Better GPU, or cheaper GPU+more RAM and better CPU for a gaming computer?

[RedMiles]

Firstly I'm not looking to overclock or used overclocked components. I need a computer with a long lifespan - it'll likely be the last time I'm able to buy a computer or components barring emergency for a very long time. I don't want to do anything that'll reduce its operative lifespan so I'm trying to avoid even factory overclocked components. It's just that the 4790k says it has a 4MHz speed while the 4790 has 3.6 so I went with the K.

That said, I can get a computer build with an i7-4790k, 16gb RAM and a GTX 970, or for the same price range, I can get an i5-4690, 8gb RAM, and a GTX 980.

Which of these options is more suitable for gaming? The increased RAM and CPU, or bumping down a notch on CPU and RAM to grab a more powerful GPU?

 

[mdocod]

Performance vs price scaling in gaming drops off pretty rapidly above the GTX970, 8GB RAM, and a decent i5. Trying to decide whether to go with a CPU upgrade that offers very poor performance scaling for the increased cost, vs a GPU that offers very poor performance scaling for the increased cost, is sort of a silly place to be. Go with secret option C and don't "waste" money on either.

If you want long term reliability, your focus should be on the rest of the build anyway. Go with the i5 + GTX970 + 8GB RAM and use the savings to ensure you are getting a great quality motherboard and PSU, and consider semi-enterprise class storage solutions.

 

[RedMiles]

Performance vs price scaling in gaming drops off pretty rapidly above the GTX970, 8GB RAM, and a decent i5. Trying to decide whether to go with a CPU upgrade that offers very poor performance scaling for the increased cost, vs a GPU that offers very poor performance scaling for the increased cost, is sort of a silly place to be. Go with secret option C and don't "waste" money on either.

If you want long term reliability, your focus should be on the rest of the build anyway. Go with the i5 + GTX970 + 8GB RAM and use the savings to ensure you are getting a great quality motherboard and PSU, and consider semi-enterprise class storage solutions.

Really? I was looking at benchmarks and was told the GTX 980 is really strong for the price point, just that the GTX 970 is stronger in its price point because for ~350 nothing on the market beats it, but at higher price points the 980 is good performance for the money too, was I being misled?

And I'm not really skimping on the other components, it's still around a $1500 price point for the system. I'm unable to build it myself - I have a condition that makes my hands tremble uncontrollably at times and the last time I tried to work on a computer I bent something on the mobo trying to put in a video card and bricked it. So I've been looking at online configurators and comparing their markup to the cost of the components on pcpartspicker..

The whole computer is selected with parts that got good reviews. I looked around at what sites - mostly techbuyersguru and Tom's had to say before I added them. I wasn't really skimping on the PSU or mobo or anything, though I did try to stay with the 1500 budget so there's not really any superparts in there. It's just that I could play around with those things and maintain a ~1500 price point, and wondered which was more powerful from a gaming standpoint, the 8gb RAM/i5/980 or 16gb RAM/i7/970.

Someone told me a while back that the i5 would effectively bottleneck the 980 in a lot of newer games, and then someone else said it wouldn't and got into an argument that left me confused what was being discussed, is the main reason I ask about this.

I've been reading up and know that anything above 8gb RAM is more than the average game will need, but I've also read that this could change in a few years with the way games are being created and 16gb is still a nice point to aim for if I wanted to build a computer that'll last a long time without needing future upgrades to stay playable.

I don't understand what you mean by semi-enterprise class storage though - I haven't seen that term before. What does it mean?

 

[mdocod]

Anyone arguing over whether an i5 bottlenecks any specific GPU, or doesn't bottleneck a specific GPU, without specific conditions for that bottleneck occurring (resolution, refresh, game title, detail settings, post processing settings, and specific in-game conditions) is just making stuff up, shooting from the hip, or deriving their computer hardware knowledge from a mystical subjective place based on "feelings." You can safely ignore that entire argument as it sounds to me like both parties involved had no clue.

Any CPU can bottleneck any GPU in the right conditions (for example, even an i7-4790K can bottleneck a GTX650 in some (rare) conditions). Any CPU can be a good match for a particular GPU if the CPU and GPU are aligned well with the goals for the system.

The CPU should be selected to fullfill your FPS goals in the games (and in-game conditions) you want to play. This applies no matter what GPU is selected because the CPU sets the hard performance (FPS) limits. i5 and i7 haswells are strong gaming CPUs and offer some of the best FPS performance you can get in compute intensive games regardless of GPU selection.

The GPU should be selected to fullfill your visual quality goals at the prior selected FPS goal. Any performance (FPS) limits imposed by the GPU are soft, adjustable limits. They are always inversely adjustable with visual quality. Any modern discrete GPU can play any game at any practical FPS goal, but not all of them can do it with the same visual quality settings. A $100 GPU might need to be running a 720P monitor with low or medium detail settings in a particular game to get 60FPS, while a $500 GPU might be able to achieve the same FPS goals at 1440P with high detail settings.

The i7-4790K typically costs 40% more than an i5-4690, and offers anywhere from no performance advantage ( both are easily able to maintain a 60FPS goal in most games and conditions), up to a ~20% performance advantage depending on the specific game and conditions in question. Most compute intensive games will scale with the clock speed advantages more than anything else (~12%), the remaining ~8% advantage will be very rare and come into play in cases where the game scales into the additional parallelism provided by hyper-threading. The performance advantages of the i7 are going to be so slim in most cases that they would not be perceivable except in very specific and rare cases. It's possible (albeit unlikely) that future titles may scale better into the additional parallelism of the i7, but don't hold your breath.

The GTX980, typically costs ~65% more than the GTX970, and offers about a 15-20% render throughput advantage. If you were following along before, you should realize that since performance effected by the GPU is actually a soft, adjustable limit, both the GTX970 and GTX980 can play the same games at the same FPS, but with slightly different visual quality settings. The GTX980 may be the best GPU in it's price class, but that doesn't make it a very good value when one small step down the render performance ladder shaves $230 off the price tag.

If I were forced to choose between the i7+16GB+GTX970, and the i5+8GB+GTX980, I would choose the i7+16GB+GTX970 because performance originates with the CPU, not the GPU. The i7 configuring with more RAM will last longer before running into hardware restrictions. The RAM being the main issues as we are approaching the transition to 16GB being the standard.

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Many SATA drives from the Western digital red, black, RE, and SE series as well as Seagate constellation series, would be considered "enterprise or semi-enterprise" class storage. They are just a bit more robust than consumer class drives like the blue/green series from WD and the barracuda series from Seagate. More "hardcore" applications of enterprise storage systems will typically use SAS drives, but not always.

For example, when picking your mechanical drive for storage, a WD1002F9YZ or ST1000NC001 would be more robust choice than say, the WD10EZEX or ST1000DM003.

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If you want to take long term reliability a step further, ECC memory has been shown to have a failure rate ~10X lower than regular consumer desktop memory. You could drop the i5/i7 idea all together and build the machine around an E3 V3 xeon instead (same quad core haswell's as the i5/i7 series, just with ECC memory support enabled). An E3-1231V3 on a C226 chipset motherboard with some Kingston or Samsung 1.35V ECC UDIMMs would be nice.

 

[RedMiles]

Anyone arguing over whether an i5 bottlenecks any specific GPU, or doesn't bottleneck a specific GPU, without specific conditions for that bottleneck occurring (resolution, refresh, game title, detail settings, post processing settings, and specific in-game conditions) is just making stuff up, shooting from the hip, or deriving their computer hardware knowledge from a mystical subjective place based on "feelings." You can safely ignore that entire argument as it sounds to me like both parties involved had no clue.

...

If I were forced to choose between the i7+16GB+GTX970, and the i5+8GB+GTX980, I would choose the i7+16GB+GTX970 because performance originates with the CPU, not the GPU. The i7 configuring with more RAM will last longer before running into hardware restrictions. The RAM being the main issues as we are approaching the transition to 16GB being the standard.

Thank you for taking the time to explain that and for being so concise. I was apparently confused about a great deal. So, in broad strokes, what you're saying is that the i5 is more than capable of pumping games out at high FPS, the video card is just what regulates how good those FPS look on-screen? Or am I (quite likely) misreading what you're telling me?
So in a game like Metro 2033 (A prime reason we're looking into a new computer, along with some other recent or desired purchases our current desktop could not keep up with,) there'd be very little practical, visible difference between what settings I could run the game at and have smooth FPS between an i5/970 and the 'next steps up' i7/980?

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Many SATA drives from the Western digital red, black, RE, and SE series as well as Seagate constellation series, would be considered "enterprise or semi-enterprise" class storage. They are just a bit more robust than consumer class drives like the blue/green series from WD and the barracuda series from Seagate. More "hardcore" applications of enterprise storage systems will typically use SAS drives, but not always.

For example, when picking your mechanical drive for storage, a WD1002F9YZ or ST1000NC001 would be more robust choice than say, the WD10EZEX or ST1000DM003.

We actually have very little need for storage for anything but games. Our current desktop is strictly gaming, and occasionally watching a DVD. It is, however, constantly in use - there are often three generations of gamers using it throughout the day. Myself at 30+, younger relatives in their very late teens, and younger still relatives below 10.

We have little need for large amounts of storage. Even any music on our current desktop is only there as the result of an accidental sync with an MP3 player or two. For this reason I'd considered simply skipping a mechanical drive altogether and only taking an SSD. However our current desktop has a 500gb HDD, and we're out of space for new games. I was honestly unsure which direction to go in. I've been told SSDs are only really useful for gaming if the games are stored on them. But we need more than 500gb and 1tb SSDs are... Very expensive.

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If you want to take long term reliability a step further, ECC memory has been shown to have a failure rate ~10X lower than regular consumer desktop memory. You could drop the i5/i7 idea all together and build the machine around an E3 V3 xeon instead (same quad core haswell's as the i5/i7 series, just with ECC memory support enabled). An E3-1231V3 on a C226 chipset motherboard with some Kingston or Samsung 1.35V ECC UDIMMs would be nice.

I'm looking on pcpartspicker, but they only identify a single mobo as having the C226 chipset - a $200 ASROCK that only has a single PCI-e slot for a video card, no other slots at all. Do you have any specific models to suggest?

 

[mdocod]

The CPU sets the hard limits of performance. In some games, those hard limits may be at an FPS that is way beyond what is necessary for a great experience in that game. When this is the case, the performance winds up delegated by the balance between the visual quality settings and the render throughput available on the GPU. In many popular multi-player games, those hard limits of the CPU begin to show up, with weaker CPUs sometimes causing performance to dip to 30FPS or less in some conditions. An i5 haswell will maintain that 50-60+FPS minimum in about 99% of games and 99% of conditions imaginable, which is ideal, as it will usually keep the bottleneck shifted to the GPU or the monitor refresh rate.

So while performance does absolutely originate with the CPU, once you "solve" the CPU performance dilemma by using a great CPU for these workloads, the performance can often then wind up being dictated by the GPU and the balance of visual quality settings.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GTX_970_SC_ACX_Cooler/16.html

The sequel to metro 2033 is benchmarked on many different GPUs at many different resolutions in the link above. You can see that the same GPU can be used to deliver results ranging from <30FPS at 4K, all the way to beyond 100FPS at 1600X900. This is a nice example of the point that visual quality is inversely adjustable with performance. In this case, the overclocked i7 used for the benchmark is not a significant player in effecting this range of performance because it is capable of producing more than 100FPS in the conditions used for this test. In this case, the GPU and visual quality settings selected wind up dictating the results, but somewhere lies a hard limit imposed by that CPU. Could be at 110FPS, or at 200FPS, I really have no clue for that particular game. Point being, once you hit the hard limit set by the CPU, there is no way to adjust the GPU selection or visual quality settings to get any more framerate. In this particular game, the CPU requirements to maintain over 60FPS (a popular goal) are probably relatively low, but in many games this is not the case.

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there'd be very little practical, visible difference between what settings I could run the game at and have smooth FPS between an i5/970 and the 'next steps up' i7/980?

Precisely. Yet that "step up" would cost an additional ~$350 or so? There are value "cliffs" on both ends of the hardware specrum not worth jumping off.

Like buying a 500GB HD for $48 when you can buy a 1TB drive that offers both twice the capacity and better performance for $55. This is an example of the "cliff" on the bottom end of one particular scale. On the top end, we see the same sort of "cliff" where the value of flagship products is typically far lower than the products in a tier just below that flagship. A huge price jump for very little performance improvement.

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Speaking of HDs, yes, in order for games to benefit from an SSD, the game must be installed on the SSD. If your collection has swelled to beyond 500GB, then you're faced with possibly biting the bullet on a $400 1TB SSD.

You might find a happy alternative with something like a WD1000DHTZ, the 10,000 rpm 2.5" drive from western digital improves random access performance over traditional 3.5" consumer drives by about double, which would be a welcome improvement for booting and loading performance at about half the cost of the 1TB SSD. The downside is that these are typically noisy drives.

Another alternative would be to leverage a ~64GB SSD as a cache drive, and a 1TB mechanical drive for storage. This can be set up in the BIOS of just about any modern Intel platform. I believe they call it "smart response" technology. It's a fancy implementation of a fakeraid setup. This could be implemented with a great quality 1TB drive and SSD for ~$150 or less in parts.


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PCPartpicker is unfortunately, not set up for browsing workstation/enterprise grade hardware. You can find this hardware through google shopping pretty well. If you're looking for one shop that carries the CPU/MOBO/RAM, superbiiz carries a lot of this stuff and is very competitive on price.

CPU: E3-1231V3 (alternatively you might opt for the E3-1230V3 or 1240V3 if the motherboard you select doesn't have haswell refresh support out of the box) http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=E3-1231V3B

MOBO: SuperMicro X10SAT, X10SAE, ASrock C226 WS or WS+...
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=MB-X10SAT
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-X10SAE
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-C226-WS
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-C226WSP

RAM: Samsung 1600-11-11-11 1.35V ECC DDR3 UDIMMs (purchase 2).
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=D38GRE160S X 2

CPU: ~$250
MoBO: ~$250
RAM: ~$200
Enterprise grade hardware in your home: Priceless.