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time for an upgrade?
been out of the loop a bit. was looking to maybe upgrade. is it time? just with newer games coming out, i dont want to be caught struggling.
im running:
amd fx-8350 8 core black edition
evga 1080 ti founders edition memory 11GB
Asus sabertooth 990 fx r2.0 motherboard
16 gb of corsair vengeance 1866 pcs15000
im running:
amd fx-8350 8 core black edition
evga 1080 ti founders edition memory 11GB
Asus sabertooth 990 fx r2.0 motherboard
16 gb of corsair vengeance 1866 pcs15000
Samsung 860 EVO 500GB
asus monitor 144hz 27 inch
EVGA Supernova 850 P2, 80+ Platinum 850W
thanks
asus monitor 144hz 27 inch
EVGA Supernova 850 P2, 80+ Platinum 850W
thanks
Comments
Your CPU is getting a bit old, so if you notice problems with performance you might want to upgrade it. But it's not so old that I'd recommend doing pre-emptive upgrades right now, rather stick with it as long as you think the performance is ok.
AMD's new 7nm processors should be coming sometime later this year. If you don't upgrade now you might get better performance for same money a bit later on.
To upgrade your processor you need to buy also new motherboard. Then you also need to buy new RAM because your old RAM wouldn't be compatible. Also you should re-install your OS from scratch after a change that big, and if you're not on Windows 10 already you should switch to Win 10 because older operating systems (like Win 7) don't quite provide support for new hardware.
If you're going to buy new CPU, then Ryzen 5 2600 would provide maybe 50% CPU speed increase and Ryzen 7 2700X would provide maybe 70% CPU speed increase.
So you could really use a CPU upgrade, but because of how much stuff you'd need to switch I'd recommend against upgrading preemptively and only doing it once you encounter something that needs it.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
While there will be new motherboards that launch along with third generation Ryzen around the middle of this year, the new CPUs will also fit into the old motherboards. The new motherboards might support PCI Express 4.0, but that's not a big deal for consumer use.
If your caught struggling,it would more be a case of bad game design.
How many genres/games do you actually need a good system for?Open ended worlds is about it,most games are like 20x20 grids,1990's gaming and others are just empty worlds with players shooting each other.
One of the most intense games i have played is Atlas,it cripples my older machine that was able to play a lot of mmorpg's.Some games simply rob your system with the smallest of details,again,poorly optimized games.Atlas uses on the fly AI,all the creatures are mobile units with Ai,nothing is static and even the water using physx is in view causing stress as well.Your system would or should play Atlas quite well,your not going to notice any differences that require a stronger machine.
I have seen some pictures and videos of late showcasing hardware that unless side by side,you wouldn't even notice the difference in the graphics yet the difference in hogging resources is staggering.
We need better developers before we need better machines.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
With respect to ugprading. FX8350 is ~very roughly~ equivalent to a i7 2600. It's Bulldozer architecture, and it a decent budget option, back in 2013.
Now, CPUs haven't moved forward all that much in the past 5-7 years, I won't argue with that. But Bulldozer has always struggled a bit. It was better than the lowest end dual core Intel options, but never really competed well once you got enough budget to get into the i5/i7 lineups. And that was true back in 2012 when the FX line was released, and it's even more true today.
The Zen lineup runs rings around the FX lineup. The 6-core Ryzen 5 is much faster than this 8-core Bulldozer, and a true 8 core Ryzen 7 is almost twice the performance today. Intel has always had better per core performance than FX for similar , and that has been compounded as Intel has tweaked there more recent releases (although Zen has caught up significantly in that regard, and tends to offer more cores than Intel for a lower price).
Now, if your tooling along with a 1080Ti running at 1080, you have so much GPU power available that even the FX is going to get you 144+ FPS. And hence, all the advice here - if your happy, that's fine. You would likely get the exact same performance out of a video card that cost 1/4 what a 1080Ti costs though... and if you're willing to invest in something like a 1080Ti, I would think you would want to get what you can out of that investment.
But make no mistake, your bottleneck is definitely that FX. And there are games out there today (Civilization comes to mind, many of the console ports that are still heavily single threaded, etc) that are going to struggle mightily on that -- most won't, but they do exist. Moving forward, games to tend to balance better across multicores, which does bode well for your FX, but there's never going to be a replacement for per-core performance, and FX has always struggled with that.
It would be an investment to upgrade. New CPU, new motherboard, new RAM. My advice would be, also purchase an inexpensive video card. Keep your old system working with the inexpensive card - either as a backup, or to sell/donate as a complete and functional computer. Build a new rig, transfer your 1080Ti over as the GPU, but everything else new.
That's probably more money than you were thinking, but I still think you are looking at less than what you spent on a new 1080Ti. And that's why I'm saying your ready for an upgrade, against the otherwise good common sense advice that's being given here.
And as far as performance at higher resolutions, thats not helped as much by CPU as it is by video card and video ram.
Third generation Ryzen is the one thing that you might plausibly wait for. AMD says it's due out around the middle of this year.
Sure, there's always something new coming up, but the number of new HW generations coming up over the next 12 months for so many key components has not been seen since 2013-2014. If the OP can wait, I think it will be worth it.
Not to mention that if Intel indeed finally introduces their new GPU and Nvidia launches their next gen, 2020 could finally see some GPU competition again.
Also based on everything we've heard from Navi AMD isn't trying to compete on the title of fastest GPU. If OP wanted to upgrade his GPU he should likely look for NVidia's offering because AMD seems to be set up to offer competition against NVidia in GPUs that are slower than his existing GPU.
When I said CPU speed increase, I meant that the new CPU would be that much faster than the old CPU was. Total gaming performance depends also heavily on GPU, and sometimes on memory or other components, so it wouldn't increase that much.
Intel isn't going to have any meaningful new CPUs until they can move to 10 nm, which they're hoping to do late this year. I'd expect the first Intel 10 nm CPUs to be low power laptop parts, with larger chips coming later. I suppose that it's more plausible that that could support DDR5, but far from guaranteed.
Regardless, when you buy a CPU, you pick the CPU first and then buy whatever memory standard it supports. Waiting for DDR5 in particular would be ridiculous.
I would bet against Intel's first discrete GPUs challenging for the high end. The last two times they tried that ended catastrophically. They need to get respectable lower end to mid range parts out first to earn some credibility, and that's much easier to do than seriously challenging for the high end.
In order to have a better top end GPU than the competition, you need at least one of:
1) building it on a better process node,
2) making a larger die, or
3) having a more efficient architecture.
With AMD already on 7 nm and Intel still looking to move to 10 nm, option (1) looks like it's not happening for Intel's first discrete GPUs. With Nvidia not at all shy about building enormous dies (currently selling consumer parts with a 754 mm^2 die!), option (2) isn't likely, either. Option (3) also seems unlikely if you look at the history of Intel GPUs; they also lack the experience that both AMD and Nvidia have with building high-performance GPU architectures.
Besides, the original poster already has a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. There's no sense in trying to upgrade from that anytime soon. Yes, you can get a faster video card, but that's not what is holding his system back. To get a worthwhile upgrade over that (loosely, at least double the performance), you're likely looking at 2021 or 2022. That's a long time to wait.