is about to launch their Fury X at $850, Nvidia went for the jugular again and released the GTX 980 Ti for $650 that was almost indistinguishable from the $1000 an X for gaming performance. AMD had to put off the launch like 2-3 weeks, up the clockspeeds on their Fury X, and sell it at $650 instead of the $850 they had planned on that would have made it such a bargain in comparison to the an X.
You just gotta admire Nvidia, they have played their hand beautifully. But it ain't over yet, as DirectX12 is here and AMD GPUs are murdering Nvidia's on asynchronous computing in the first DirectX12 game released (Cry Havoc has a thread about it here in the tech forum). This could end up being a big deal. But it might not, since as Nvidia gained market share they also gained hugely in getting PC games optimized for Nvidia cards. It used to be 50/50 whether big new releases would be optimized more for Nvidia or more for AMD, but right now it's almost all Nvidia. Anyways, lots to think about when it comes to buying a system right now. It might make more sense to wait a couple of months to see how DirectX12 shakes out in more games.
Last edited by baseline bum; 09-18-2015 at 09:14 PM.
Given how much of an impact asynch could make, I would highly recommend AMD GPUs at the moment. The 290x, 390, 390x, and Fury are all incredibly good values.
It sucks that there are so few DirectX12 games coming soon. I originally recommended RG wait until November to see what DX12 games look like and whether they're able to usefully employ async compute, but there is nothing releasing then other than possibly Ashes of Singularity. ARK Survival Evolved is getting a DX12 patch this month I think, but that game is such a ing mess right now I don't think you could draw useful conclusions from it.
Async compute could indeed be a big thing, but I have been burned buying Team Red based on hardware capabilities; ever since the ATi days they seem to have mostly been significantly more powerful than similarly priced Nvidia GPUs on a hardware level, but it didn't always translate to gaming. I still remember how pissed I was I bought a Radeon 8500 over a GeForce 3 Ti 500 based on strength of hardware when the Ti 500's drivers made it perform better in games, it actually pushed me back to consoles. So now I refuse to buy a GPU based on potential, it's gotta be based on performance I can get right now. Especially when GPUs have such short lives at a given performance level when compared to CPUs.
RandomGuy, I forgot one other way Nvidia really on AMD in 2014. AMD released a lower overhead API called Mantle because their DX11 drivers have a lot of overhead and AMD CPUs are dog for highend gaming, so Mantle would relieve CPU bottlenecks. I guess Nvidia took this threat seriously, and drastically reduced CPU overhead in their own DX11 implementation. But Mantle did push Microsoft to build DX12, which is a good thing. Still, Nvidia's response to Mantle made them far better for using with lower end CPUs. Even low end Nvidia cards will outperform upper midrange AMD cards when using a weaker CPU like an i3 thanks to Nvidia fixing their DirectX11 driver overhead in response to Mantle. Thankfully this isn't a problem if you go with an i5 or better for your CPU; an i5 is more than powerful enough for the AMD DX11 driver overhead to not matter.
Here is a great comparison of the GPUs you should be looking at for highend 1080p 60 Hz gaming. The left number is current framerate, the right number is average framerate over the entire test run so far for that one game.
A big thing to look for is es in the frame time graph at the bottom right: those correspond to stutters, or momentary losses of framerate, and can be pretty jarring.
Last edited by baseline bum; 09-18-2015 at 09:06 PM.
Here are similar videos for 1440p
And here is a pretty clear illustration of why you can't cheap out on the CPU:
Notice the constant repeated oscillations in the frame time graph with the Pentium G3258 even though it's at 4.5 GHz. I'm not saying you have to go buy an i7-4790k, i7-6700k, or i7-5820k by any means. Core i5 does just as well in the vast majority of games (though this game, Crysis 3, runs better with an i7 in the stage shown; but it's still the hardest game to run even though it's 3-4 years old now).
I don't think either makes sense. For 1080p those cards are both enormous overkill and the 970 or 390 are much better buys at $200 less. At 1440p better to spend the extra $100-$150 on a 980 Ti that crushes both.
Depends on what res you want to play at. Right now you need to spend an insane amount of money to make 4k gaming viable. 1440p you have several cards that are options. 970, 290x, 390, 390x, 980, and fury are all good cards for that.
1440 or 4k is my next upgrade screen, what video card should i invest in? i dont need the expensive card, just one thats cheap and can play at those resolutions...
You do need an expensive card at those resolutions.
Razor sharp 4K displayed at a buttery smooth 18 FPS
Here is an insanely good deal on an R9 390 right now:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125805
So I finally put this build together... just ordered everything from Amazon with Prime. It'll be here Thursday/Friday...
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
CPU: Intel Core i5-4590 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($189.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B85N PHOENIX-WIFI Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard ($84.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($37.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Crucial BX100 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($84.94 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($52.95 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 4GB Video Card ($219.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Corsair 250D Mini ITX Tower Case ($84.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 430W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($48.77 @ Amazon)
Total: $867.89
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-09-22 01:46 EDT-0400
$57 of that was taxes...
I might swap the GTX 960 with the GTX 970 I have at work. We'll see. I'm only going to be doing 1920x1200 gaming, so the 960 might just work fine. I'm also not sure the G1 Gaming will fit this mini ITX enclosure, that's why I've got the shorter 960. I thought for a while if I wanted to cheap out a bit more and go for micro atx, but the difference is negligible, tbh, and I rather have a smaller box.
I got the wifi-bluetooth mobo since I'm thinking of maybe using a Dual-Shock 4 with this, but I also have a wired xbox 360 controller lying around. What do you guys use for gamepad?
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
