Help on minor upgrade needed

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Hi

I currently have the Phenom II x 4 965 BE 3.4 @ 3.8 cpu, with a GTX 560 GPU.

I have a choice to upgrade, CPU or GPU.

If i need to do CPU, i will have to buy new MB and intel cpu (3570k i5) or mabt the new FX 8350 8 core cpu.

How much does memory bandwidth count towards a game , in this case i poit out i need it for ARMA 2 and 3.

My eye caught the gtx 660, but i dont like fact that it is only like 13% faster than my current one...

My budget for a good card will be R2500 - R3000 . Any tips?

Thx
 
1) How much RAM do you have at this moment and what motherboard (brand + model) do you have?
2) Do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler and if so, which one?
3) What games do you play and at what resolution & detail level? Any one in particular that is running slow?
4) Do you have a SSD already?
5) That budget of ~R3k, is that including the money that you'll get from selling your GTX560? (Also, do you have the 560Ti or just 560?)

You'll most likely benefit more from a GPU upgrade if you're playing on max detail level on 1920x1080.
 
Also, if you went for the bulldozer, would you upgrade your motherboard? And will your current board work with an am3 cpu?
 
1)8GB ddr 1600 , MSI 970A-G46
2)Hyper 212 EVO
3)bf3, arma 2 dayz, dayz (when its released) and arma 3 now, 1680x1050
4) vertex 4 128gb
5)excluding the money of old card, will sell after i have new one. (plain 560 from leadtek)

Would like to play on 1080p, but a piece of screen is cut off on my 40" samsung :(


Was looking at HD 7870 (hwcompare.com show its faster than 660) BUT 3d mark vanatage points on rectron pricelist show higher score for 660.

sepose i must NOT just go Sli yes..?
 
The screen cut-off thing is probably an overscan issue, can be remedied in the Geforce drivers pretty easily. I'd say keep the board, RAM and CPU as-is. Games like ARMA are coded to use more RAM and rely on both single-thread performance and GPU bandwidth, so you'd be able to get away with the setup as-is, aiming for a HD7950 3GB for the GPU portion. It won't be enough on its own to enable every single feature, but it'll come pretty damn close. Overclocking that will also improve performance and we're talking about gains in the 10-20% region depending on the game in question.

When Piledriver becomes cheaper and more stock is available, look at bumping up the CPU to either the FX-6300 or the FX-8350. That'll probably be sometime after June or somewhere close to the end of August. It won't be necessary to upgrade yet, but its something to consider, especially once the standalone DayZ and ARMA3 is out and you have a good idea of performance from reviews.

I also wouldn't recommend something like SLI just yet, but it is an option. I'm just not sure how ARMA2 currently handles SLI setups. DayZ is still practically in beta and it's not completely optimised, so there's still lots of room for improvement.
 
NAG - Wesley said:
The screen cut-off thing is probably an overscan issue, can be remedied in the Geforce drivers pretty easily. I'd say keep the board, RAM and CPU as-is. Games like ARMA are coded to use more RAM and rely on both single-thread performance and GPU bandwidth, so you'd be able to get away with the setup as-is, aiming for a HD7950 3GB for the GPU portion. It won't be enough on its own to enable every single feature, but it'll come pretty damn close. Overclocking that will also improve performance and we're talking about gains in the 10-20% region depending on the game in question.

When Piledriver becomes cheaper and more stock is available, look at bumping up the CPU to either the FX-6300 or the FX-8350. That'll probably be sometime after June or somewhere close to the end of August. It won't be necessary to upgrade yet, but its something to consider, especially once the standalone DayZ and ARMA3 is out and you have a good idea of performance from reviews.

I also wouldn't recommend something like SLI just yet, but it is an option. I'm just not sure how ARMA2 currently handles SLI setups. DayZ is still practically in beta and it's not completely optimised, so there's still lots of room for improvement.
Click to expand...


That price of that card looks nice wesley. Ill have to save a up a bit...paying my last payment on my 40" samsung next week, then time for card.

And ill get another 8 gig ram then, does it matter if the ram is dual channel or not?
 
At this point, not really. Dual-channel does have bandwidth benefits but I'm running an Athlon X3 with two 2GB sticks with different density chips and even though I lack the dual-channel option in the BIOS, it doesn't affect performance to any degree that I notice. 8GB will be plenty for DayZ though.
 
can u tell me why is that card so cheap vs all other 7950's?
 
Flame said:
can u tell me why is that card so cheap vs all other 7950's?
Click to expand...

Comes straight from Taiwan, its a reference design created by TUL Corporation and made by three of their subsidiary companies, it has the backing of AMD's Never Settle promotion and only Wootware's offering it, so there's no price collusion by other online retailers and they can drop prices nice and low because they want to draw more people to their site.

Physically, there's nothing about the cards that's wrong, or our of the ordinary or bad. They're just as good as a Sapphire card, for example.
 
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