PC upgrade advice?

Gmanx · Mar 2015

My home-built desktop machine is getting very creaky and I find I'm relying more on my gaming laptop for heavyweight number-crunching. It's way past time for an upgrade!

I'd like to spend about £500 on beefing this ol' fella up as much as poss. I can't afford a completely new machine just yet.

It's used for pretty much everything: video editing, Graphics, Painting, 3d modelling and animation (Maya, Blender, UE4), gaming, sending emails lol.

Current specs are:

ASUS P7H55-M Motherboard
Intel Quad-Core i5 661 @ 3.33GHz (LGA1156 socket)
8gb DDR3 Ram (2x4gb sticks - board has 4 slots and will support 16gb max)
Nvidea GeForce GTS 450
Regular HDDs and 700w power.
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1.

I obviously can't afford to start from scratch or replace everything so, what's your take on the most important area to upgrade? I'm thinking graphics (that Nvidea card is soooooo old) and/or ram but I'm open to suggestions.

skyline5gtr · Mar 2015

Video card def first to go the rest of the system looks fine, maybe more memory and an SSD

ZacD · Mar 2015

As long as you aren't hitting 7-8 gigs of ram usage frequently, I wouldn't worry about upgrading ram. You could easily get a GTX 970 got £300. If you really want an i7 you could probably find one somewhere, but socket LGA1156 has been phased out.

kloogens · Mar 2015

Replace the video card first, with a 700w power supply you should be good. Just make sure it can physically fit into the case you have. Some of those cards are pretty big.

If your computer uses the swap disk a lot then add more memory. If you run a lot of heavy weight programs at the same time more memory is always good.

Adding an SSD will increase boot time, app loading , and perhaps scratch disk operations like in Photoshop. However in the case of scratch disks its recommended that its not the main drive of the computer, so its not competing with your OS for performance.

Hope this helps.

oglu · Mar 2015

more Ram much more Ram... min 16GB better 32GB...

NegevPro · Mar 2015

As others have said, getting a new GPU will have the most noticeable effect on performance, followed by an SSD, and then RAM. If you shop around you could probably get all 3 upgraded with your budget.

gnoop · Mar 2015

That creaky thing could be easily on Windows side only which usually starts to turn gradually into a crap the first day you install it. I recently re-installed on a fresh new 512gb SSD and everything became working with a light speed including things normally never disk dependent

Gmanx · Mar 2015

Thanks guys - some very good advice there. I'll start looking at graphics first.

I have a Coolermaster tower case so there should be enough room for a big card.

Any recommendations? I've always been an Nvidea guy, but I've heard that their quality and driver support has slipped of late? I'm hesitant to go with AMD (my laptop has an ATI Radeon) because I like having that CUDA GPU pipeline available.

ZacD · Mar 2015

GTX 970 would suggestion. It's not really worth looking at any older series cards because you might end up with a more limited feature set in UE4 in the future, with VXGI and DX12 being right around the corner. 4 gigs of vram is a pretty big deal with newer games and higher resolutions, so that's why I wouldn't really look at the GTX 960, plus there's a pretty big performance gap between the two, much bigger than the 980 vs 970 gap.

SonicBlue · Mar 2015

ZacD wrote: »

GTX 970 would suggestion. It's not really worth looking at any older series cards because you might end up with a more limited feature set in UE4 in the future, with VXGI and DX12 being right around the corner. 4 gigs of vram is a pretty big deal with newer games and higher resolutions, so that's why I wouldn't really look at the GTX 960, plus there's a pretty big performance gap between the two, much bigger than the 980 vs 970 gap.

Wasn't the GTX 970 the card affected by the 3.5 GB of actual GDDR5 performance and the remaining 0.5 GB running at slower speed?

ZacD · Mar 2015

It is, but it's not a huge deal when actually using it to play games. It's a shitty thing for Nvidia not to be up front about it, but it's still a good card.

SonicBlue · Mar 2015

ZacD wrote: »

It is, but it's not a huge deal when actually using it to play games. It's a shitty thing for Nvidia not to be up front about it, but it's still a good card.

If you don't consider that, it's a much better choice than the GTX 980, in a performance to price ratio.

Amazon UK is also selling the 970 on sale.

For an AMD card you have to wait some months, they don't have the new 300 series ready. To get the same performance of a GTX 960 you need a thermonuclear reactor to power up one of those R9 290X cards, they are not very efficient.

Gmanx · Mar 2015

Yeah, I've seen this:

[ame]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spZJrsssPA0[/ame]

..so I'll shop around and see how the current crop of cards compare.

Thanks again guys.

Gmanx · Mar 2015

A quick update: I'm currently looking at the Nvidea GTX970 over the AMD 290X. I doubt I'll get above the 3.5gb vram ceiling in my gaming given that I'm usually on a single 1020p display, and running an i5 processor.

The AMD cards have dropped in price recently following the controversy over the 970 and of course are true 4gb cards but I use Blender a lot, and can access the CUDA cores to render with. AMDs OpenCL support for Blender doesn't seem to be in the same league, unless anyone knows different.

ZacD · Mar 2015

I'd say just stick with Nvidia if you are already happy with them and CUDA. Nvidia does have a few perks for devs, like you can download the VXGI build of Unreal Engine 4 and start playing with their voxel lighting. The power power usage over a few years is going to make the price gap less. At one point AMD had a lot more bugs and glitches in 3d software, but I don't know if that is the case anymore.

Add3r · Mar 2015

recently installed an AMD 290x for someone, have not had a single issue with drivers or anything of that sort. Some weird desktop virtual scaling once the drivers were all setup, but an easy slider adjustments got rid of that.

I am not biased to either the Red or Green side of things when it comes to cards, and can say from personal experience that there isnt really any major visual improvements using CUDA. People beg to differ, but for a usual art pipeline, I haven't noticed a damn thing lol. As ZacD pointed out, they do have Nvidia FX tech specific to Nvidia cards, and that IMO is the only real "perk" of going Green. (red is AMD, Green is Nvidia FYI).

OpenCL support has gotten better, but I cannot say from experience with Blender that they have made any improvements. Once again, for a usual art pipeline for a dev in the games industry wont be pushing the card hard enough to really see any visual improvements with one or the other IMO. I am currently running a 770 4GB, used a 6970 4gb before that. Have used the latest AMD cards at work.

Gmanx · Apr 2015

Sorry to dig up an old thread but - just as an update and final word on this.

My budget shrank somewhat (putting a daughter through college will do that).

So, I went for the [ame=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00SKWIISQ/ref=dra_a_rv_lb_hn_it_P1400_1000?tag=dradisplay0bb-21&ascsubtag=5ec40c6be18b10b4e68ce57f96b63d9d_S]Nvidia Gtx 960[/ame] since my current display is 1080, which this card is optimised for.

I also, more interestingly, went for a hybrid drive - the Seagate SSHD 2TB. I'm hearing good things about these hybrid drives. If this one works out well I might get another in future and set them up in raid0.

Richard Kain · Apr 2015

That sounds like a pretty good compromise to me.

The 3D card you got is actually pretty beefy. You could have probably made do with a GTX 750. But that 960 will probably do you proud. The important thing is that you bumped up to above a GTX 600. Now you will have access to Shadow Play, a really great video-capture solution. I strongly recommend installing the Nvidia Experience software package and trying out Shadow Play, it's pretty great.

I just got a hybrid drive for my rig as well. I was already rocking a solid state drive, but the space on it just wasn't enough. It's been performing pretty well so far. I've installed most of my games on it. (they take up a lot of room)

I hope your upgraded rig works out well for you!

skyline5gtr · Apr 2015

You could even look at older 770gtx they are still plenty powerful and can be had at bargain price

Gmanx · Apr 2015

Thanks guys. I'm looking at getting 2 to 3 years out of this card and rig then thinking again.

PC upgrade advice?

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