What should I upgrade fist?

May 13, 2018
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So I was going to buy HTC VIVE but as much as I hate to admit it my PC isnt good enough for VR so I decided to upgrade and I dont know where to start. My budget is £500 - 600. Any help is appreciated

My current PC:
MOBO: MSI Z97-G45 Gaming Intel LGA1150 Z97 ATX Motherboard
GPU : MSI R9 390 GAMING 8G Radeon R9 390
CPU: Intel i5 4690 Quad Core CPU
RAM: 2X Ballistix Sport BLS8G3D1609DS1S00CEU 8 GB DDR3
SSD: Samsung 500GB
HDD: WD 2TB
 
Solution
Your system does meet the requirements for VR. I would try it out before I upgraded. Use some in-game hardware monitoring software to determine the bottleneck. I would imagine different games will have different bottlenecks, some GPU bound others CPU bound. Maybe even some that are limited by system RAM.

https://www.octopusrift.com/building-a-vr-pc/

HTC Vive

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 or better
CPU: Intel Core i5 4590 or AMD FX 8350 or greater
RAM: 4GB or more
Video port: HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2, or better
USB port: 1 USB 2.0 or faster port
Windows 7 SP1 or newer

Oculus Rift

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 or better
CPU: Intel Core i5 4590 or greater
RAM: 8GB or more
Video port: HDMI...
Your system does meet the requirements for VR. I would try it out before I upgraded. Use some in-game hardware monitoring software to determine the bottleneck. I would imagine different games will have different bottlenecks, some GPU bound others CPU bound. Maybe even some that are limited by system RAM.

https://www.octopusrift.com/building-a-vr-pc/

HTC Vive

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 or better
CPU: Intel Core i5 4590 or AMD FX 8350 or greater
RAM: 4GB or more
Video port: HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2, or better
USB port: 1 USB 2.0 or faster port
Windows 7 SP1 or newer

Oculus Rift

Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 or better
CPU: Intel Core i5 4590 or greater
RAM: 8GB or more
Video port: HDMI 1.3
USB port: 2 USB 3.0 ports
Windows 7 SP1 or newer


**Your upgrade options (or at least if I was looking to upgrade that system) should be: i7-4790K, GTX 1070 or higher, and 16GB RAM. Right now you're pretty well balanced. If you upgrade one thing you might want to upgrade all three. But do as I said above and determine what your games need by seeing which parts are being utilized fully and could use an upgrade.
 
Solution
I would say keep the rest and change the GPU. If you have a poor PSU, change that as well.

PCPartPicker part list: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/yYtZhq
Price breakdown by merchant: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/yYtZhq/by_merchant/

Video Card: MSI - GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8GB DUKE Video Card (£373.51 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £373.51
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-05-13 17:02 BST+0100

On the side note, glad to see GPU prices are mostly back to normal in the UK. A 1070Ti for 373 pounds is a real steal.
 


Actually he does meet the requirements; R9 390=/> R9 290; and the rest of his specs match the requirements posted.

OP; you can always get the Vive; try it and if it's not performing to your satisfaction, look at upgrading. You have a pretty solid rig; though you could bump the RAM up to 16GB to help out with those very few (like less than a few) games that increase total RAM usage to a bit over 8/9GB , especially with Windows 10 (unless you are saying you have 2x8 for 16GB total; then disregard).

The 390 is still a very capable card, but a GTX 1070 would be a great performance boost. The 1070Ti isn't really worth it for the small performance gain over the 1070 http://

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Here is a 1070:
PCPartPicker part list: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/QFQ6D8
Price breakdown by merchant: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/QFQ6D8/by_merchant/

Video Card: Palit - GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Dual Video Card (£383.99 @ Aria PC)
Total: £383.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-05-17 13:33 BST+0100

The price is more than the 1070Ti above. If you can get a 1070Ti for cheaper than the 1070 here, like it is above, I would say it is definitely worth it.