Cpu upgrade for my gaming system

[Galdorf]

Seems to me as far as cpu's are concerned that speed of cpu's seem to have hit the limit as far as technology is concerned not much has happened in 3 years.

So i was doing some research on getting an upgrade for my personal gaming rig but the i7-2600k i have still seems to be hard to get anything worth replacing it with that will net any real speed increase.

I was looking at ivy bridge since i'm not going to use onboard video for gaming and have checked the 2600k vs ivy bridge benchmarks and have noticed all you get is more heat and not much of a speed increase maybe 5% at the most.

Im thinking maybe just wait for kepler to drop in price and upgrade my video card i'm only running a gtx 470 atm and maybe upgrading my motherboard from a P67 to Z77 to get the sdd caching to lower boot times and load screens/zoning times on mmo's.

I consider 30% for cpu's to be the magic number for upgrades on real world benchmarks so nothing out there is worth upgrading to.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Also depends on the particular game(s) that you play. Some games are much more dependent on your video card(s), and memory. My gaming rig is still an early Core 2 Duo...she still does fine with current games like Battlefield 3.

My rig runs 24x7. So bootup times are moot.
She runs a pair of WD Raptor 10krpm drives...pagefile spanned across both of them.

 

[ZenTree]

I agree with yeOlde, I've got a fairly old Quad now and it handles everything just fine. I don't mind not being bleeding edge with my tech, as long as I can play a game on decent settings without lag I'll keep on using it till it breaks.

 

[jbartlett323]

I'm still running a Q6600 + AMD/ATI 5770... still plays with almost everything maxed ~30 frames minimum no matter the game. it is OC'd at 3.6, but thats nothing.

As long as the Proc has enough bandwidth to fully realize the video cards potential (and most will today) it really doesn't matter. Faster Graphics is where its at to a point...

If your sitting on a 2700K, then stay there. Sandy Bridge-E was a negligable jump, and Ivy Bridge is also a very small jump. If your worried about it still, put water on that bad boy and crank him up to a 24/7 speed of 4.2 - 4.5GHz!! otherwise go for broke, and see how long it will last a 5GHz, may not be long though...

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Not to mention...todays online games...I'm just not into them as much any more. It's like..as each generation comes out, I'm less and less interested.

You know I get a lot more enjoyment out of playing old school "Quake Live" online..than Battlefield 3?

I was huge huge huge into the first Battlefield 1942 when it came out, and then Desert Combat, Battlefield Vietnam (I built and ran a lot of public game servers for those)...and after that....less and less.

And then of course going further back in time....Unreal Tournament, Quake 2, Quake 1. The online gaming days, and huge mega LAN parties...didn't get much better than in the Unreal Tournament days. I built a ran a big clans server that made it to number 16 in the NGStats top 20 UT servers in the world...and stayed in the NGStats top 20 list for over a year.

 

[ZenTree]

I agree with this to some extent. The most fun on an online game I've had for ages was on a minecraftesque first person shooter called "ace of spaces", I'm a natural born tunnel rat and used to spend ages with a friend on red faction tunnelling around to ambush the other person. AOS is very basic graphics but a whole lot of fun. And will run on pretty much anything, including steam powered machines.

 

[compnet]

The i7 is already overkill... there aren't any games out that are coded for multi threads... Video editing and rendering is what the i7 is good for right now.. You get maybe a frame or two per second over a 2500k, and maybe 5 over the older CPUs these guys are talking about..

I'd say upgrade other components

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

there aren't any games out that are coded for multi threads...

Uhm...."multi threaded"....I disagree that there aren't games out there which are "multithreaded"

Now...able to really take advantage of multiple cores...the list shortens..but there are still quite a few newer generation games which can..and will...take advantage of mutiple cores.

Most games can't do much more than 2 cores. However...some of the newer games have shown to be MUCH better on quad cores than dual cores.
Proof:
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page8.html

"For example, in Deus Ex dual-cores were 43% slower than their quad-core counterparts."
http://www.techspot.com/review/436-deus-ex-human-revolution-performance-test/

 

[Rob_NNCC]

I have an ATI 3750 (or there abouts) graphics card in my gaming rig.

I went from an E6750 Core 2 Duo to a used (cust wanted an upgrade) Core I7 980 Extreme edition.

As far as gaming goes, I can not really tell any difference.

I would spend it on the graphics card if you are unhappy with gaming performance.

 

[compnet]

Uhm...."multi threaded"....I disagree that there aren't games out there which are "multithreaded"

Now...able to really take advantage of multiple cores...the list shortens..but there are still quite a few newer generation games which can..and will...take advantage of mutiple cores.

Most games can't do much more than 2 cores. However...some of the newer games have shown to be MUCH better on quad cores than dual cores.
Proof:
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page8.html

"For example, in Deus Ex dual-cores were 43% slower than their quad-core counterparts."
http://www.techspot.com/review/436-deus-ex-human-revolution-performance-test/

Ya quad core is better than dual. I was talking about hyper threading on an i7 2600k vs none on an 2500k. unless your funds are unlimited, the 100 dollar price diff will be better spent ANYWHERE else on a gaming rig.

 

[Galdorf]

Looking at intels roadmap next chip is Haswell while using 20x less energy seems green and performance wise it will feature transactional memory,transactional Synchronization Extensions, or TSX.
What does this mean it will be much easier for programmers to take advantage of multiple core cpu's.
for more information: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT021512050738

 

[Galdorf]

Wow after reading that the unreal 4 engine is only designed for kepler now i'm really starting to wonder about the pc gaming industry.

Unreal Engine 4 Not For Current Platforms (Except Kepler)

I highly doubt people are going to go out and buy a 600 series nvidia card to play one game, why would a game designer do such a thing is beyond me but looks like i will just wait for kepler prices to drop and maybe haswell.

Haswell seem to be a leap forward as far as features go ivy bridge really is not that much of an upgrade, wonder if AMD is going to do anything with TSX it should really change the pc gaming industry.

 

[Tepin]

Wow after reading that the unreal 4 engine is only designed for kepler now i'm really starting to wonder about the pc gaming industry.

This engine is still early in development and won't see release for about 2 years or more. They aren't just developing a game for new hardware; they are developing a game engine that if successful will be the framework for hundreds of games over the next decade.

Right now PC game development is behind the technology curve of modern hardware. Everything is still programmed for DX9 with just a fraction having DX11 support. The desire to easily port to/from XBOX 360 has held back the software development of games on PCs in my opinion. This cutting edge hardware that Epic is preparing for will likely be the standard hardware for tomorrows consoles and gaming PCs.

I am actually happy to read about game companies pushing the envelope instead of just finding the easiest implementation to port to other platforms. I know it will stagnate again once Sony and MS solidify the specs of their next gen consoles.

 

[StableSolutions]

CPU means very little as far as gaming performance is concerned. Your biggest factors are Your Video card & Video memory (I suggest minimum 2gb onboard video ram) and your System RAM (I suggest 8gb minimum for gaming)

I'm running an AMD 1100T Black (3.3ghz hex core)
8gb Ram (Had 16gb and had NO change in performance so put that in another machine)
NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT (4gb) Video-card

Playing WoW I was pulling about 45fps, SWTOR running about 40fps
That's on Maxed settings with lots of stuff going on.

I also run 3 Chrome windows in the background along with Photoshop, flash or whatever else I'm playing with and I have no lag other than server-side game lag.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Seems to me as far as cpu's are concerned that speed of cpu's seem to have hit the limit as far as technology is concerned not much has happened in 3 years.

So i was doing some research on getting an upgrade for my personal gaming rig but the i7-2600k i have still seems to be hard to get anything worth replacing it with that will net any real speed increase.

I was looking at ivy bridge since i'm not going to use onboard video for gaming and have checked the 2600k vs ivy bridge benchmarks and have noticed all you get is more heat and not much of a speed increase maybe 5% at the most.

Im thinking maybe just wait for kepler to drop in price and upgrade my video card i'm only running a gtx 470 atm and maybe upgrading my motherboard from a P67 to Z77 to get the sdd caching to lower boot times and load screens/zoning times on mmo's.

I consider 30% for cpu's to be the magic number for upgrades on real world benchmarks so nothing out there is worth upgrading to.

No CPU worth upgrading to, wouldnt upgrade my motherboard either. You can upgrade your video card but depends on what games your playing and what resolution your running. I assume you already overclocked the processor so I don't expect you to be needing an upgrade for gaming anytime soon......well...unless the game you are playing is capable of using over 4 cores.

 

[Rosco]

ram is so cheap now adays. if i were to build a gaming rig it would have 16 gig RAM. i would upgrade to and i3 or i5. they are way cheaper then the latest i7 and the real world performance difference is minimal.

 

[frase]

I recently built a new system as was posted in another thread. I purchased an i52500k, is an awesome processor. I didn't even bother with an i7 as cost to performance is negligible.

 

[Galdorf]

I was looking at getting a kepler based video card but they can't be found anywhere also notice that nvidia has lost alot of money last few quarters.
I really wonder why they decided to release kepler in such limited quantities This is the first release where i was not able to grab one before stock ran out.
Seems like this shortage led to 55% drop in profits they are the only ones to blame not having enough product to sell wonder when this will change?.

 

[Vicenarian]

i3 2100 + EVGA 9800GT + 8GB Corsair DDR3 = plays almost any game I throw at it; and the 9800GT is like 2 generations old hahaha