Well make sure, because depending on your mobo you cant just put in any Intel or AMD. its one or the other.
Rift "can" be a very demanding game if you run full settings, Rift has some of the nicest and smoothest graphics ive seen compared to a lot of games out at the moment. I would go with the AMD & GPU combo IF your mobo is the right socket.
No, what I meant is that I am buying a motherboard/cpu combo and know they are compatible. The mobo i have is completely screwed so I need to get another one and was going to upgrade the cpu to the 3.2 quad along with buying a new one. The combo is only $190, opposed the the i5 2500 + pc67 mobo being a combo of about $400...so I was hoping to get away with the first one since everyone was telling me the cheaper one of the two would still run everything great. I also need a new GPU and was going to get a corsair 650w, along with 4-8GB of DDR3 ram. After all that being said I was debating over the GPU or SSD upgrade.
To Quizzical: So you think that if I could spare more money in the first place then I should just get a better motherboard/cpu instead of upgrading the gpu or getting and ssd? Why would I do that exactly? I'm just confused because everyone told me that the combo you suggested would not have any issues with games for years so why would going further make any difference when the gpu/ssd would actually make one.
There are several points here.
First, don't do slight upgrades. Upgrading to something only 50% faster than what you already have is usually a waste of money, unless someone will buy the old part off of you to cover most of the cost. Unless you have a big enough budget to buy the high end every time a new high end comes out (which you don't, and most people don't), it's better to wait until you can get dramatically greater performance than your old part.
That's why I said not to get a GeForce GTX 460. It's faster than a GeForce GTX 260, but not by enough of a margin to justify the upgrade. If you were running a GeForce 9400 GT, then I'd say sure, go ahead and get a GeForce GTX 460.
If you get a Core i5 2500K, then you'll roughly double your processor's performance in single-threaded workloads. Having four cores rather than two is a huge deal, too. That's enough of an upgrade to be worthwhile.
Furthermore, processors aren't going to get much faster for gaming purposes in the near future. Clock speeds have largely topped out. The highest stock-clocked desktop processor ever released was a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4--and that launched way back in 2004.
Architectural changes can let you do more per clock cycle, but Sandy Bridge was largely Intel's attempt at tearing up everything and rebuilding it to maximize IPC. There aren't huge IPC gains coming from Intel in the near future. Zambezi is going to be AMD's attempt at doing likewise, and might have IPC in the same ballpark at Sandy Bridge, but after that, there aren't going to be huge IPC gains coming from AMD for a while, either.
They'll still be able to add more processor cores. But quad cores today are common, and games won't see much benefit from more than four cores for quite some time, because threading games to more cores is tricky to do.
It's not that processors won't get any faster at all. But next year's desktop processors might be 10% faster than this year's for gaming purposes. It's not going to be huge leaps in performance (typically 40% annually) like we've had in the past few decades.
If you get a Core i5 2500K today, it will still be a nice gaming processor three years from now. Conversely, if you get something cheaper today, you'll likely eventually have to upgrade to something not much faster than a 2500K. Buying the cheaper option today plus the upgrade later will cost considerably more than just the 2500K today, so you might as well just get that level of performance today if you can afford it.
With video cards, the situation is very different. As video cards are becoming more limited by power consumption, performance gains won't be as rapid as they have been in the past. But for gaming purposes, graphical performance will still increase much more quickly than processor performance. New APIs will make older video cards obsolete, too. If you buy a brand new GeForce GTX 580 for $500 today, then three years from now, it will still be serviceable, but will feel pretty dated.
Furthermore, your GeForce GTX 260 is still a decent enough card for a while longer. You've been talking about maxing settings in Rift, but max settings means very different things to different people.
When you pick up a new game, what do you do? Do you tinker with settings trying to find which settings will give you the lowest possible frame rate, and use that as your main criterion? Or do you look at how settings affect image quality. If a graphical setting cuts your frame rate in half, but doesn't make the game look any better, would you turn it off or on? If you'd turn it on and complain about low frame rates, then sure, you'll need an awfully powerful video card.
But if you'd say, it's not worth cutting my frame rate in half to only make the game look slightly better, then you don't need nearly as powerful of a video card. If you want to run Rift at fairly high but not completely max settings, then your GeForce GTX 260 can do that just fine.
Among gaming cards, a not powerful enough video card doesn't mean that the game won't run smoothly. It only means that the game will run smoothly, but at lower graphical settings. A not powerful enough processor means that the game won't run smoothly at any settings.
In addition, it's not just that vastly better video cards are coming eventually. They're coming soon, with the first cards coming possibly this month and surely this year. The next generation is a full node die shrink, and that's a huge deal. What you'll be able to get eight months from now will be vastly better than what you can get today, whether at the high end or at any given price point. If it was a choice between upgrading a processor now and a video card then or the other way around, doing the processor now and the video card later would be the obvious, correct choice even if your current motherboard were in perfect working order.
I think you'd be far better off doing a large upgrade of your processor now and a large upgrade of your video card later, rather than doing a small upgrade of both now, and then having to do another small upgrade of both later. It's better to pay $300 once than $200 twice.
As for an SSD, that's kind of independent of other stuff. You do that when the budget permits. An SSD usually won't improve your frame rates in games, but it will make nearly everything else on your system feel faster and more responsive. How important an SSD is is largely a matter of opinion.
You can follow as what Quizzical said, but as he says "spending $300 once is better then $200 twice" this can be true but you also have to put TIME into affect. Theres two different ways to upgrade, upgrade 1 thing at a time with the better option, then wait long periods of time in between to upgrade the next thing, or upgrade 2 things now to very decent (but not better then option 1) and use it until you feel you need to upgrade again.
I feel that in your situation, the AMD & GPU would be better if your going to play games such as Rift and want to play Max Settings. The AMD has enough power to be able to have the settings run smoothly at max, but from personal experiences i dont see how a mere GTX 280 could. I played Rift with GTS 450 SLi and THAT didnt even run max settings. Of course you can get the 2500K now, but how long would you wait until you bought a good graphic card? You will see better gains NOW if you got the AMD & GPU... BUT if you feel like you can wait, you would see EVEN BETTER gains in the future when you get your better graphic card along with the 2500K.
its all up too you, just think about what youll be using your PC for and if you really need to spend the money on the 2500K or if youll be just fine with the AMD.
Ok, I understand most of all that now. Thank you Quizzical and everyone else for all your help. The only thing that still confuses me is this. Are some people just like Quizzical said, saying rift cannot run maxed setting with a 260 because they are not even considering just lowering a few settings that would increase fps hugely? I mean...I would be fine with funning it at very high settings, if i just had to lower a few unnoticable things and get great fps boosts.
Also a nice tip when buying RAM. Check wich type the mother board supports.
Double channel means you need two slots filled, triple three etc.
I made a mistake few years back when I was still a noob and bought triple channel for my double channel mobo. Plugged in the three and didn't work. Ofc I could just use two of the three but you waist money for other parts
I'm not sure exactly what you mean with double channeling/triple channeling and what exactly the difference is
8GB DDR3 Ram (mainly just so that it stays up to date for a long time to come and since its stupid cheap)
Keep my GTX 260
Motherboard/CPU comb (3.2 Quad core)
- I have been thinking and I do not think the price would be worth it to me to get the full blown i5 2500. Mainly because I know what I use on my pc and I do not believe it will be worth my needs. Also, if later down the line in a year or so I want to upgrade I will then just get a zambezi. Maybe in the long run I spent more, but I think taking my budget/needs and other things into consideration I think this would be the best choice.
- I believe I will be plenty satisfied with how it will run games/programs. Later down the line, I will probably upgrade the cpu to a zambezi when they come out and the graphics card once some prices drop. From the knowledge I have gained here from Quizzical and many others; I have put my own thought into it and together have come up with this decision. It may be a bit more exspensive cpu wise in the future, but I should have much more money later down the line when I need this upgrade.
Again, thank you all for helping me try to figure all of this out in such a short time
Also a nice tip when buying RAM. Check wich type the mother board supports.
Double channel means you need two slots filled, triple three etc.
I made a mistake few years back when I was still a noob and bought triple channel for my double channel mobo. Plugged in the three and didn't work. Ofc I could just use two of the three but you waist money for other parts
I'm not sure exactly what you mean with double channeling/triple channeling and what exactly the difference is
Dual channel memory requires 2 physical sticks of memory in order to work. Triple channel; 3 sticks. It is a requirement of a motherboads specifications not necessarily of the memory sticks themselves.
"I used to think the worst thing in life was to be all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." Robin Williams
Ok, I understand most of all that now. Thank you Quizzical and everyone else for all your help. The only thing that still confuses me is this. Are some people just like Quizzical said, saying rift cannot run maxed setting with a 260 because they are not even considering just lowering a few settings that would increase fps hugely? I mean...I would be fine with funning it at very high settings, if i just had to lower a few unnoticable things and get great fps boosts.
You can't really take Rift as an example to point out how different hardware performs. The engine is seemingly not optimized at all and scales very very bad from mid to high to highend range PCs.
Phenom x4 955 @3.2 stock, 1920x1080, all settings maxed beyond ultra except for supersampling:
280GTX: 35 fps min.
AMD6950: 37fps.
Measured with the camera pointed from the camp towards the huge field at the end of the guardian starting area. Fps going down to the 10s in rifts (same is but reported by players with 6970 CF or 5*0 SLI setups). Exactly the same fps with CPU at 3.8Ghz or the camera pointed to the ground or 800x600 resolution. Cpu and GPU load around 50% all the way through.
Unless you wan't to play a Dx9 game with an age old engine without shadows, AA and AF you just can't lower a few settings and expect to gain fps in Rift.
Except for Rift and Stalker ClearSky (which is an unoptimized hardware hog itself), i've been running all recent games at max settings 1920x1080 with my trusty old 280GTX.
Good luck on your build man. A few settings that you could lower that will really boost your FPS are SHADOWS and AA, also disable any type of Bloom Affect
Thank you. Yes, I was hearing that rift was not optimized very well and that beastly computers are struggling just because of other problems, so I guess we shall see when I set it all up.
See, this is the kind of thing that confuses me. That is prety much my exact setup and everyone else is saying it won't max anything like that...but you have the setup and are telling me it works great so what the heck...
eventually, you'll learn that not all display settings are pleasing to your eyes.
maxing you display setting for the sake of saying you have it maxed is one thing. but can your eyes actually pick out the difference between a med setting and max setting? or do you actually WANT to turn on something that actually makes the screen look worse? personally I HATE bloom effect with a passion. it makes EVERYTHING blurry and i absolutely hate it. BUT, for the sake of SAYING I have everything maxed, i'd have to run it on because it takes extra processing cycles to generate that blurry effect.... i can bet that your eyes cant tell the difference between 4x AA and a 16x AA nor do you have a monitor that is good enough to be able to display the difference anyway. these are "nit pick" settings that waste extra CPU/GPU cycles that hardware manufactures/game publishers use to sell their product. does it ACUTALLY add to the gameplay or the overall game experiance? not really...
to make things simpler to understand, just eyeballing it, MOST people CANT tell the difference between a 2011 porche 911 and a 2012 porche 911. however, the difference is huge if you are actually looking for the difference.
ssd arent mandatory either since you can deactivate paging file wich in trm use ram instead of ssd or hhd.(basicly faster then anything.you do need a bit more ram tho! i recommend you to go to 6 gig of ram if you disable paging file ,yes you can get by with 4 gig but my recom stand! if you already got the ram disable paging file and wait till the new gpu are released from ati!
Not to add more fire or confusion to your thread but always keep an eye out for deals on the items you're wanting to buy.
For example, I bought a 60GB SSD for $49 on Newegg instead of paying $100ish for it.
Also another consideration, sometimes MMOs do slow down because of the amount of data that's being read from the Hard Drive, for example an area with a lot of players you will see a faster loading of those assets from an SSD drive compared to a mechanical drive.
As a final note, Quizz does give very good advice.
To try and explain some of the confusion you may have been seeing re the gfx cards:
The #70/#80 + on the nvidia range are often double(sometimes triple) the price of a #50/#60s but this is alot to do with the mechanic of how the card is built (cores and pipes(check out tomshardware for some good reading on tech stuff))and often why the #80s will age much better than the #60s, so as someone was saying a 285 will not be far off a 560 today on performance but will lack some of the bells and whistles (direct x11 support in this comparison).
Also you need to take into account type of game being played for performance. FPS = greater realiance on GFX card, RTS greatere realiance on CPU/Memory.
Also the difference between Med/High and max settings on most games would only be noticable on 2 machines set up next door to each other, and even then debatable.
Remember the game is the same on low gfx settings as it is on maxed - unless you want to play BF3/Skyrim in which case it might be worth dropping the sound stuff and sdd and grabbing a 560ti or similar, and updating those things in the near future.
I'm just looking to get the best experience I can now without sacrificing to must cost later down the line. I know later on I will have a much much larger budget and so getting a new gpu then would be much easier
SSD will give You most noticeable kick, so go for it. Surely it won't do anything about fps or graphics quality in game, but having fast reacting OS is really nice and You can feel it.
Otherwise save up $ and wait to buy whole package as You got some nice advices already
If your going to have a bigger budget down the road, then i would do as your planning and buy the SSD now and save for that larger budget to get a good GPU
I'm just looking to get the best experience I can now without sacrificing to must cost later down the line. I know later on I will have a much much larger budget and so getting a new gpu then would be much easier
you already have all the information you'll ever need to make a decision. there really isnt much more anyone can say about the choices you can make after quizzy layed out every single option you can have:D
at this point, i'll have to say you are just wasting money if you refuse to follow quizzys advice... he's put in tons of time explaining why each options is good/bad... the rest is up to you.
For sure, get a new graphic card first and then get the SSD. You will see way more gains with that, and depending on the rest of your PC, the GTX 260 will NOT run Rift at max settings. My OLD gaming rig has GTS 460 SLi (2 of them) and that ran Rift pretty much Max Settings (not full shadows) and i was around 45+ FPS.
I would recommend you look into ATI/AMD Cards. They relatively have better bench marks and are cheaper.
You are wrong. A GTX 260 will run rift at max settings. I own a GTX260 and easily run it at max with a Q6600 and 4 gigs of DDR3. I dont know how you wouldn't be able to run it at max with that card. I ran with full shadows and all.
Originally posted by marinrider Originally posted by drazzah For sure, get a new graphic card first and then get the SSD. You will see way more gains with that, and depending on the rest of your PC, the GTX 260 will NOT run Rift at max settings. My OLD gaming rig has GTS 460 SLi (2 of them) and that ran Rift pretty much Max Settings (not full shadows) and i was around 45+ FPS. I would recommend you look into ATI/AMD Cards. They relatively have better bench marks and are cheaper. Use http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU11/188 and check out your benchmarks for the GTX 260 VS another card.
You are wrong. A GTX 260 will run rift at max settings. I own a GTX260 and easily run it at max with a Q6600 and 4 gigs of DDR3. I dont know how you wouldn't be able to run it at max with that card. I ran with full shadows and all.
For sure, get a new graphic card first and then get the SSD. You will see way more gains with that, and depending on the rest of your PC, the GTX 260 will NOT run Rift at max settings. My OLD gaming rig has GTS 460 SLi (2 of them) and that ran Rift pretty much Max Settings (not full shadows) and i was around 45+ FPS.
I would recommend you look into ATI/AMD Cards. They relatively have better bench marks and are cheaper.
You are wrong. A GTX 260 will run rift at max settings. I own a GTX260 and easily run it at max with a Q6600 and 4 gigs of DDR3. I dont know how you wouldn't be able to run it at max with that card. I ran with full shadows and all.
But yes, upgrade the video card over a SSD.
What anti-aliasing setting were you using btw?
Everything was as high as it could go (with the exclusion of bloom). Rift isnt a very tasking game on the computer. My laptop with integrated grapics runs it inbetween low and medium as well.
For sure, get a new graphic card first and then get the SSD. You will see way more gains with that, and depending on the rest of your PC, the GTX 260 will NOT run Rift at max settings. My OLD gaming rig has GTS 460 SLi (2 of them) and that ran Rift pretty much Max Settings (not full shadows) and i was around 45+ FPS.
I would recommend you look into ATI/AMD Cards. They relatively have better bench marks and are cheaper.
You are wrong. A GTX 260 will run rift at max settings. I own a GTX260 and easily run it at max with a Q6600 and 4 gigs of DDR3. I dont know how you wouldn't be able to run it at max with that card. I ran with full shadows and all.
But yes, upgrade the video card over a SSD.
What anti-aliasing setting were you using btw?
Everything was as high as it could go (with the exclusion of bloom). Rift isnt a very tasking game on the computer. My laptop with integrated grapics runs it inbetween low and medium as well.
I cant belive that a GTX 260 can run Rift at Max Settings with Full AA at max FPS when ive heard SO MANY people not being able to run it with way better graphic cards. Even my old rig with GTS450 SLi could not run Max Settings with decent FPS.
Yeah my GTS450 SLi could "run" max settings, but i would get about 40 FPS alone running around killing shit, and low teens to 20s in a town full of people. Theres a huge difference between running max settings and running max settings at 60+ fps. I just dont understand how a GTX260 could run Rift.. Max Settings.. Full AA @ 60+ FPS. Anything less is not "running" max fps, its just putting settings to max and dealing with the fps spikes.
Never said max fps. It would be 30+ though. Either way, I know that I did it. I'm not going to bother going on because the op is upgrading the gpu likely anyway.
Never said max fps. It would be 30+ though. Either way, I know that I did it. I'm not going to bother going on because the op is upgrading the gpu likely anyway.
Alright like i stated before, when you called me wrong... A GTX260 will NOT run Rift at Max settings with 60+ FPS. Pretty much any modern card now will be able to put the settings to max, but its all about where your FPS is at, not just being able to "run" max settings. Anything less then 60 FPS (personally) is a waste considering your just putting settings to max and dealing with the low fps. There is no point in wasting money on a video card that will only play games half-assed. And im pretty sure the OP is getting the SSD now and when he has a bigger budget later on he will buy the GPU.
Comments
No, what I meant is that I am buying a motherboard/cpu combo and know they are compatible. The mobo i have is completely screwed so I need to get another one and was going to upgrade the cpu to the 3.2 quad along with buying a new one. The combo is only $190, opposed the the i5 2500 + pc67 mobo being a combo of about $400...so I was hoping to get away with the first one since everyone was telling me the cheaper one of the two would still run everything great. I also need a new GPU and was going to get a corsair 650w, along with 4-8GB of DDR3 ram. After all that being said I was debating over the GPU or SSD upgrade.
There are several points here.
First, don't do slight upgrades. Upgrading to something only 50% faster than what you already have is usually a waste of money, unless someone will buy the old part off of you to cover most of the cost. Unless you have a big enough budget to buy the high end every time a new high end comes out (which you don't, and most people don't), it's better to wait until you can get dramatically greater performance than your old part.
That's why I said not to get a GeForce GTX 460. It's faster than a GeForce GTX 260, but not by enough of a margin to justify the upgrade. If you were running a GeForce 9400 GT, then I'd say sure, go ahead and get a GeForce GTX 460.
If you get a Core i5 2500K, then you'll roughly double your processor's performance in single-threaded workloads. Having four cores rather than two is a huge deal, too. That's enough of an upgrade to be worthwhile.
Furthermore, processors aren't going to get much faster for gaming purposes in the near future. Clock speeds have largely topped out. The highest stock-clocked desktop processor ever released was a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4--and that launched way back in 2004.
Architectural changes can let you do more per clock cycle, but Sandy Bridge was largely Intel's attempt at tearing up everything and rebuilding it to maximize IPC. There aren't huge IPC gains coming from Intel in the near future. Zambezi is going to be AMD's attempt at doing likewise, and might have IPC in the same ballpark at Sandy Bridge, but after that, there aren't going to be huge IPC gains coming from AMD for a while, either.
They'll still be able to add more processor cores. But quad cores today are common, and games won't see much benefit from more than four cores for quite some time, because threading games to more cores is tricky to do.
It's not that processors won't get any faster at all. But next year's desktop processors might be 10% faster than this year's for gaming purposes. It's not going to be huge leaps in performance (typically 40% annually) like we've had in the past few decades.
If you get a Core i5 2500K today, it will still be a nice gaming processor three years from now. Conversely, if you get something cheaper today, you'll likely eventually have to upgrade to something not much faster than a 2500K. Buying the cheaper option today plus the upgrade later will cost considerably more than just the 2500K today, so you might as well just get that level of performance today if you can afford it.
With video cards, the situation is very different. As video cards are becoming more limited by power consumption, performance gains won't be as rapid as they have been in the past. But for gaming purposes, graphical performance will still increase much more quickly than processor performance. New APIs will make older video cards obsolete, too. If you buy a brand new GeForce GTX 580 for $500 today, then three years from now, it will still be serviceable, but will feel pretty dated.
Furthermore, your GeForce GTX 260 is still a decent enough card for a while longer. You've been talking about maxing settings in Rift, but max settings means very different things to different people.
When you pick up a new game, what do you do? Do you tinker with settings trying to find which settings will give you the lowest possible frame rate, and use that as your main criterion? Or do you look at how settings affect image quality. If a graphical setting cuts your frame rate in half, but doesn't make the game look any better, would you turn it off or on? If you'd turn it on and complain about low frame rates, then sure, you'll need an awfully powerful video card.
But if you'd say, it's not worth cutting my frame rate in half to only make the game look slightly better, then you don't need nearly as powerful of a video card. If you want to run Rift at fairly high but not completely max settings, then your GeForce GTX 260 can do that just fine.
Among gaming cards, a not powerful enough video card doesn't mean that the game won't run smoothly. It only means that the game will run smoothly, but at lower graphical settings. A not powerful enough processor means that the game won't run smoothly at any settings.
In addition, it's not just that vastly better video cards are coming eventually. They're coming soon, with the first cards coming possibly this month and surely this year. The next generation is a full node die shrink, and that's a huge deal. What you'll be able to get eight months from now will be vastly better than what you can get today, whether at the high end or at any given price point. If it was a choice between upgrading a processor now and a video card then or the other way around, doing the processor now and the video card later would be the obvious, correct choice even if your current motherboard were in perfect working order.
I think you'd be far better off doing a large upgrade of your processor now and a large upgrade of your video card later, rather than doing a small upgrade of both now, and then having to do another small upgrade of both later. It's better to pay $300 once than $200 twice.
As for an SSD, that's kind of independent of other stuff. You do that when the budget permits. An SSD usually won't improve your frame rates in games, but it will make nearly everything else on your system feel faster and more responsive. How important an SSD is is largely a matter of opinion.
You can follow as what Quizzical said, but as he says "spending $300 once is better then $200 twice" this can be true but you also have to put TIME into affect. Theres two different ways to upgrade, upgrade 1 thing at a time with the better option, then wait long periods of time in between to upgrade the next thing, or upgrade 2 things now to very decent (but not better then option 1) and use it until you feel you need to upgrade again.
I feel that in your situation, the AMD & GPU would be better if your going to play games such as Rift and want to play Max Settings. The AMD has enough power to be able to have the settings run smoothly at max, but from personal experiences i dont see how a mere GTX 280 could. I played Rift with GTS 450 SLi and THAT didnt even run max settings. Of course you can get the 2500K now, but how long would you wait until you bought a good graphic card? You will see better gains NOW if you got the AMD & GPU... BUT if you feel like you can wait, you would see EVEN BETTER gains in the future when you get your better graphic card along with the 2500K.
its all up too you, just think about what youll be using your PC for and if you really need to spend the money on the 2500K or if youll be just fine with the AMD.
Ok, I understand most of all that now. Thank you Quizzical and everyone else for all your help. The only thing that still confuses me is this. Are some people just like Quizzical said, saying rift cannot run maxed setting with a 260 because they are not even considering just lowering a few settings that would increase fps hugely? I mean...I would be fine with funning it at very high settings, if i just had to lower a few unnoticable things and get great fps boosts.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean with double channeling/triple channeling and what exactly the difference is
I think this is what I have decided to get:
Corsair 650w PSU
Xonar DS 7.1 Sound Card
Sennheiser PC161 Headsets
Cool Master HAF 912 Case
Crucial M4 64GB SSD 6.0 Gb/s
8GB DDR3 Ram (mainly just so that it stays up to date for a long time to come and since its stupid cheap)
Keep my GTX 260
Motherboard/CPU comb (3.2 Quad core)
- I have been thinking and I do not think the price would be worth it to me to get the full blown i5 2500. Mainly because I know what I use on my pc and I do not believe it will be worth my needs. Also, if later down the line in a year or so I want to upgrade I will then just get a zambezi. Maybe in the long run I spent more, but I think taking my budget/needs and other things into consideration I think this would be the best choice.
- I believe I will be plenty satisfied with how it will run games/programs. Later down the line, I will probably upgrade the cpu to a zambezi when they come out and the graphics card once some prices drop. From the knowledge I have gained here from Quizzical and many others; I have put my own thought into it and together have come up with this decision. It may be a bit more exspensive cpu wise in the future, but I should have much more money later down the line when I need this upgrade.
Again, thank you all for helping me try to figure all of this out in such a short time
Dual channel memory requires 2 physical sticks of memory in order to work. Triple channel; 3 sticks. It is a requirement of a motherboads specifications not necessarily of the memory sticks themselves.
Thanks. Yeah, I looked it up and finally understood it.
You can't really take Rift as an example to point out how different hardware performs. The engine is seemingly not optimized at all and scales very very bad from mid to high to highend range PCs.
Phenom x4 955 @3.2 stock, 1920x1080, all settings maxed beyond ultra except for supersampling:
280GTX: 35 fps min.
AMD6950: 37fps.
Measured with the camera pointed from the camp towards the huge field at the end of the guardian starting area. Fps going down to the 10s in rifts (same is but reported by players with 6970 CF or 5*0 SLI setups). Exactly the same fps with CPU at 3.8Ghz or the camera pointed to the ground or 800x600 resolution. Cpu and GPU load around 50% all the way through.
Unless you wan't to play a Dx9 game with an age old engine without shadows, AA and AF you just can't lower a few settings and expect to gain fps in Rift.
Except for Rift and Stalker ClearSky (which is an unoptimized hardware hog itself), i've been running all recent games at max settings 1920x1080 with my trusty old 280GTX.
Good luck on your build man. A few settings that you could lower that will really boost your FPS are SHADOWS and AA, also disable any type of Bloom Affect
Thank you. Yes, I was hearing that rift was not optimized very well and that beastly computers are struggling just because of other problems, so I guess we shall see when I set it all up.
eventually, you'll learn that not all display settings are pleasing to your eyes.
maxing you display setting for the sake of saying you have it maxed is one thing. but can your eyes actually pick out the difference between a med setting and max setting? or do you actually WANT to turn on something that actually makes the screen look worse? personally I HATE bloom effect with a passion. it makes EVERYTHING blurry and i absolutely hate it. BUT, for the sake of SAYING I have everything maxed, i'd have to run it on because it takes extra processing cycles to generate that blurry effect.... i can bet that your eyes cant tell the difference between 4x AA and a 16x AA nor do you have a monitor that is good enough to be able to display the difference anyway. these are "nit pick" settings that waste extra CPU/GPU cycles that hardware manufactures/game publishers use to sell their product. does it ACUTALLY add to the gameplay or the overall game experiance? not really...
to make things simpler to understand, just eyeballing it, MOST people CANT tell the difference between a 2011 porche 911 and a 2012 porche 911. however, the difference is huge if you are actually looking for the difference.
ssd arent mandatory either since you can deactivate paging file wich in trm use ram instead of ssd or hhd.(basicly faster then anything.you do need a bit more ram tho!
i recommend you to go to 6 gig of ram if you disable paging file ,yes you can get by with 4 gig but my recom stand!
if you already got the ram disable paging file and wait till the new gpu are released from ati!
Not to add more fire or confusion to your thread but always keep an eye out for deals on the items you're wanting to buy.
For example, I bought a 60GB SSD for $49 on Newegg instead of paying $100ish for it.
Also another consideration, sometimes MMOs do slow down because of the amount of data that's being read from the Hard Drive, for example an area with a lot of players you will see a faster loading of those assets from an SSD drive compared to a mechanical drive.
As a final note, Quizz does give very good advice.
A. Raquel
To try and explain some of the confusion you may have been seeing re the gfx cards:
The #70/#80 + on the nvidia range are often double(sometimes triple) the price of a #50/#60s but this is alot to do with the mechanic of how the card is built (cores and pipes(check out tomshardware for some good reading on tech stuff))and often why the #80s will age much better than the #60s, so as someone was saying a 285 will not be far off a 560 today on performance but will lack some of the bells and whistles (direct x11 support in this comparison).
Also you need to take into account type of game being played for performance. FPS = greater realiance on GFX card, RTS greatere realiance on CPU/Memory.
Also the difference between Med/High and max settings on most games would only be noticable on 2 machines set up next door to each other, and even then debatable.
Remember the game is the same on low gfx settings as it is on maxed - unless you want to play BF3/Skyrim in which case it might be worth dropping the sound stuff and sdd and grabbing a 560ti or similar, and updating those things in the near future.
I'm just looking to get the best experience I can now without sacrificing to must cost later down the line. I know later on I will have a much much larger budget and so getting a new gpu then would be much easier
Otherwise save up $ and wait to buy whole package as You got some nice advices already
If your going to have a bigger budget down the road, then i would do as your planning and buy the SSD now and save for that larger budget to get a good GPU
you already have all the information you'll ever need to make a decision. there really isnt much more anyone can say about the choices you can make after quizzy layed out every single option you can have:D
at this point, i'll have to say you are just wasting money if you refuse to follow quizzys advice... he's put in tons of time explaining why each options is good/bad... the rest is up to you.
You are wrong. A GTX 260 will run rift at max settings. I own a GTX260 and easily run it at max with a Q6600 and 4 gigs of DDR3. I dont know how you wouldn't be able to run it at max with that card. I ran with full shadows and all.
But yes, upgrade the video card over a SSD.
But yes, upgrade the video card over a SSD.
What anti-aliasing setting were you using btw?
Everything was as high as it could go (with the exclusion of bloom). Rift isnt a very tasking game on the computer. My laptop with integrated grapics runs it inbetween low and medium as well.
I cant belive that a GTX 260 can run Rift at Max Settings with Full AA at max FPS when ive heard SO MANY people not being able to run it with way better graphic cards. Even my old rig with GTS450 SLi could not run Max Settings with decent FPS.
Yeah my GTS450 SLi could "run" max settings, but i would get about 40 FPS alone running around killing shit, and low teens to 20s in a town full of people. Theres a huge difference between running max settings and running max settings at 60+ fps. I just dont understand how a GTX260 could run Rift.. Max Settings.. Full AA @ 60+ FPS. Anything less is not "running" max fps, its just putting settings to max and dealing with the fps spikes.
Alright like i stated before, when you called me wrong... A GTX260 will NOT run Rift at Max settings with 60+ FPS. Pretty much any modern card now will be able to put the settings to max, but its all about where your FPS is at, not just being able to "run" max settings. Anything less then 60 FPS (personally) is a waste considering your just putting settings to max and dealing with the low fps. There is no point in wasting money on a video card that will only play games half-assed. And im pretty sure the OP is getting the SSD now and when he has a bigger budget later on he will buy the GPU.