- Jul 14, 2015
- 5
- 0
- 4,510
Hello and thank you for reading this thread!
I find myself having a little bit of spare cash which I wish to spend on upgrading my PC (which is near 5 years old, graphics card excepted) but having researched it heavily over the last week or so I am unable to decide what to do. Therefore, I thought why not ask the good people of the Tom's Hardware forum?
To start with, here is my system as it stands:
Intel Core i5 2500 @ 3.3GHz (unfortunately not the K version so no overclocking)
MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G
Gigabyte GA-Z68-XP-UD3 Motherboard
8GB DDR3-1333 (made by a company called Mustang but I have no idea who they are or what the part is exactly)
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD
1TB Western Digital Hard Drive
Corsair CX650 PSU
Corsair 300R Case
AOC G2460PG 24" 1080p 144Hz G-Sync Monitor
The system is used for gaming (no video editing or heavy professional workloads) and I play a wide variety of games (The Witcher 3, GTA V, Europa Universalis IV, Total War series, FIFA etc.) I recently upgraded to the GTX 970 from an old Radeon HD 6950 and the difference is fantastic but now I would like to go to the next level.
The problem is how best to do so? I read that open world titles (Witcher, GTA, Assassin's Creed and so on) are becoming more and more CPU taxing and my old Sandy Bridge CPU is technically under the official system requirements (although obviously they do play). However, it also seems that upgrading to even Devil's Canyon might not show a large performance gain over my 2500. On this point I am quite unsure as most forum threads have people asking whether they should upgrade from their overclocked 2500Ks- a solution I cannot do.)
My FPS in such open world games is... okay I guess. Even with quite a few settings turned down a bit I waver between 40-60fps and suffer things like pop-in and slow texture loading (The Witcher is installed on my SSD and GTA V on my HDD in case this makes a difference.)
I am wondering if this is my CPU unable to keep up? For instance I might have near 60fps but then a couple of textures and models will pop in a split second later without the frame rate dropping. Having used HWMonitor for the last week my CPU is reaching 100% load (No thermal throttling, thankfully) and my GPU Core load reaches 98-99%.
So I ask you, what is likely to be the best way to improve my performance?
1. Wait for Skylake and the i5-6600k (with new motherboard and RAM) in the expectation that 4 full processor generations will make a decisive difference in CPU- taxing open world games?
2. Add another GTX 970 and go SLI? This option would mean having to buy a new PSU as well.
3. Upgrade to a Devil's Canyon (i5- 4690K) and do a little overclocking?
Naturally, options 1 and 2 would be great but money does not permit so it has to be one of the options (or another if someone else has another idea)
My only concern about going down the SLI road is the 3.5GB VRAM issue. Whilst not really a problem today, I am thinking about 2-3 years down the road- will even 1080p require more than this, after all, you can reach this limit on Shadow of Mordor if you max everything out. It is also unclear whether DX12 games will support memory scaling in SLI or not (obviously older games will not). So I'd hate to have 2 970s sitting there reaching 100fps on some settings but not be able to turn up textures or what not because I'll run out of VRAM.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and considering my problem.
-ChurchillsDog
I find myself having a little bit of spare cash which I wish to spend on upgrading my PC (which is near 5 years old, graphics card excepted) but having researched it heavily over the last week or so I am unable to decide what to do. Therefore, I thought why not ask the good people of the Tom's Hardware forum?
To start with, here is my system as it stands:
Intel Core i5 2500 @ 3.3GHz (unfortunately not the K version so no overclocking)
MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G
Gigabyte GA-Z68-XP-UD3 Motherboard
8GB DDR3-1333 (made by a company called Mustang but I have no idea who they are or what the part is exactly)
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD
1TB Western Digital Hard Drive
Corsair CX650 PSU
Corsair 300R Case
AOC G2460PG 24" 1080p 144Hz G-Sync Monitor
The system is used for gaming (no video editing or heavy professional workloads) and I play a wide variety of games (The Witcher 3, GTA V, Europa Universalis IV, Total War series, FIFA etc.) I recently upgraded to the GTX 970 from an old Radeon HD 6950 and the difference is fantastic but now I would like to go to the next level.
The problem is how best to do so? I read that open world titles (Witcher, GTA, Assassin's Creed and so on) are becoming more and more CPU taxing and my old Sandy Bridge CPU is technically under the official system requirements (although obviously they do play). However, it also seems that upgrading to even Devil's Canyon might not show a large performance gain over my 2500. On this point I am quite unsure as most forum threads have people asking whether they should upgrade from their overclocked 2500Ks- a solution I cannot do.)
My FPS in such open world games is... okay I guess. Even with quite a few settings turned down a bit I waver between 40-60fps and suffer things like pop-in and slow texture loading (The Witcher is installed on my SSD and GTA V on my HDD in case this makes a difference.)
I am wondering if this is my CPU unable to keep up? For instance I might have near 60fps but then a couple of textures and models will pop in a split second later without the frame rate dropping. Having used HWMonitor for the last week my CPU is reaching 100% load (No thermal throttling, thankfully) and my GPU Core load reaches 98-99%.
So I ask you, what is likely to be the best way to improve my performance?
1. Wait for Skylake and the i5-6600k (with new motherboard and RAM) in the expectation that 4 full processor generations will make a decisive difference in CPU- taxing open world games?
2. Add another GTX 970 and go SLI? This option would mean having to buy a new PSU as well.
3. Upgrade to a Devil's Canyon (i5- 4690K) and do a little overclocking?
Naturally, options 1 and 2 would be great but money does not permit so it has to be one of the options (or another if someone else has another idea)
My only concern about going down the SLI road is the 3.5GB VRAM issue. Whilst not really a problem today, I am thinking about 2-3 years down the road- will even 1080p require more than this, after all, you can reach this limit on Shadow of Mordor if you max everything out. It is also unclear whether DX12 games will support memory scaling in SLI or not (obviously older games will not). So I'd hate to have 2 970s sitting there reaching 100fps on some settings but not be able to turn up textures or what not because I'll run out of VRAM.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and considering my problem.
-ChurchillsDog
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