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Greetings. Longtime lurker, first time poster here.
I'm currently running a system with E4300 @ 2.4Ghz / X1950Pro / 2 SATA HDDs / Auzentech sound card on a Seasonic S-12 430W. After burning out on FF11 I've mostly returned to consoles for gaming.
Now with FF14 on the horizon I've been looking into updating my system with minimum cost to get ready for more endless hours of grinding, and the biggest bottleneck seems to be the PSU. The price of bigger PSUs seem rather high as well, so if possible I'd like to leave it untouched. I'd also rather avoid swapping the MB, so I'm looking right now at the E8500 for the CPU upgrade -- hell would freeze over if the geniuses at Square could actually figure out how to make use of multiple CPU cores. I don't plan on much PC gaming aside from FF, so future-proofing with a quadcore seems pointless as well.
The graphics I'm not nearly as sure about. The S-12 offers 14A / 15A rails for 12V power; at 80% that would be 144W for even the 15A side. Would I still be able to use, say, a Radeon 5850 which has a 150W TDP (and seems to actually use that much, according to the reviews)? If it's sufficient but close, how much power reduction could I achieve if I underclock the card by 10-20%? I doubt the game will force a card to constantly run at full power, but since it'll involve a lot of AFK'ing with the game turned on (for loot bazaars and such), I'd rather be on the safe side.
The CPU I'm intending to purchase within a few weeks; the graphics card, I'm likely waiting for whenever they release a benchmarking program for FF14. Any help/suggestions will be appreciated.
I'm currently running a system with E4300 @ 2.4Ghz / X1950Pro / 2 SATA HDDs / Auzentech sound card on a Seasonic S-12 430W. After burning out on FF11 I've mostly returned to consoles for gaming.
Now with FF14 on the horizon I've been looking into updating my system with minimum cost to get ready for more endless hours of grinding, and the biggest bottleneck seems to be the PSU. The price of bigger PSUs seem rather high as well, so if possible I'd like to leave it untouched. I'd also rather avoid swapping the MB, so I'm looking right now at the E8500 for the CPU upgrade -- hell would freeze over if the geniuses at Square could actually figure out how to make use of multiple CPU cores. I don't plan on much PC gaming aside from FF, so future-proofing with a quadcore seems pointless as well.
The graphics I'm not nearly as sure about. The S-12 offers 14A / 15A rails for 12V power; at 80% that would be 144W for even the 15A side. Would I still be able to use, say, a Radeon 5850 which has a 150W TDP (and seems to actually use that much, according to the reviews)? If it's sufficient but close, how much power reduction could I achieve if I underclock the card by 10-20%? I doubt the game will force a card to constantly run at full power, but since it'll involve a lot of AFK'ing with the game turned on (for loot bazaars and such), I'd rather be on the safe side.
The CPU I'm intending to purchase within a few weeks; the graphics card, I'm likely waiting for whenever they release a benchmarking program for FF14. Any help/suggestions will be appreciated.