Advice on PC upgrades

Hello all,

I am gradually upgrading my PC bit by bit and would really like advice from you guys, as I guess most of you are experienced PC builders. (hopefully)

This is my build at the minute

Case: Antec 1200
CPU: i7-975 Extreme
MoBo: Asus Rampage Gene II
RAM: OCZ 6GB DDR3 1066MHz
GPU: Asus GTX 980 Strix
PSU: Corsair HX850i

I’m looking at the following upgrades, if any of you have these or have heard good/bad things your input would be appreciated.

MoBo:

MSI X99S SLI PLUS £154
or ASUS X99-S £216
or ASUS x99-Deluxe £295

Processor:

i7-5820K 3.30GHz £320
or
i7-5930K 3.50GHz £465

Finally RAM:

Corsair Dominator 16GB DDR4 2666MHz £260
or
Corsair Vengence 16GB DDR4 2666MHz £214

If you have any suggestions different from the ones I have shorts listed please let me know, the aim here is the build a rig as future proof as possible while being able to play games like Arma III and the Total War series with ease.

Many thanks in advance.

Dachi

(Plus any tips on cable management would be very much appreciated as I seem to be really bad at it.)

How often do you notice your CPU bottlenecking? If not very often, I’d just wait for Skylake. Your rig already is a monster. As for cable management, you’ll probably need a more cable management friendly case.

Edit: Do you really only have 6GB of RAM in total? Or do you have two of those?
Edit2: If it is bottlenecking, look into overclocking if you haven’t already.

Hey Anarchy,

To be fair my CPU has always been good but its like 5 years old now I think the little guy deserves to retire to the low CPU workload of my girlfriends work PC.

Yes that’s all the RAM I have, is that bad its also 5 years old, the only new components are my GPU and the PSU(Cables).

Skylake new intel chips??
(just watched a couple of YouTube videos, seems like I my have to wait for prices to drop after Broadwell and Skylake release or buy Skylake depending on improvements)

Hi Dachi,

I have the same plan as Anarchy proposes, I have a [email protected] and won’t upgrade until Skylake.
May be overclocking can help you bridge until then : OC i7-975
Although Arma does not really support it, 6GB is a bit short nowadays, so if you had an opportunity to upgrade for cheap, it’s still worth to go for 12 or 16 GB. With 16GB you can disable paging altogether.
Another questions is : Do you have an SSD ? It improves the overall performance a lot ! Would be upgrade number 1 if you have none. Resource intensive games are best stored on an SSD.
For the cable management (which by the way doesn’t look that horrible) : your box seems quite alright and like most boxes, it’s the space you have at the back , behind the motherboard where most cables should be going through, like for instance, the blue cable which is visible in the middle, should in fact go into the hole at the bottom right and come out at the top left over the cpu cooler. Then you should always try to make your cable follow a ridge and not hang loose in the air, and if they are too short not shy away of making them longer or buy longer ones. And cable ties are your best friends all along. It can easily eat up a whole afternoon to get it right.

Don’t forgot your ram is really nice when using mutiple applications and be quite usefull with the smooth running of day to day in arma

Also, placebo or not, a lot of people reported performance improvement with faster RAM.

  • dont go SLI/crossfire
  • dont upgrade

PC upgrading is similiar to poker, you have take into consideration the POT ( what perf. gain your looking at ), and the investment ( money you will put in ).

Example:

-If your current build gets 40fps in arma3 and is worth lets say 1000eur ( top of my head, just for example )
-Build that you want will get 50fps in arma 3 and the upgrade cost is 500eur ( top of my head, just for example )

-What you gain here is 10fps, which equals to aprox. 25% performance boost, so the upgrade to be worth it, should be around 25% value of the current build. 25% of 1000eur = 250eur. If you can upgrade it to the desired performance using this method, than its mostly OK.

But my life rule is not to upgrade, cause the biggest difference is mostly in static tests, that have nothing to do with actual ingame performance. Dont upgrade your PC coz of bad coding on the developer side.

I run a i7 4770K & 780gtx ti, arma 3 = 50+ fps, cs:go 500+ fps… :smiley: I have already made peace that I will never play arma 3 at 100fps, let alone be able to go 3D. But when this pc reaches its second birthday I will invest aprox. 200eur on cooling and overclock it until it starts screaming at me to stop. Than use it for another year, sell it and start from scratch.

You can never keep up with the technology, I burned my self on monitors, ran a 24" dell IPS, wanted more, bought a second screen ASUS 24" 144hz, saw the diff side by side, sold the dell and the asus for my current 27" BENQ 144hz, reflashed the firmware to v2, strobelight, bla bla bla etc. all was good, until nvidia annouced gsync… GGWP

When people ask me: "what PC should I get ?" I usually reply: "raspberry pi" and they walk away.
Another example :smiley:

day 1: buy laptop for 600eur, getting to know it
month 1: finnaly got to know it good enough now lets do some work
year 1: wow now I really know how to use my laptop to the max.

lets put that in money value:

day 1: laptop is worth still 550eur
month 1: worth 450eur
year 1: maybe you will get 250

now lets see what I would do:

day1: raspberry pi
month 1: i maxed out the capabilites of the PI and need to upgrade
month 1: buy used laptop
month 6: buy another used laptop
year 1: get the laptop.

value of this:

day1: raspberry pi aprox. 50eur
month 1: used laptop 150 eur
month 6: used laptop another 250 eur
year 1: 600eur

What i am trying to say, or was trying im lost as well as you are probably right now, but use your hardware to the MAX !
Once I see my gpu or cpu be at the 70% usage levels I will start looking into an upgrade. Hardware is built to be used, your cpu has not broken a sweat in 5 years at maybe 30% usage… run it another year overclocked and enjoy the money saved.

Dont think of this to be 100% accurate in anyway, its just my experience and my point of view, maybe it will help you decide. In anyway dont go too hard :smiley: Its usually best to wait it out, I waited a long time for my PC ( had a hp probook 17" laptop before this pc, I overclocked that i3 like it was no tommorow added a custom CPU cooler over the laptop, used a usb keyboard etc… it was a mess :smiley: but man i went from cs:go being 40-60fps unplayable to a stable 80fps playable. And I learned everything there is regarding laptops, now I clean laptops as a side job :smiley:

There is one thing that i dont like regarding you PC, its the led’s, if your gonna overclock, loose the bling :smiley: you need as stable of a power suply as you can get, corsair is good, but i personaly would give my upvote to XFX. Also again your using a 850w psu… @ maybe 50%, there is also some science regarding the PSU’s and im not currently that well informed, but if im not mistaken, PSU’s work best when @ 80-90load something… power loss or something.

I have written this wall of text expecting someone to read it and correct me if I was mistaken in anyway. I will apreciate any advice as well. Best regards.

Fenix out

I found a calculator for power consumption which has an up-to-date list of components:
Power Supply Calculator.
It is recommended that the load is between 65% and 85% of what the power supply is supposed to give (the number eg: 850 is supposed to be related to that, not to the power it will suck from your socket ,which depends on the efficiency, which again depends on the quality of your gear -> for the Corsair HX850i is claimed ‘80 PLUS® Platinum efficiency, delivering 92% energy efficiency at real world load conditions’).
Dachi’s PC is drawing between 500-600 W(hour, to be precise) so if I take 550 it’s ±65% which is on the bottom limit, but on another hand gives you buffer to upgrade, so nothing to change. The 85% limit is set because over this number, PSU’s usually go out of their silent mode (and that’s usually why you buy those ‘quiet’ Plus platinum PSU’s in the first place) and start their fans and then it adds to the overall noisy brick which an non water cooled gaming PC’s becomes when running e.g: Star Citizen :slight_smile: . so also , there if you are over 85% , it’s no brainer, the thing just starts heating up, but that’s still ok.
For completeness about efficiency: Dachi’s PC at 550W load sucks 598W (550/0.92) out of your socket.

By the way, I use http://www.logicalincrements.com/ as a reference. You want a balanced system, you don’t need a Fiat with a Bugatti engine or a Bugatti with a Fiat engine. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hi all thanks to everyone for the advice it is very much appreciated.

I think I will wait for the new Broadwell and Skylake chips to come out so I can pick up the i7-5930K at a better price so thanks to Anarchy and Hellfire for pointing this out.

As to power supply I used PC Part Picker to give me a rough guide to what the system would use. If your interested this is what I have decided on and using my old parts to create another PC maybe for my girlfriend or sell she says she doesn’t really want it haha. (trying to get her on Arma)

Original PC
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/G8pjhM

Stage Now
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/KR3vCJ

Planned Upgrades
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/jcksBm

350D Build
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/zjCDXL

Again thanks to everyone for replying.

See you all Monday,

Dachi

Hey Fenix,

Thanks for your reply, I have used the Intel extreme tuning utility and it says my CPU is running at 25% usage when running Arma but the FPS is around 50 using 2715x1527 Res and optimal settings for the GTX980. Most people are right about the RAM situation it says its using nearly 5GB of that which I think seems quite tight.

Cheers,
Dachi

As far as I remember, ARMA is still soft-capped at 2047mb RAM and VRAM so 8gb or even 6gb is enough, depending on how clogged it is with background processes. Really high-end GPUs are just not utilized fully because the bottleneck is almost always the CPU.

Not sure if I posted on the forum but Process Lasso is a software that let’s you automate the process of setting arma3.exe process to High priority, unpark all CPU cores and change the Windows Power Plan to High Performance. I had 10% performance boost after applying these settings.

Hello Guys,

I have finally received all the part I was waiting for and have managed to put them together without burning down my house which is a bonus :slight_smile:

Thanks for everyone’s advice and help, if your interested below are the finished products.

Looks good man !
Nice cable management alot of people can learn from you :slight_smile: