Upgrade Advice

[Yvaelle]

My current gaming rig is roughly as follows:

x58 sabertooth mobo
LGAxxxx i7 core (I forget the old socket... like 1337 or something, w/e)
16gb of ddr3 ram (9-9-9-24 timings)
120gb sata3 SSD
2x 1TB 7200rpm mechanical drives
nVidia GTX 460

So, obviously the graphics card is what is holding me back the most at this point - and I want to upgrade it - but I'm happy most of my case apart from that.

Since my mobo only supports PCI-e 2.0, I need a new mobo for 3.0 if I want a new card - and since my chipset is too old to match the newer mobos (even though it's still a very capable i7 that I never end up taxing) - I believe that I need a new CPU as well (please corret me if I'm wrong on any of this!

I was thinking of the GTX 760, but a friend is pushing the 770 - the price difference is $250 vs $350 though, that's pretty steep for I'm guessing ~10-15% higher performance? The GTX 760 alone is twice as powerful as my current 460 - which is only now beginning to feel outdated.

So I'm leaning 760 but I'd like another opinion there. I was thinking a Z87 board to fit?

Lastly that bundle above includes an i5 4670k which seemed about right - I hear the hyperthreading on the i7's is actually nonfunctional in most-games and so the i5's are generally the better gaming CPU's anyways (not that that's a big issue when I'm buying a proper graphics card).



The advantage to just transplanting these parts is I could then transplant the old parts into my file server to upgrade it as well. Are there any considerations I might be missing above though? Would this not work for some reason I might not know about? Is the 770 really the buy a friend seems to think, or is he just enamoured with his choice?

Thanks all!

[yurano]

A 770 will offer no performance benefit over the 760 in WoW.

All current PCIe 3.0 cards will operate on a PCIe 2.0 motherboard with no problems and no bottlenecks.

An upgrade to the i5-4670K will improve performance in WoW raids.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($239.79 @ DirectCanada)
Motherboard: Asus Z87-A ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($139.79 @ DirectCanada)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 2GB Video Card ($254.99 @ NCIX)
Total: $634.57
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-11-06 03:59 EST-0500)

[Yvaelle]

A 770 will offer no performance benefit over the 760 in WoW.

All current PCIe 3.0 cards will operate on a PCIe 2.0 motherboard with no problems and no bottlenecks.

An upgrade to the i5-4670K will improve performance in WoW raids.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($239.79 @ DirectCanada)
Motherboard: Asus Z87-A ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($139.79 @ DirectCanada)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 2GB Video Card ($254.99 @ NCIX)
Total: $634.57
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-11-06 03:59 EST-0500)

Even my 460 handles WoW without issue unless I'm FRAPS'ing without dropping the settings down a bit - it's newer games that I'm more concerned with - like today I had to crank my setting to all lows and such to get a solid framerate in CoD: Ghosts. (It looks like Quake 2 now, so sad)

I'm surprised to learn - maybe I'm misunderstanding - that PCI-E 3.0 Cards work on 2.0's without bottlenecks? So I'd just need to upgrade the card then in theory? What's the point of PCIe 3.0?

[Deleted]

if you play other games, then the 770 will be better then the 760, wow really has no improvements, ive went from a amd 5770 to a 7970, the min fps in a 25 man raid wasnt really different, the upper end of that saw a massive increase, but not like you get to see that when you want it in raids or such.

my advice is, wait a few weeks, the reason is, amd and nvidia yet to play all of their cards at the mo, and prices are most likely going down, hold off, also, a AMD 280x is a lot cheaper then the 770 for the exact same performance, thats not a joke, if you can find a 7970 GHZ, thats even cheaper and its still the same performance

[Deleted]

Well if it's video capture holding you back you might just want to buy an nVidia card with Shadowplay. That lets you to capture with very little FPS loss, and with little to no CPU performance impact, which is especially important for WoW. I probably got the same CPU as you, since i7 920 is easily the most common LGA 1366 processor. And LGA 1366 is what you'd have with a X58 chipset. It is fine for WoW when overclocked.

You might want to buy a decent CPU cooler like Noctua NH-D14 and give that i7 a decent overclock. It should do 3.5GHz without much of an issue. 760 is just fine for WoW as mentioned above.

[Toffie]

760 is a terrible price: performance card, get a 770 instead.

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-vid...d-n770tf2gd5oc

If you only play WoW then get yourself a GTX 660 for 174 $
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyt...rd-gvn660oc2gd

[zoomgpally]

Even my 460 handles WoW without issue unless I'm FRAPS'ing without dropping the settings down a bit - it's newer games that I'm more concerned with - like today I had to crank my setting to all lows and such to get a solid framerate in CoD: Ghosts. (It looks like Quake 2 now, so sad)

I'm surprised to learn - maybe I'm misunderstanding - that PCI-E 3.0 Cards work on 2.0's without bottlenecks? So I'd just need to upgrade the card then in theory? What's the point of PCIe 3.0?

Just throwing it out here, my 550 ti did just find in CoD: Ghosts, so a 760 should be more than enough

[Yvaelle]

I think everyone got the WoW idea from my signature - but I never actually mentioned WoW or that it was the only thing I play: I play tons of stuff - WoW is the least of my worries

Well if it's video capture holding you back you might just want to buy an nVidia card with Shadowplay. That lets you to capture with very little FPS loss, and with little to no CPU performance impact, which is especially important for WoW. I probably got the same CPU as you, since i7 920 is easily the most common LGA 1366 processor. And LGA 1366 is what you'd have with a X58 chipset. It is fine for WoW when overclocked.

You might want to buy a decent CPU cooler like Noctua NH-D14 and give that i7 a decent overclock. It should do 3.5GHz without much of an issue. 760 is just fine for WoW as mentioned above.

Ya it was the Shadowplay feature that got me thinking I needed a new card - my friend had just shown it to me on the 4th, and then Ghosts came out the next morning and looked like Hexen: time to upgrade

I'm using an overclocked 930 chip, and it seems constantly bored with any game I play - so I don't think I need to upgrade it unless I have to swap out the mobo as well.

[Deleted]

the signature has nothing to do with it funnily enough, its the forum in it self , its the most commonly requested requirement as well.

basically with a 770 or 280x/7970 GHZ card, at 1080 with AA dialed down, you will have a silky smooth experience.

example, my I5 3570 k clocked at 4.4 GHZ and a 7970 GHZ card, even on a 64 player conquest on BF 4 with high settings, i havent dropped below 60 FPS at 1080 once.
texture i have on ultra, rest of the features on extra dont make a difference to my eyes, prob something that is noticed at higher resolution.

now any cards below this, like the 760 or 7950, will do well, but you will get the dips, it depends on how you feel about that, must add, 7950s are going for a sweet price on deals since they want to get rid of them.

also with recordings, if im brutally honest, and i can see you have youtube videos, as long as you have a quad core cpu with decent clocks, you are fine in that respect, other wise its storage driven, 2 separate drives with decent thorough put will yield better results then the gpu upgrade for that.
one word of warning with shadowplay, it only records 10 min of footage, and i dont know if it has a continue record after 10 min feature either so you can make 10 min blocks of videos with a single push of a button.

but, as a lot of us have been saying with the gpu front for upgrades, wait, the 770 may come down in price, as well as the whole spectrum of gpus in a few weeks thanks to the new releases of gpus.

[yurano]

Shadowplay has two modes, "Shadow" recording of up to the last 20 mins or manual mode akin to any other recorder which can last indefinitely. Shadowplay's hard drive bandwidth requirement is extremely low (< 5 mb/s) so a dual drive system is not necessary. In fact, Shadowplay caches 1 Gb of footage in RAM and quick flushes at max HDD speed when necessary.

For the moment, PCIe 3.0 isn't necessary for modern graphics cards because PCIe 2.0's x16 bandwidth is sufficient. All PCIe versions are forward and backwards compatible.

[Deleted]

Well then, I'd say go for 770 and be set. I recommend the Gigabyte Windforce edition.