- Jun 8, 2015
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So I've recently moved to Palo Alto, and though I don't get a lot of time for gaming being near a fry's has given me a nudge to upgrade my 5 year old PC (except the GPU which is 2 years old).
I saw a good deal on a i5-4690K, and since that was Tom's recommendation for high end but before the price break I picked it up yesterday, seeing how LGA 1150 motherboards are abundant, I'll pick up a good one soon. I also got an 8GB pair 1866MHz DDR3 (Viper if the brand matters to anyone).
I'm watching for a good mother board. But I'm thinking about the GPU. The one I have is a (pasting the description) Sapphire Radeon HD7950 3G DDR5 w/Boost PCIE. It's hard to compare this to the newest cards since it falls on different charts. The clock rate and memory haven't changed that much in the newer ones from what I can see, though the memory speed has. Is this card a major bottleneck with this processor?
I saw that the 970 GTX was a pick in the best GPU for the money list, currently a EVGA GTX 960 FTW 4GB is on sale at the same place where I got the CPU. Looking at them side by side I see the boost clock is the same as the 970, so is the memory clock and amount. Fewer cuda cores on the 960 though (1024 VS 1664) and the base clock is a little slower on the 970. Not sure how different they really are when it comes to smooth FPS on GTAV or Battlefield.
Basically as with the CPU I chose, I'm going for good performance without hitting the sharp diminishing returns.
So in case my main questions got lost in the length of this post. How bottle-necked is my new CPU (i5-4690K) with my old GPU (Radeon HD7950 3G)? Is a GTX 960 FTW 4GB a good balance for this CPU? Is the 960 much worse than the 970 and is $245 for it a good deal? And while I'm at it, when I look for motherboards is there anything I need to look out for? I notice some LGA1150 boards say "4th gen" and some do not, I would like to be able to upgrade my CPU in the same mobo later if there is a way to plan for that. But I will get into details of the mother boards later, because I'm already at a fairly long post here.
Other details since I noticed some in the "how to ask about GPUs" sticky:
-I have a 1440x900 monitor, wont be going 4k in the near future
-I do plan to overclock the CPU, I have a kraken x40 on my old one that will fit the new one
-I do not plan to put the video cards in SLI in the near future, I will probably pick a mobo that supports it in case I want to later, I'm not concerned about keeping it compact
-the old one CPU is a Phenom II X2 550 - I didn't consider this crucial information because it's being replaced either way, but if anyone can comment on how big of a bottle neck that was for a HD7950 3G video card, I am curious
Thank you for any info.
I saw a good deal on a i5-4690K, and since that was Tom's recommendation for high end but before the price break I picked it up yesterday, seeing how LGA 1150 motherboards are abundant, I'll pick up a good one soon. I also got an 8GB pair 1866MHz DDR3 (Viper if the brand matters to anyone).
I'm watching for a good mother board. But I'm thinking about the GPU. The one I have is a (pasting the description) Sapphire Radeon HD7950 3G DDR5 w/Boost PCIE. It's hard to compare this to the newest cards since it falls on different charts. The clock rate and memory haven't changed that much in the newer ones from what I can see, though the memory speed has. Is this card a major bottleneck with this processor?
I saw that the 970 GTX was a pick in the best GPU for the money list, currently a EVGA GTX 960 FTW 4GB is on sale at the same place where I got the CPU. Looking at them side by side I see the boost clock is the same as the 970, so is the memory clock and amount. Fewer cuda cores on the 960 though (1024 VS 1664) and the base clock is a little slower on the 970. Not sure how different they really are when it comes to smooth FPS on GTAV or Battlefield.
Basically as with the CPU I chose, I'm going for good performance without hitting the sharp diminishing returns.
So in case my main questions got lost in the length of this post. How bottle-necked is my new CPU (i5-4690K) with my old GPU (Radeon HD7950 3G)? Is a GTX 960 FTW 4GB a good balance for this CPU? Is the 960 much worse than the 970 and is $245 for it a good deal? And while I'm at it, when I look for motherboards is there anything I need to look out for? I notice some LGA1150 boards say "4th gen" and some do not, I would like to be able to upgrade my CPU in the same mobo later if there is a way to plan for that. But I will get into details of the mother boards later, because I'm already at a fairly long post here.
Other details since I noticed some in the "how to ask about GPUs" sticky:
-I have a 1440x900 monitor, wont be going 4k in the near future
-I do plan to overclock the CPU, I have a kraken x40 on my old one that will fit the new one
-I do not plan to put the video cards in SLI in the near future, I will probably pick a mobo that supports it in case I want to later, I'm not concerned about keeping it compact
-the old one CPU is a Phenom II X2 550 - I didn't consider this crucial information because it's being replaced either way, but if anyone can comment on how big of a bottle neck that was for a HD7950 3G video card, I am curious
Thank you for any info.
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