A bit of help for choosing the next computer, please....

[sebastheuniballa]

So, it is that time for me. I want to upgrade my computer and have the ability to do so within reason.

I am not a huge gamer, and am by no means an expert on what really matters when it comes to just how various hardware impacts and interacts. Building my own computer is just not what I am looking to do. I am not a complete idiot when it comes to understanding hardware, specs, etc, but not being a major gamer, I don't quite know just how important one feature might be...or how a certain feature is just a waste of cash that companies try to trick us into buying. I would love to see some opinions and suggestions about what direction would be most appropriate for me. The first place I know we need to start is with you knowing what I intend do do and what I am looking for out of a computer.

Not a huge gamer, I always have just one or two games I play at any time. Right now, my primary concern is GTA V/Online. I don't see the value of running in 4k (it might be gorgeous, but it is not worth the extra expense for me). I would love to run the game on maxxed out settings, yet I am not crazy concerned over having fully tweaked out framerates. Certainly better than 30 fps is desirable, but needing above 60 just runs into the area of "it looks better, but does the expense justify it?" I am not buying a new computer for just GTA, but when I compare it to other games that hold my interest, that game is certainly the most graphics-intensive game I have in mind. Thus, it is sort of my benchmark.

I know something with a SSD is something I want/should have. Is 128GB enough for me (keeping in mind that i won't have a large number of games at any single moment), or is Windows 8 or 10 + GTA already pushing that size?

Various people/companies have different opinions (or sales pitches) when it comes to 4/8/16GB of RAM. What works for you guys?

Of course, the centerpieces are the CPU and GPU. Right now I have a i7 2600@3.4ghz and dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB each. I get about 30fps and run at the lowest settings for textures. It is set up with SLI bridge, but when I toy around with it and GTA, I don't quite understand what I am doing wrong (or if, as I have read about in other programs...GTA does not support/recognize more than one GPU). If I turn off the SLI, GTA sees one card's worth of about 1GB of video and I set the settings for as much of that as I can use. However, when I get both cards back on with the SLI, the game keeps all of the same settings...recognizes 2GB of video...BUT shows I am already using almost all of that 2GB while on the same settings as I was with just the 1 GPU. Again, I know I am far more of a noob about this than any sort of experienced techie. However, I am aware that there are legit discussions regarding the use of multiple smaller GPUs being inferior to a single larger GPU.

So....would love to see what any of you have to say or suggest. I do know that I need to be ready to spend more than 499 for the entry level Alienware, but not at all able to spend $8000US on one of those crazy multi-Titan rigs.

[moanin]

If you want to buy instead of build your own, I would suggest Ironside computers.

[LassyKongo]

I presume youre building it yourself? Theres no point in doing anything else

Get a relatively new mobo so its futureproof for now.

Cpus i5/i7's you should aim for. That is if youre going for intel, i have no idea about amd chips. If youre planning to overclock make sure you get the cpus with 'k' on the end of their name. Also obviously if youre gunna overclock make sure u have a decent cooler for your cpu.

You wanna spend most of your money on your GPU. 960/70/80 are good value for money and brand new.

Get an SSD for your operating system, id aim for 120gb ones as other user files will fill it up and its good to have extra space. You can move some of the folders and create links but yeah..it soon dwindles down when you have a lot of games installed.
I wouldnt go below 60gb for an ssd. Samsung, Kingston are reliable. Moreso Samsung. whatever hardrives for everything else like games etc, theyre pretty cheap now.

Ram..dont go below 8gb its pointless for a new system. 8 is ok for most things, if you do a lot of multitasking aim higher. Corsair, Kingston are good brands.

Power supply..get a little higher than your required amount. Saves any mishaps and futureproofs you should you want to upgrade in the future.

Cases..dont go for these cases with flashy lights and "hyper epic amazing airflow 360 noscope get rekt temperature". Theyre a gimmick. Unless you like flashy lights but even then you can buy led strips. Fractal design have good, smart cases although slightly expensive. Corsair is another good one.

Pcpartpicker.com is an amazing website, you can plan your build there and it checks compatability for you so if youre an amateur like i was you dont make a crappy mistake. It also has other users builds so you can base off them.

Also im not sure if they ship worldwide or not but i used Aria.co.uk for my parts, they are incredibly cheap compared to most sites.

If i could offer one bit of advice which you may already know is dont get sucked into these flashy parts with bright colours and words uber hyper epic. They are just the same as most other things. Read user reviews theyre your best friend. And most of all have fun with it. Designing your own pc is awesome

Thats as much as i can be bothered to type on my phone sorry for any spelling errors.

[Ed.Venture]

Man, you said you don't want to build, but you could really save some cash looking forward. Your CPU likely has plenty of power for what you want to do as gaming really doesn't tax the CPU all that much. It's really all about memory and GPU power. You could up your computers performance by a fairly large margin just by updating RAM and GPU. Throwing in an SSD would be a great idea as well.

I'd go with the GeForce GTX 960 as right now that seems to be the sweet spot for price vs performance. www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+960&id=3114
You can find it on NewEgg here: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125777

For your RAM you need to do some research on your PC and find out what motherboard you have, then we can find out what clock speeds your motherboard supports. Anymore you want at least 8-16GB of RAM.

For the SSD you have a couple of options. Most people want to setup an SSD as the master drive that your OS boots from. Just for the simple fact that it cuts down load time by quite a bit when starting the PC from a cold boot. Still, if your main concern is good gaming performance, you can easily just plug the SSD into your motherboard's SATA controller and set it up as an additional HDD. You then just install your games to whatever drive letter to choose for this additional drive.

For SSD you'll want to go with a SATAIII option as a SATAII drive is going to leave you with a bottleneck in your data transfer rates and sort of defeat the purpose of having an SSD. You'll want to verify that your motherboard supports SATAIII (if your PC is newer then about 2010ish, it should). For the SSD I'd recommend going with a 250GB drive size. Anything lower then that and your paying a disproportionate amount in terms of dollars vs drive space. I'd recommend getting the Samsung 840 EVO: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0ZX1AJ8275

Once we get the RAM factored in, all said and done you'd probably come out somewhere around $600.00 for the upgrade if you go with the parts I listed... of course there are cheaper parts that could fill the same role, I just provided the products that I prefer. It might seem a little on the steep side, but this hardware would last quite a while and would be compatible with basically any intel/AMD setup you might choose to go with should you eventually decide to get a new motherboard and CPU.

Anyway... for pre-built. I dunno. I've never gone that route.
I always hear about iBuyPower who does stuff on a built to order basis: www.ibuypower.com/Site/Intel-4th-Generation?gclid=CKWqlYePjscCFQ4paQodZH8Ivg
NewEgg also has a desktop computer section with complete builds for sale: www.newegg.com/Desktop-Computers/Category/ID-228?name=Desktop-Computers

[sebastheuniballa]

Hmm....You might be on to something, Ed. I looked up a few things. First of all, I have an Alienware Aurora R3. It was badass and never broke a sweat....until GTA 5.

For memory, the motherboard supports up to 16GB at 1333. That I can get figured out and replaced without an issue.

With the GPUs I mentioned (2 GTX 460s), would a pair of GTX 960s work? I did some looking and searching in forums and such. Evidently, nobody who has these machines are doing any upgrading anymore. Could not find anything recent or active regarding this computer. Aside from the fact that Dell/Alienware wasn't designed much for future upgrades. I was able to see that the 960 uses less power than the 460, so that is one less thing to worry about. Evidently upgrading the powersupply in this case is a huge hassle.

Again, I have to bring up the wierdness of how settings looked in GTA. Why did connecting the two cards with SLI simply double GTA's listing of available GPU memory AND double the GPU memory being used (with no improvement in performance)....compared to when for some reason, I had been using only one GPU the whole time by not having SLI active? The only change to performance came when I went into the SLI settings and opted to use the CPU for the PhysX operations. When I did that, there was still no improvement in what settings could be increased...but it did eliminate the framerate drops I was experiencing in GTA Online.

Not sure if I am reading specs correctly. I have 4 connections for SATA 3.0GB and two connections for the SATA 6.0GB. It looks like in the docs that the 6.0 is SATA3. Am I reading that correctly?

Yeah...I am getting old. Back in the day, I knew all of what was going on with building and upgrading these things. Back to being a total noob about it. Thanks for the help...

[Ed.Venture]

No problem man, and yes you're reading the SATA specs correctly. SATAII is 3.0Gb while SATAIII is 6.0Gb. You get double the throughput on SATAIII which is important for SSD as it really takes advantage of that. If you were using a mechanical drive it wouldn't matter as the data transfer rate for those really isn't improved much (if at all) under the SATAIII revision.

For the video card I actually had to look back a bit. The GTX460 had a PCI Express 2.0 interface while the new 960 has jumped ahead to PCI Express 3.0... PCI Express is backwards compatible. You might take a small performance hit but nothing that should really be noticeable. I would assume the PCI slots you have are both x16 being that they already hold two 460s in SLI, so they should work out just fine. Honestly one card might even be all you need. Your not required to continue to run SLI though that is certainly an option.

For the GTA Weirdness, I don't have any answers there. I can't comment on the SLI issues as I'm currently running a single card so I haven't had to toy with it. I know GTA IV's graphic settings were buggy as hell and I've noticed quirks with V as well. From what I can tell the game will often misreport memory usage, but I haven't had the need to pursue a fix for that as everything seems to work regardless.

::EDIT::

Also, you should be able to ebay your old hardware to save some cash on the back end.

[soilworker]

GTA does not support SLI. You will have more luck with one card.

If you want 1080p at 60fps on high/almost ultra go with a 970. Your i7 should still be able to kick a little bit longer, but if you get a chance to snag an i5-4xxxK series or i7-4790K for under 300 that would be the route to take for future proofing. But like I said your processor should be able to handle another few years.

If you plan on having GTA on an SSD with your operating system, then plan on getting a 250 GB at least. Or wait a few months until 500GB SSDs drop to around $120 or so.

As for SATA speeds, your older board might have like 2 or 4 SATAIII ports, if not then you might want to get a motherboard/cpu upgrade on black friday or so.

Also getting a new motherboard you will be able to see what RAM it supports, and plan accordingly. 1600 seems the norm for gaming PCs.

[sebastheuniballa]

Thanks, everyone.

I got most of the work done. The only thing I missed (so far as I can tell) is the fact that GTA does not support SLI. Not to worry, I think I went sufficiently overboard to have that issue tackled. Everything is in the case...so, tonight will be all the boring part of updates, downloading, etc. For now, I know I am locked at 60 fps because I am using a 32" tv as my monitor. Later, I plan on finding a monitor that can take advantage of the gpu/cpu capabilities.

Geez, back in the day, it was a fun achievement to get 1tb of hard disk all set up together in a Raid all in the same overstuffed case. Now...1tb SD cards are coming out.

I feel old...

[soilworker]

Samsung is working on a 16TB SSD, so yes times are changing fast. Hope all goes well with the updated computer.

[sebastheuniballa]

Ho-lee Ka-rap!

GTA is like an all new game now. Car colors pop, chrome wheels actually look like chrome (before, they look like chrome just in the Mod-shop), no fps drop, no lobby-dropping, and the physics even work differently now. I can only imagine the improvement when I get a quality monitor later...

[jam442]

I'm still trying to decide if i want a 980 Ti or the new R9 Fury cards.

[Ed.Venture]

To me it sort of depends what CPU and drivers I'm running. I've had trouble in the past running Nvidia hardware with an AMD system. It's an issue that I've heard has since been resolved, but I'm wary of pairing the two brands. So basically, if you're running Intel, I say go Nvidia, if you're running AMD, I say go AMD. At the end of the day, you really can't go wrong. The top end video cards are so powerful that it'll be another three or four years before a game comes out that can really start to tax them.

As for the comparison of the two cards themselves, on paper they look pretty evenly matched as both hold advantages over the other. However if you look at the current batch of benchmarks over at passmark.com you can see the Nvidia hardware is pretty much dominating and the 980Ti is right at the top of the heap.
www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-R9-FURY-vs--9223372036823111234

So, if it were me and I wanted absolute no doubt top of the line on an Intel system, I'd pick the Nvidia card.

[jam442]

Yeah I have a AMD FX 8350 8 core. Kinda wonder if it will play nice with Nvidia.

The only problem with the R9 is i want the air cooled version, but the factory can't make them fast enough, and they are nearly impossible to get right now.

[soilworker]

I had an 8320 paired with my 970 for a few months, and it played games alright. However benchmarks weren't as good as they could have been. AMD processors are great for budgets, but for when you really want to get graphics cranking they aren't as strong as an Intel.


My 3DMARK score with the AMD was a 8015.
And my score with the i7 4790K is a 10143.

The main difference is the physics score.

[jam442]

Yeah i just cant go Intel. Been building AMD for 20 years and always been happy. Just don't see the point in spending twice as much on Intel just to gain 5 frames per second.