Help me rebuild
trooster89
Are you from London? Icrontian
in Hardware
I built my current rig about 6 years ago and haven't upgraded much since. It used to not matter much since I was playing a lot of TF2 and D3.
I'd like to be able run overwatch on higher settings and to play battlefield 1.
here is a link to my current rig
I think at a minimum I'll have to upgrade my cpu and gpu and i'll likely need a new mobo. I'd like to keep it as cheep as possible for now and make additional upgrades later on.
Any recommendations?
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Honestly? I think you can reuse the case and the power supply. You won't want to compromise a modern computer by using DDR3 and your hard drive has passed the 5-year mark and is now a dead drive walking. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are going to be your best bets.
Related, here's a hard drive failure bathtub curve:
Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923-2.html
wow Thanks!
Here is what I would recommend, GPU and SSD are portable, you can take them to a new platform. Trick with motherboard and CPU is the space we are in right now. In a few months, AMD releases their new platform, which is supposed to be amazing (but we have heard that before, so only time will tell)... Intel is out there for you if you want to go to an entirely new platform, but I'm not sure the Cyber Monday deals are going to justify a "let's do it now" kind of move... the GPU and SSD now, that is a better space where I feel confident you will not regret your buy in a few months.
In the budget SSD race my favorite item without a doubt is the Crucial MX300. Easy to clone your drive with the included software, crucial drives are reliable as I have used and I have installed a lot.
For GPU, you have a few good options, the RX470 and RX480 are both phenomenal upgrades for you. If you are satisfied gaming in 1080P you can get a RX 470, Amazon has a sale on a nice Asus branded card now.
The RX480 8GB is worth the extra dollars if you think you think you might be getting a 1440P or 4K monitor for gaming in the near future, otherwise the 470 will do for 1080P and save you a little money and extend the useable life of your PSU if you are looking to maintain budget.
I agree with Cliff. A 470, SSD and maybe some eBay RAM to get you by until spring would be my course of action. Just turn the RAM back around to eBay when you are done with it.
Agree with all of the above. Cyber monday is your friend. I would rec 480 for longevity, but agree that if you do not plan to upgrade monitor, there is little value. GPU > SSD > RAM > CPU + MOBO + new RAM would be the order of operations I'd follow in your setup. PSU will also age out eventually.
Thanks guys. I went ahead and did the GPU and SSD for now. I'd like to upgrade the cpu (and will likely have to do the mobo) for christmas.
Is DDR4 ram worth the $$$ these days?
Depends on what you mean by worth the money. They are about the same cost in my totally scientific "looking at the first line of results on newegg" test, so if your mobo has DDR4, that's what I would use. It's almost certainly a better use of your money long-term to save up and get new CPU, MOBO, and RAM at the same time instead of trying to upgrade to a newer CPU in your existing socket. Zen is coming from AMD (wiki) in 2017, so if your GPU + SSD upgrades can give you the boost, I would wait and see.
@trooster89 what did you go with so far for GPU / SSD?
For Christmas if you do not want to wait on a platform change you can go in a few directions. With DX12 and Vulkan more processing threads in parallel are supposed to see bigger gains in games. I'd want a CPU that does eight threads in some fashion on another coming from a quad core like you are right now. You could go AM3+ get something like the 8320 on it and get some more DDR3 for the board and I can say that performs nicely in modern games because that's similar to what I am running now, but honestly, I'm not sure I'd spend money on that platform.
If you want to keep the best budget and salvage some of your RAM, maybe buy a matching kit run 8GB on an LGA1150 you could get a Xeon E3 1231V3 (which is just an i7 with the integrated graphics turned off), Pair it with a reasonably priced Z97 board and you have a reasonably priced platform upgrade with a CPU that should have some legs.
If you want to though you could go spring for a Skylake build on a core i7 and DDR4 RAM. Figure you are going to spend about $200 more than the stuff listed above but you will have the latest Intel platform.
DDR3 vs. DDR4, here is how I see it. From a performance per clock standpoint on traditional threaded operations, once you hit DDR31600 and have an adequate amount of RAM for the task at hand, you won't see much from the extra bandwidth. DDR4 could be phenomenal for integrated graphics where they could utilize that extra bandwidth for shared VRAM. It's remarkable to me that AMD has sat this out for as long as they have because the one thing on the CPU side that they have done really well is their integrated graphics for people that want to run that way. That's where the value of DDR4 is and honestly you won't see it as much because you have a nice hunk of DDR5 super RAM doing it's magic for you on your GPU, so you just need enough on the board to feed the card. 8GB should be fine, but 16GB is fairly future proof if you want to budget for it.
I went with the RX 470 that deal was too good to pass up. Thats a good point about waiting for Zen.