42 replies to this topic

[RyannVonDoom]

Catamount, on 18 February 2012 - 02:16 PM, said:

Well that's easy. You're looking at a Radeon HD 6870 right there. It'll set you back about $170.


First, though, it would help to know what power supply you're using. I don't want to be giving you a recommendation that's going to fry your machine and set your house on fire because you're using the Sparkle 650W $18 special

I've got a 750w Gamer PSU bought new for the FX4100 and motherboard since I just upgraded January 1st.

[Catamount]

RyannVonDoom, on 18 February 2012 - 04:15 PM, said:

I've got a 750w Gamer PSU bought new for the FX4100 and motherboard since I just upgraded January 1st.

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817371049 ?

[Seth Deathstalker]

DV^McKenna, on 18 February 2012 - 04:03 PM, said:

Tbh it was not so much the avatar, its that my brain was shocked it was not an AMD build....i should have twigged it was an impostor!

[RyannVonDoom]

Catamount, on 18 February 2012 - 04:17 PM, said:

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817371049 ?

Yes.

[Grotonomus]

My Audio

[Oderint dum Metuant]

I think he ment hardware, as in is it onboard? or is it a PCI card.

[Grotonomus]

DV^McKenna, on 18 February 2012 - 04:41 PM, said:

I think he ment hardware, as in is it onboard? or is it a PCI card.

Ok that makes more sense I just use onboard sound.

[Catamount]

No, I meant actually listening equipment (my bad for not specifying). Onboard audio is fine these days, and if you have Z5300s, you're golden for sound.

RyannVonDoom, on 18 February 2012 - 04:27 PM, said:

Yes.

Good deal. Yeah, I'd just grab the 6870. It's AMD's best offering in that price range, and Nvidia doesn't have a decent sub-$200 offering.

Edited by Catamount, 18 February 2012 - 04:56 PM.

[Grotonomus]

So just to clear the air. What are the main differences between the i7-2600K and 2700K?

[Catamount]

Arden Sortek, on 18 February 2012 - 05:12 PM, said:

So just to clear the air. What are the main differences between the i7-2600K and 2700K?

$40 and 100mhz; nothing more


It's actually a good alternative to the 2700k

Edited by Catamount, 18 February 2012 - 05:14 PM.

[Grotonomus]

Catamount, on 18 February 2012 - 05:14 PM, said:

$40 and 100mhz; nothing more


It's actually a good alternative to the 2700k

That's what I figured. I'm not an equipment specialist by any means but I get the job done.

[RyannVonDoom]

Veritas was mentioning the price drop of the 6900 series.. is that happening soon?

[Catamount]

RyannVonDoom, on 18 February 2012 - 08:31 PM, said:

Veritas was mentioning the price drop of the 6900 series.. is that happening soon?

It would seem to an extent, it already has. My guess is that ultimately, prices will drop for the same reason as GTX 460s: them being phased out. The 6900 series will be replaced at their price-point by the 7800 series (next month), most likely, if AMD can get prices down.


For now, however, http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814150523

There you go, $213 total. It never occurred to me to look to see if they'd dropped that low. That should still be in your price range, no? It's 198 after MiR, but I don't know if you do those; most people I know don't.

Edited by Catamount, 19 February 2012 - 11:34 AM.

[Gremlich Johns]

@ Catamount

your comment from early in this thread: "You have a fairly old CPU, and that's going to hurt you, especially for MWO."

How do you know this? is the MWO game using more than two cores? What information tells you that the vast majority of people out there in gaming land will not have the CPU power to run this game? I know people that are running crytek2 engine games on 4 GB RAM with a 512 MB vid card with little issue (meaning they are happy with their gaming experience).

Not trying to be adversarial, but how much are people going to have to expend on either 1) upgrading a dual-core system (which is likely the majority of consumer PCs these days (because people have not upgraded in 2-3 years) or 2) making a whole new gaming rig and 3) why? I was playing MWLL on a single core AMD 2800+ with 2 GB RAM on a GT220 on medium with no crashes. A year later, I built an x4 3.2 GHz system with 8 GB and a slightly overclocked GTX 460 SE. Works fine, has for close to 2 years.

The ratio of gamers who can make their own system compared to the general population who are willing to let someone else do it for them (HP, Dell, etc) is great, perhaps 1:10. I submit that a video card upgrade for the OP will be sufficient for the interim, maybe for the next year. Then as the game improves (or a few months after it launches), he can take that video card (or not) and make himself another computer for under $1000 (who knows what will be out in less than a year).

[Vulpesveritas]

Gremlich Johns, on 19 February 2012 - 03:33 PM, said:

@ Catamount

your comment from early in this thread: "You have a fairly old CPU, and that's going to hurt you, especially for MWO."

How do you know this? is the MWO game using more than two cores? What information tells you that the vast majority of people out there in gaming land will not have the CPU power to run this game? I know people that are running crytek2 engine games on 4 GB RAM with a 512 MB vid card with little issue (meaning they are happy with their gaming experience).

Not trying to be adversarial, but how much are people going to have to expend on either 1) upgrading a dual-core system (which is likely the majority of consumer PCs these days (because people have not upgraded in 2-3 years) or 2) making a whole new gaming rig and 3) why? I was playing MWLL on a single core AMD 2800+ with 2 GB RAM on a GT220 on medium with no crashes. A year later, I built an x4 3.2 GHz system with 8 GB and a slightly overclocked GTX 460 SE. Works fine, has for close to 2 years.

The ratio of gamers who can make their own system compared to the general population who are willing to let someone else do it for them (HP, Dell, etc) is great, perhaps 1:10. I submit that a video card upgrade for the OP will be sufficient for the interim, maybe for the next year. Then as the game improves (or a few months after it launches), he can take that video card (or not) and make himself another computer for under $1000 (who knows what will be out in less than a year).

the reason we know it will, is it is running CryENGINE 3, which is heavily multithreaded. The plus side, is it is able to do great things and fairly smoothly with at least a quad core. (it is able to use up to 8 threads btw.) downside... fewer cores have issues.

[guardiandashi]

Gremlich Johns, on 19 February 2012 - 03:33 PM, said:

@ Catamount

your comment from early in this thread: "You have a fairly old CPU, and that's going to hurt you, especially for MWO."

How do you know this? is the MWO game using more than two cores? What information tells you that the vast majority of people out there in gaming land will not have the CPU power to run this game? I know people that are running crytek2 engine games on 4 GB RAM with a 512 MB vid card with little issue (meaning they are happy with their gaming experience).


The ratio of gamers who can make their own system compared to the general population who are willing to let someone else do it for them (HP, Dell, etc) is great, perhaps 1:10. I submit that a video card upgrade for the OP will be sufficient for the interim, maybe for the next year. Then as the game improves (or a few months after it launches), he can take that video card (or not) and make himself another computer for under $1000 (who knows what will be out in less than a year).

I am going to speculate on catamounts answer but I have an idea where he is coming from.

in general terms the advice they are giving is 3 parts speculation 2 parts observation and 5 parts history.

the 3 parts speculation is assuming that the folks at piranaha can do a really good job of taking advantage of the capability of the game engine to handle multithreading, and that they program the game to WANT that capability then that is a reasonable speculation.

the observation aspect has to do with the processors available, the processor mentioned the game engine specified etc

history the history aspect is looking at what games have done in the past and processor/gpu historical scaling.

now the truth is a number of the best games have had their "minimum specs" be at a point that the average consumer would find barely playable, or barely giving a "good experience" (the reason they are called minimum specs) a lot of those same games do not even come close to topping out at the "recommended specs" the recommended specs are actually right at or just above what the devs believe is the "common gaming rig in general use" IE if you have a desktop and the belief is that 80% of the gaming rigs for 2012 have an intel (or amd equivalant) 2010 dual to quad core processor, that is what will likely be "recommended" and they might specify that an nvidia 360 or better gpu is recommended (with an 8600 as the minimum) now that 6600 (or equivalant nvidia card MIGHT work, as long as you have plenty of ram and a GOOD processor from its era) but you might be getting 10-20 fps at minimum resolution IE some people would call it playable but they are gonna get crushed ... a lot.

the truth of the matter is that until TPTB release the "official requirements" and some people start playing (or reporting experiences from beta) we won't actually know what the "real" requirements are. plus there is the whole periodic sales cycles eg valentimes day sale, presidents day sale, 4th of july sale (in the us) etc plus there is the whole aspect that if you "know" that this part is way under recommended, and this is a bit over, then sometimes your system can "fake" acceptable if a really good reating in 1 area can make up for a poor rating in another.

the gist is based on speculation and what we know about the game engine, a good processor might help out game performance a lot. or it might be a case of the gpu is critical and even a really dated and lame processor can do the job, as long as the gpu is good enough

[Catamount]

Wow, I didn't think one small comment would spark so much conversation


Yeah, it's pretty much been nailed on the head by the two above posters (thanks guys).

Cryengine 3 has shown itself to be absurdly CPU-intensive in DX9, and at least decently intensive in DX11, something we've covered in previous threads.

Then you have the Athon 64 X2 6000+; that CPU isn't just a dual core, but an ancient dual core. It might not make the game unplayable, but it'll bottleneck a system pretty quick, which means that anything past a low-mid GPU won't net you any performance increases. Even then, CPU lag can manifest entirely independently of simply bottlenecking a GPU

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Ugh.

Too many people are looking at these threads as thought MWO is the only thing people will be doing with their computers.
He has an old duel core (ancient really), he currently has money to spend on upgrades for his PC, he may not have this money next year or the year after when his duel core becomes useless to play anything its far better to upgrade the lot now, while he has the funds.

MWO wont use 8 cores effectively so a simple quad core upgrade would suffice and most games today are starting to make good use of quad core systems.

Catamount is completely correct in his assesment, of Cry engine 3 (different to cry engine 2 and MWLL so pointless to compare).

To sum up you wont need I7's/8120/8150 's and AMD 7970's/7950's to play MWO, but if you have the money now better to upgrade to get the best bang/buck because life changes and money may not be around when you need it next year or the year after.

[Gremlich Johns]

Fair enough answers, mates. Helps to clear some things up in my head as I am distrcted by enough other things (photography) that I am not necessarily current on the tech needed to support an avid gamer. Certainly not to level some others are.

Edited by Gremlich Johns, 20 February 2012 - 09:57 AM.

[Catamount]

Gremlich Johns, on 20 February 2012 - 09:56 AM, said:

Fair enough answers, mates. Helps to clear some things up in my head as I am distrcted by enough other things (photography) that I am not necessarily current on the tech needed to support an avid gamer. Certainly not to level some others are.

You see, I have the opposite problem. Between school and electronics, I don't get enough time in for photography

Out of curiosity, what kind of camera setup to do you use?