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You ever goto buy milk and come back with $200 in groceries?
So my gtx 470 video card died and I was inquiring about a new one. Well then someone had to say that my PC was on the old side and hope that its had a good life...UGH... now I want more.. so thanks... anyways this is what I came up with and wanted some input.
I have a thermaltake 850 watt PSU, DVD drive. so im good there. And my case is good also.. Sound card I cant part with either.. Is this a significant enough upgrade?
Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 Desktop Memory Model CMZ16GX3M2A1866C9
my old specs are...
Antec P182 gunmetal case
ThermalTake smartM series 850 watt PSU
Evga geforce 470 GTX 1280mb video card <<>>>
Gskill 4 gig ddr2 1066 (8500) memory
AMD phenom II X4 945 deneb 3.0 Processor
Asus M4N82 Deluxe AM3/AM2+/AM2 Nvidia 980 sli Motherboard.
Razer Barracuda AC-1 gaming audio card
Western digital WDC WD64001aals-00l3b2 (640 gig Hard drive)
Hitachi Hard drive 500 gig as a backup (secondary)
Windows 7 64 bit
Comments
Someone will come in and say that is ok.... but you can do better. No specifics, though.
Someone will come in and in detail explain his own setup. It will sound so up to date with the latest everything, you suspect he copied the stats from a computer store. No feedback on your setup, though, only want to show his own.
Someone will say that one part is really bad, and if you really want a better computer, then buy this part, that he fansy himself. it will be more expensive, stats similar but word of mouth (his) is that it is twice as good, at least.
Someone will say you are cheap and that computer sucks. No info what he use himself.
Someone will talk about some game they like, and try to pick a fight with a game they do not like. No feedback on computers.
And someone will try to make a funny list of different personalities on mmorpg.com and be of no help whatsoever...
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Unless I really felt the need for a new computer I would just buy a cheap gfx card and use your old computer until it's not good enough.
Your old computer is more than enough for everything I use my computer for atm.
All the time. What started as a simple CPU fan / case upgrade has turned into a completely new machine. Figured, "Well, if I'm going to go to all the trouble to swap cases, I may as well replace the stock CPU cooler. If I'm going to go to all THAT trouble, I may as well upgrade to an Intel CPU. Which means a new mobo. Plus some new, faster RAM. Oh, and a new copy of Windows 7. Oh, and this is on sale..."
All I have left to buy is the processor at this point. Been purchasing parts since June (got a LOT from black Friday sales). If only Newegg would put the damn i5 3570K on sale...
If you are gaming the only time the processor will matter is in cases where the 8350FX will be better. That being highly threaded strategy games. If not you are looking at differences of less then 1 fps or fps over 60. Now if you are using old processor intensive workloads then the core i5 will be a better choice. This is with things like video/file compression under 4 threads, and CPU based PhysX. It also makes sense if your energy bill is important considering the wattage difference between the processors. Getting a Core i5 will also come with a premium on motherboards. You will get less then what you can buy for the same price using AMD.
My point was not "you need something better", but rather, "your computer can't really be upgraded much further". The latter isn't a problem until you decide that you need more performance.
I think that what may have happened is that you botched the choice of a motherboard when you built the computer. Your motherboard is Socket AM2+, which became obsolete when AMD launched their Phenom II processors (which used Socket AM3) in early 2009. (DDR2 memory means it's effectively Socket AM2+; some Socket AM3 processors can also fit Socket AM2+, and the motherboard does support those processors, which is why Asus claims it's Socket AM3/AM2+/AM2. There is only one CPU socket, though.) Meanwhile, you also have exactly such a Phenom II processor, as well as Windows 7, which launched in late 2009, and a GeForce GTX 470, which didn't arrive until well into 2010.
The oldest New Egg review of that motherboard dates to 2009--meaning, after the platform was obsolete. So I'm not sure why the motherboard even exists in the first place. Maybe it's a relic of the era when Nvidia was artificially disabling SLI through their drivers if the motherboard had an AMD chipset. That meant that in order to use SLI with an AMD processor, you'd have to buy a markedly inferior motherboard--and probably pay a premium price for it. Nvidia finally dropped that approach when AMD moved to Socket AM3+ in 2011.
If you've got the itch to upgrade, then I'd recommend adding an SSD in addition to replacing the video card, as when the time comes for a full replacement, you could take the SSD with you to a new system.
I'd advise against that approach, as if you can't test if a part works until months after you bought it, it might have been dead on arrival, but you don't find that out until it's too late to RMA it.
Quizz your knowledge is awesome! Thanks for the resposes...
What does "highly threaded" have to do with "strategy games"? Other than determining where to place the camera once per frame, graphics computations are about as easy to thread as there is, apart from toy examples chosen to make threading trivial. I haven't tried threading AI computations (yet), but I'll be surprised if they're not clearly harder to thread than graphics computations. ("Harder" does not imply "hard". I'll also be surprised if they're hard to thread, but that's a different matter.)
You can get it for $169.99 at a Microcenter if you have one nearby.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
My budget is limited so I try to wait for good sales to maximize my dollar. When you make little money you learn to squeeze as much as you can out of it. Plus Newegg is pretty damn good about defective parts.
I have to agree with Quiz to some degree here.
It's fine to upgrade in piecemeal, but plan your upgrades so you can actually use them when you purchase them.
For example: buying a motherboard one month, and not getting the CPU until several months later is not a good idea for three big reason:
The first, the motherboard may be bad, and your way outside the convenient RMA window
The second, you have invested in a piece of hardware but unable to use it for months
The third, by the time you purchase the CPU, the motherboard could have been updated several times over, could have been found cheaper, or the CPU could be discontinued making it more difficult to find.
If you buy a hard drive now (and use it), and a CPU/Motherboard later (and use them), and a video card later on (and use it) - that's fine, and a good way to keep a computer functional on a limited budget. But taking it too extreme, which is sounds as if you have, is counter-productive. Piecemeal upgrading is fine, just make sure the pieces are coarse enough that you can use each of them as you get them.
Strategy games are not like other video game genres. They have hundreds of NPCs that need to be rendered and need their AI calculated. This means its one of the few genres that are CPU bound instead of GPU bound. With decent coding AI can be split near linearly across multiple threads. For AI, I would imagine the techinique would be similar to how MMO engines work. A management task sends a request for what an NPC is doing and gets a response.
ok the wife kinda laughed at me when i said i was gonna spend close to 900 dollars so ive had to revise..
Is this still a good significant upgrade? And would it be a bad idea to use my old hard drive?
ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX R2.0 AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
GIGABYTE GV-R787OC-2GD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video ...
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL
AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8150FRGUBOX
Yeah there's one 35-40 mins from my house, which is probably what I'll end up doing in the next week or two.
Strategy games are not like other video game genres. They have hundreds of NPCs that need to be rendered and need their AI calculated. This means its one of the few genres that are CPU bound instead of GPU bound. With decent coding AI can be split near linearly across multiple threads. For AI, I would imagine the techinique would be similar to how MMO engines work. A management task sends a request for what an NPC is doing and gets a response.
Being CPU bound doesn't necessarily equate to multithreading well. Additionally, trying to split 100+ NPCs each into their own thread would have a lot of thread overhead, a lot of state locking, and could quickly turn into a mess... Trying to cordon off 100+ NPC's into a handful of threads that optimally is based on the number of CPU cores available is also equally non-trivial.
One would think that a simple object-oriented NPC AI would be easy to thread, but when it has to interact with global objects - such as the player's actions and your game engine, it remains easy to thread, but extremely difficult to optimize, especially when your trying to hit a 60FPS (or even 30FPS) target.
You can reuse your old hard drive, however... consider that hard drives are mechanical beasts. They don't fail often (~3% or so typical new failure rate), but they don't age gracefully either. Once a hard drive gets more than 3 years old, it's failure rate will double for every year it stays in operation. So if it's more than 3 years old, I would really consider the risk/hassle of having it die early for your build.
Honestly, though, if I were you:
I would get the graphics card - that's a good one, and it's really the only piece you need to get this computer back up and running.
Drop the idea of upgrading the rest of your computer. This is a faster setup you have picked out, but in my opinion, you wouldn't get enough speed increase out of it to justify the cost. Just save that money for later on when you can just go whole hog on a new computer.
What I would consider: an SSD. Keep your old drive as a data drive, drop a 120G SSD in there and run that as your primary drive. Your computer will feel brand new, spiffy, and a whole lot faster (even though it's the same old CPU, motherboard, and memory).
Then re-evaluate your motherbaord/CPU/Memory upgrade later on, when the wife isn't quite so ... amused by the idea. Ideally, you could just build an entire second computer, since your existing computer is worth more as a complete working unit (either reselling it used on Craigslist/eBay, or as a tax donation where you can write off the entire NEW RETAIL price of the computer), or pass it down to the wife/kids/parents/etc.
Threading graphics computations is a completely straightforward producer-consumer queue. You break up the CPU-side graphics processing work into as many producer threads as you care to. Your rendering thread that communicates with the GPU is the sole consumer thread. Each producer thread computes the program, vertex array, texture(s), and uniforms that the rendering thread needs to send to the GPU, creates an object with that data, and sticks it in the queue.
Java has the LinkedBlockingQueue class to handle all of the synchronization work for you. I don't know C++, but I'd assume it has something analogous or else it would only infrequently be used for games.
It does take a lot of work to take an arbitrary object and compute the data that the rendering thread will need to draw it. But how much more programming work does it take to split that into arbitrarily many threads as opposed to just single-threaded? 1% more? 2% more? It's not much. And that accounts for most of the CPU-side work in most games.
I haven't tried threading AI before. I'd assume that you'd have to basically freeze the state of the game and then have all characters base their AI choices off of what the state of the game was at that particular point in time to avoid tripping over each other. You could divvy all of the characters into some arbitrary number of threads, but you'd definitely have to worry about how long the whole thing takes and how many CPU cores you're eating up.
If you're trying to make the game real-time, then you also have to worry about what if you're not done computing AI choices before it's time to start again? Do you make the whole game slow down to wait for it? And what if you're trying to make it multi-player? You don't want the AI threads to hog all of your CPU cores and make rendering slow to a crawl, nor graphical threads do likewise and prevent AI computations from being done by the time they're needed. In MMOs, you do all of the AI computations on the server, and make sure you have plenty of CPU power to prevent this or else Very Bad Things will happen.
As for the ratio of how much CPU work is for AI versus how much is for rendering, that will vary wildly from one game to the next. I'd expect that computing the AI for one character once would tend to be more work than computing where to draw one object once. But remember that you have to redraw every object in every single frame. By comparison, AI only gets recomputed infrequently. Furthermore, most objects that have to be drawn don't have any associated AI, as trees, hills, buildings, and so forth just sit there and don't have to make choices. Even a character that does have to make choices may internally consist of many different objects to be drawn that each have to be processed separately.
Onless the OP is fond of loading screens, I'd say no. Solid State Drives are essential for today's gamer.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
Solid state disks are nice but hardly essential, that really doesn't have anything to do with whether he should upgrade his whole computer or not though.
But generally speaking 4 cores is enough.
I mean how fast of a difference will i see with a solid state drive.
Where does the speed make up at?
Boot times will go from around 45-75 seconds to around 10-15 seconds. That mysterious time where the computer looks booted up but still won't let you do anything and just dies spinning hourglass for several seconds, goes away entirely.
Game and application load times (for games and applications that are on the SSD) go from 15-30 seconds to 10-15 seconds.
Game zone times (for games that are on the SSD) will go from 10-15 seconds to nearly instantaneous.
Texture pop in games (about the only "gaming" benefit") goes away almost entirely.
Those random times when you right click or hit the Start menu, and your computer has to sit and think about it for a bit - go away entirely.
This pretty much. A few examples from games I play.
In skyrim my load times / zone in times are almost instant. 1-2 seconds at most, dont even have time to read the hints.
In TSW load times are probably 4-6 seconds, compared to an HDD which are probably 15+ seconds at best.
GW2 load screens probably 3-5 seconds maybe.
I have gotten so used to SSD load/boot/zone times that I have trouble even remembering how slow an HDD is. Where I notice it the most is zoning in games, its almost too fast if you want to read the hints and what not.
Once you use an SSD you wont go back to a regular hard drive.
Edit:
I will give you my opinion on what I would do in your shoes. Others opinions may / will differ=)
Buy a 7870, Buy an SSD ( 120g for OS and 2-3 favorite games ) and 4g of matching RAM if you can find it cheap enuff to justify buying it, if not then skip it.
Your system will perform just fine for gaming and I bet a dime to a dollar you will be happy with it. Build a new computer from scratch whenever you get ready for an upgrade in a year or two and that will make a great 2nd PC to keep or sell.
Good luck with whatever you choose