When Do You Upgrade?

E

Eradan

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 7, 2006
Messages
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I'm curious what criteria people consider when evaluating substantial PC upgrades?

I ask because the PC in my signature was built in late May 2012 primarily for gaming. I wonder if anyone with a similar build has upgraded and do you feel the increase in performance was worth the cost? Not a huge fan of overclocking although I suspect I can squeeze more performance out of my CPU. I'm out of the loop on the video card market right now and will begin researching options today. I know my 670 is a few generations behind now and upgrading might provide a nice framerate boost.

Here's my current rig in case you don't have signatures turned on:

Intel 3570K Stock / Corsair H60
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
Samsung 830 Series 120GB SATA III SSD, WD-Caviar Blue 1TB
Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 1600
Gigabyte GTX 670
Corsair 300R; Corsair HX750
Windows 8.1 Professional
Asus MX279H

Thanks for reading.
 
Hi,

I'll suggest that you take into consideration these things.

Decide your screen resolution you want to play in. Download FRAPS or some program that shows FPS while gaming. Now rate each game you play with that value FPS watching lows and highs and averages.

In my opinion if you are getting 80 FPS as a low and highs over 100 in each of your games I don't think it's time to upgrade but again this is subjective to each individual. If you are dipping down into the below 80 FPS area then I can see upgrading. An exception would be if you had a 144hz monitor and wanted to have close to 144 FPS at least or over to match the 144hz... then you need to plan for that.

With that being said I am guilty of wanting to upgrade myself just because it's been three years and all my games still run fast enough with my chosen screen resolution.

Popular now with nvidia is the gtx 970 and 980. I heard the 970 had a memory issue where not all the memory was able to be used but it may have been fixed with a firmware update.. this you will have to check if interested. The 980 is pretty salty $$.

And i would upgrade your video card first because your cpu is fine.

I have a gtx 760 and play 1080p in Black Ops 2 and peg off of the 200 FPS limiter. Advanced Warfare I hit the max capped 91 FPS. Some of todays popular games don't take too much to play nicely at 1080p. So looking at this info I have no reason to upgrade if I just played these two games at 1080p for I wouldn't see anything different. I just want to upgrade because I have the upgrade itch and to future proof myself for the next 3 years.

One more thing I should add is my friend had a GTX 660 and plays at 1080p and has a Intel i7 920 cpu. He was getting decent frame rates but bought a GTX 980 and says it didn't help him be any better in games. This is because his GTX 660 was already playing good enough for his chosen games at his set resolution. But he is future proofed for sure.
 
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I upgrade when I feel that my computer is struggling with the games I play.

Heres my machine spec:

AMD X3 435 2.90GHz
2GB RAM
Radeon 6950HD

So far:

CS:GO plays absolutely fine
Far Cry 3 average of about 25fps, it was consistent so didn't have any issues.
Alien Isolation, no problems here averaging around 30fps
Thief playing about 27fps but again its smooth and not causing me any issues.

Alot of the console ports are built for 30fps so im finding them smooth to play even on the lower specs, however I am currently saving for a new build to bring my machine upto spec as with the new consoles gaming is gonna be an issue. In the past(5700-8800 days) I would have agreed with the above :)

Personally im Aiming for a new X99 platform with at least 16GB of RAM, Im waiting on the new GFX cards to come out though as I feel popping down the cash now for a 980GTX would be a waste.

edit:

Basically what im saying is upgrade when you feel that what you do with the computer is too slow.
 
Upgrade when you want to play a game and it doesn't run well.

Or when your system is just generally feeling slow.

I'm definitely feeling the upgrade itch (see rig in sig) but have no need considering I'm playing the following games: DotA 2, Grim Dawn, and Skyrim.
 
Installed FRAPS and played a bit of Metro 2033 and Evil Within this morning. I'm running at 1080p so I can play these kinds of games on the 42" LG I have connected to my PC. Wouldn't mind moving up to a higher resolution but this is convenient for now and looks relatively good. Framerates with everything cranked in those games at 1080p bounces between 30 and 50 fps. Not bad and neither game felt sluggish. I have a backlog of older stuff I never got to because I blew all my gaming time playing WoW. I'm sure something like Dead Space and Bioshock will run great. Will be curious to see how GTA V runs on my PC but I can also pick it up for PS4, too. I think I'm probably good for 2015. I did finally add the extra 2TB hard drive and 8GB of RAM that I've had sitting here for more than a year. So lazy. I used to love tinkering with this stuff and but after years of the IT career grind, I just want everything to be simple and work.

Thanks for reading and responding, guys! :)
 
Eradan said:
I'm curious what criteria people consider when evaluating substantial PC upgrades?

I ask because the PC in my signature was built in late May 2012 primarily for gaming.
Click to expand...

First, I look at how much the upgrade is going to cost and how much performance improvement my dollars will buy. Second, I determine if my current hardware is meeting my needs. Last, I look at timing, if say a new processor generation is 2 months away, I'd probably wait.

I'd look at upgrading the GTX 670, and also doing a mild overclock on your 3570k, getting it up to 4.0-4.2 GHz range should be easy and provide a nice boost in performance for two reasons:
  • Default turbo boost lowers the speed per core boosted.IE. all 4 cores boosted only takes it from 3.4 to 3.6 GHz, if you only had one core boosted that one would run at 3.8 GHz. When you OC you set it to max boost all 4 cores and up the multiplier so all get boosted the same no matter if 1 or 4 cores is being used.
  • Raw clock speed, ha.
 
canna said:
I'd look at upgrading the GTX 670, and also doing a mild overclock on your 3570k, getting it up to 4.0-4.2 GHz range should be easy and provide a nice boost in performance for two reasons:
  • Default turbo boost lowers the speed per core boosted.IE. all 4 cores boosted only takes it from 3.4 to 3.6 GHz, if you only had one core boosted that one would run at 3.8 GHz. When you OC you set it to max boost all 4 cores and up the multiplier so all get boosted the same no matter if 1 or 4 cores is being used.
  • Raw clock speed, ha.
Click to expand...

Agreed on both counts, i've got a 35something at 4Ghz, used to have a GTX 660 and dropped a new GPU in a 4 or so months ago and that was the only upgrade I needed to run Dragon Age:Inquisition on max settings at 1080p.
 
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