Building a gaming PC

[GuyNwah]

I still disagree; I couldn't care less how fast Windows boots, but I very much do care about Windows's bad habit of using the system drive for scratch space. It's a bad use of SSD that reduces its speed to not much better than an HDD.

If Windows had a decent temporary filesystem and could be told to stuff downloaded updates, undo files, and system restores on a separate volume (you can already tell it to put the bloody useless pagefile somewhere else), I would withdraw my objections to wasting expensive SSD space on Windows. Until then, I still say SSD for read-only, only.

 

[dixxn]

Okay this might be another one of those walls of questions sort of thing, and as a warning, this might sound stupid for some of you.

1. Here's the first question, another one about SSD. What is the main thing (other than capacity) that I need to pay attention to before buying a SSD? Things like transfer rate, or compatibility maybe? And I'm a little bit confused with what GuyNwah said about SSD for read only. Does it mean that placing the OS in a HDD, and programs or games in a SSD? Am I getting it right?

2. From what I read here and elsewhere, people are getting a smooth performance for TW3 on high / ultra on 1080p with almost the same rig specifications as mine. I don't know whether it's my eyes which've been fooling me, but I tried to tweak the graphic settings, and the performance difference between each settings are barely noticeable, especially when I'm in Novigrad or when I'm running it lags so bad. I tried different settings from the lowest to the highest and from what I saw there's almost no change in performance or if there is, it's barely noticeable, and it still lags, and I play at a 1600x900 res. It makes me wonder, is there any problem with hardware or background programs? I looked at my background programs there're Intel Management Service, GeForce Experience, and HW Monitor which is always on so I could monitor the temp of my hardwares. I don't know for sure how many FPS I get from each settings. I came to think that my monitor is bottlenecking the rest of my hardware, could it be the case? I forgot the exact type of my monitor, but it's for sure an old Benq GL series. And just as a side information, I'm still using a RGB cable to DVI convertor to connect my monitor to the GPU. Is it going to matter if I were to replace my cable with a decent quality DVI cable (and I forgot to look if my monitor has one of those DVI slot)?

3. If it's not the case, and adding more RAM is out of question not going to help, then if I were to choose between upgrading my processor to an i7 4690 or upgrading my GPU to a better performance GTX 970, which one would you recommend? In either case, I will need to add about $120 if I am going to do so.

That's about it for now, and I might be back with another questions. Terribly sorry if I'm being noisy

 

[volsung]

So a better option would be a smaller hard drive, and sometime down the road a decently sized SSD for read-intensive applications *cough*games*cough*?

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

I'm not really sure how I/O intensive most games are. I'd say they don't benefit from SSD much. Audio / video editing on the other hand, or some major database, or anything that has to handle (and especially write with random access) really massive files does benefit greatly from it.

 

[volsung]

Alright so standard hard drive it is. So what really is the advantage of an SSD in a home computer? Once the OS loads it's all pretty fast, and games seem to be unaffected.

 

[Engagerade]

It just makes everything faster and significantly more responsive, personally im on team SSD for everything, going back to HDD's is just.............

Edit: How fast is your internet by the way?

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

Having system shared libraries on an SSD (i.e./usr/lib and so on) helps applications loading times as well which is convenient and makes the system feel more snappy. In essence putting the whole core OS on an SSD should be OK (at least for Linux). System updates take less time as well. But since it's expensive I wouldn't use it for /home let's say.

So a configuration that some Linux users make is /home on a big HDD and /, /boot and the rest on SSD. If you dualboot, that can be messier. In general it should be cleaner (and more flexible) not mixing several OSes on one physical drive. Just get a few in such case. Then you can unplug those drives if you need to swap them to another computer, without scratching your head how to separate those systems.

 

[GuyNwah]

Yes, Linux gets along very well with SSD. One reason is that, like other Unixen and unlike Windows, it has a well-formed notion of keeping access patterns separate by filesystem. The number of places a running Linux will random-write to is small and can be assigned to filesystems where the penalty for random writes is small, whereas a running Windows scribbles crap everyfreakingwhere, forcing you to defragment mechanical drives regularly and run TRIM and wear balancing on solid-state drives.

 

[dixxn]

Just wanted to report that I accidentally shifted the "Full Screen" mode to "Borderless Window" and noticed that things are MUCH smoother. I have no idea why that's the case, but maybe for people who experienced lags like me should give it a try.

 

[Derone_Esol]

Hello,

I'm planning on getting my first gaming pc. I've asked my 15 y/o nephew for advice since he does not only play a lot of videogames but he is also part of a team that works in robotics since he was 12.

He recommends me the following specs:

Prosessor: AMD fx8320 = 153 USD
Motherboard: Asus - M5A99FX PRO R2.0 = 137 USD
Memory RAM: Corsair - XMS CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10B (16 Gb) =158 USD
Graphic card: NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 970 = 378 USD
Power sourse: Corsair - RM Series 1000 watts = 169 USD
Tower: Cooler Master - Elite 431 Plus Gabinete de torre ATX = 55 USD
Liquid Refrigerator: Corsair - Hydro Series H100i Ventilador doble para CPU = 90 USD
Hard Drive: Toshiba - DT01ACA Series Hard Disk Drive = 60 USD

I would appreciate any advice you guys can give me. Thanks in advance.

 

[Engagerade]

Hello,

I'm planning on getting my first gaming pc. I've asked my 15 y/o nephew for advice since he does not only play a lot of videogames but he is also part of a team that works in robotics since he was 12.

He recommends me the following specs:

Prosessor: AMD fx8320 = 153 USD
Motherboard: Asus - M5A99FX PRO R2.0 = 137 USD
Memory RAM: Corsair - XMS CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10B (16 Gb) =158 USD
Graphic card: NVIDIA - GeForce GTX 970 = 378 USD
Power sourse: Corsair - RM Series 1000 watts = 169 USD
Tower: Cooler Master - Elite 431 Plus Gabinete de torre ATX = 55 USD
Liquid Refrigerator: Corsair - Hydro Series H100i Ventilador doble para CPU = 90 USD
Hard Drive: Toshiba - DT01ACA Series Hard Disk Drive = 60 USD

I would appreciate any advice you guys can give me. Thanks in advance.

I dont recommend AMD for Gaming, go with Intel instead
It's going to cost more but it will hold up for years (personally still using 2500k)
I ask that someone else recommend a motherboard though.

-Your PSU is mental ^^
It's common that people use way to high PSUs i would ask for someone elses input as my PSU knowledge is a bit rusty but i think even a 650W Gold Certified should be enough, either way 1000 is way to much

Dont know much about the case to be honest ^_^

 

[Derone_Esol]

I dont recommend AMD for Gaming, go with Intel instead
It's going to cost more but it will hold up for years (personally still using 2500k)
I ask that someone else recommend a motherboard though.

-Your PSU is mental ^^
It's common that people use way to high PSUs i would ask for someone elses input as my PSU knowledge is a bit rusty but i think even a 650W Gold Certified should be enough, either way 1000 is way to much

Dont know much about the case to be honest ^_^

Thank you, Engagerade for your reply.

 

[eskiMoe]

I dont recommend AMD for Gaming, go with Intel instead
It's going to cost more but it will hold up for years (personally still using 2500k).

I'm personally not so eager to recommend an i5 anymore after seeing The Witcher 3's CPU performance.

FX8350 is roughly 100€ cheaper than 4690K but offers very similar performance.

The question is, will this become a trend in the future with more games being in favor of multiple slower cores instead of fewer faster ones.

 

[Derone_Esol]

Thanks, eskiMoe for that table and the video. I'm starting to feel a little bit less lost on this.

 

[GuyNwah]

System designers are now favoring the "more cores, even if they're slower" approach. If you're successful at distributing the compute load, so that all of the cores are running at high occupancy, more cores will give the same result at slower clocks, and this reduces power consumption and the need to dispose of heat.

There's too much superstition about the supposed need for extremely high wattage power supplies. Unless you're running multiple GPUs or exotic CPUs like AMD 95xx's, modern 550 watt power supplies are quite sufficient, and anything over 650 watts is taking money out of your pocket and giving it to the retailer who conned you into thinking you needed it.

 

[M4xw0lf]

The question is, will this become a trend in the future with more games being in favor of multiple slower cores instead of fewer faster ones.

I'd say yes, given that the consoles use 8 (or actually 6-7) slow cores plus DX12 with better CPU efficiency and multithreading abilities is not so far away.

 

[sidspyker]

I'm not so sure about that which is why I was questioning my decision to get a new CPU but oh well, that ship sailed to Skellige long ago

These are about the only DX12 4+ cores graph I've seen

Spoiler

This is what they did

DirectX 12 Preview CPU Configurations (i7-4960X)
Configuration	Emulating
6C/12T @ 4.2GHz	Overclocked Core i7
4C/4T @ 3.8GHz	Core i5-4670K
2C/4T @ 3.8GHz	Core i3-4370

And the result:

In this case of Star Swarm, which is a CPU heavy title, they found:

Star Swarm's DirectX 11 path, being single-threaded bound, scales very slightly with clockspeed and core count increases. The DirectX 12 path on the other hand scales up moderately well from 2 to 4 cores, but doesn’t scale up beyond that. This is due to the fact that at these settings, even pushing over 100K draw calls, both GPUs are solidly GPU limited. Anything more than 4 cores goes to waste as we’re no longer CPU-bound. Which means that we don’t even need a highly threaded processor to take advantage of DirectX 12’s strengths in this scenario, as even a 4 core processor provides plenty of kick.

http://anandtech.com/show/8962/the-directx-12-performance-preview-amd-nvidia-star-swarm/4

As for power consumption, as far as I'm aware it's always been a case of balancing Cores against Clocks and the more cores, the lower power each core will need to be, so # number of cores will have to share the max limit TDP of the processor. This was true 5 years ago atleast.

I guess multithreaded will level that field but that shouldn't negatively affect processors that already have strong single threaded CPU performance, should it? Multithreaded can distribute more work across but it has to work on multiple weaker cores to reach the same point, shouldn't that inversely imply that stronger cores will get a nice performance boost now that they can work more efficiently?

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

With smaller transistors power consumption goes down too, so it can balance each other.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

An interesting review of the current SSDs trend: http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-freefall/a/d-id/1320958

 

[M4xw0lf]

Behold the beauty of Batman Arkham Knight on a GTX970:

Go directly to ~6:00 for maximum effect.