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New PC build, advise please



  Clio200 EDC Lux
Hi all
I built my last PC many years ago and it has been rock solid, I got the Battlefield 1 game for xmas but my graphics card is outdated so I can't play it :(

My current gfx is Nvidia 260GTX, CPU is quad core 2.4ghz.
I have a budget of £500, I am way out of touch of what specs are good nowadays so can anyone recommend:

Motherboard
CPU
Gfx card
Memory
Also is it worth getting a solid state drive?
Thanks
 
  Evo 5 RS
That's a fairly tight budget. Could spec you something mediocre up without the GPU for that much.

1XWCo2u.jpg
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
Er... hmm. I did actually reply to this last night so not sure where my post has gone...! Basically I said something along the lines of:

"Do you definitely want to upgrade your PC rather than, perhaps, look at buying a PS4 Pro or Xbox One S? The reason I ask is that £500 (sadly) will get you a very average setup."

But @Silent_Scone has a better reply :)
 

R3k1355

ClioSport Club Member
Could you not play BF1 with just a graphics card upgrade?

A cheap Geforce 1060 is under £200, but will have many times more grunt than your current card.
 

N0ddie

ClioSport Club Member
  Tesla Model 3
Since your rebuilding your current setup surely you shouldn't need a new case or power supply? Obviously I'm assuming they are good.

Also, do you really need an SSD? Reuse your old HDD and save money there to?
 
  Clio200 EDC Lux
Yes I don't need a case my power supply is a corsair modular 520w will that be powerfull enough or not? ref the SSD was only thinking if they made much diference currently have a 1tb normal HDD
 
  Subaru, arctic 182FF
For that budget i would go amd.
Something like this
DzBy3Ef.png

Add an ssd to that and you will be able to play almost anything at 1080p
The cpu in that bundle is pre overclocked to 4.2ghz but Possibly look at price of a hex-core FX-6300 instead of that cpu
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
Hi all
I built my last PC many years ago and it has been rock solid, I got the Battlefield 1 game for xmas but my graphics card is outdated so I can't play it 😧

My current gfx is Nvidia 260GTX, CPU is quad core 2.4ghz.
I have a budget of £500, I am way out of touch of what specs are good nowadays so can anyone recommend:

Motherboard
CPU
Gfx card
Memory
Also is it worth getting a solid state drive?
Thanks

Definitely. On my last reformat, I tried both. Two 7,200rpm SATAs in RAID0 and a single SSD. The single SSD trounced the dual SATAs in everything - loading times for Windows, launching times of the games itself, etc.

If your new motherboard can support M.2 drives - go for one of those instead. My last one was a mere £3 more expensive than its SSD sibling - yet attaches directly to the motherboard. No cables needed - it's a much neater solution. Purely for aesthetics, of course.
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
I still have my 'old' EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC for sale. It needs a fair bit of PSU juice but is still up there as one of the top GPU's performance-wise on the market. It will happily blitz through the latest games on high/ultra settings at 1080p without issue. Probably needs to be married with a half-decent CPU, mobo and memory though to get the most out of it.
 

N0ddie

ClioSport Club Member
  Tesla Model 3
Definitely. On my last reformat, I tried both. Two 7,200rpm SATAs in RAID0 and a single SSD. The single SSD trounced the dual SATAs in everything - loading times for Windows, launching times of the games itself, etc.

If your new motherboard can support M.2 drives - go for one of those instead. My last one was a mere £3 more expensive than its SSD sibling - yet attaches directly to the motherboard. No cables needed - it's a much neater solution. Purely for aesthetics, of course.

M.2s are very expensive though. I got a 256Gb one but really wanted a 1TB. Price was eye watering.
 
  Edition 30 / GSXR750
I was in the same situation few months back.. depending on your current motherboard I upgraded my cpu to a used i5 2500k overclocked it to 4.3GHz and found a bargain GTX1060 6GB. All in spent around £250 and can handle most new games on ultra!
 

N0ddie

ClioSport Club Member
  Tesla Model 3
I just got the 950 Pro for the OS. I removed the Samsung 850 Evo 1TB SSD from my iMac before I sold it and put it in my new PC. These are easily fast enough for most people for their storage needs. They've also came down in price from when I bought mine in the summer. I'll be sticking 1 or 2 of them in the PC when funds allow. 1 for meadia (Pics, music, videos) and the other for games.
 
  Evo 5 RS
They're jostled with the angle of reliability. Couple that with the huge buffer available, which I'd imagine comes in handy if you work for ILM or something ridiculous like that lol. Most norms make do!
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
On a serious note m8 - for the kind of work you do, would that kind of card really improve your workload?

Would your work necessarily have to be 'nVidia friendly' with what was being written?

No mate, it would not improve things for the work I do (or, indeed, for the work of the majority of people). For real time rendering and gaming then there's no point in spending thousands on a Pro-level GPU when your mainstream gaming graphics card can perform every bit as well (and likely even better). As @Silent_Scone has already suggested, that sort of graphics card has use in very specific roles (as does AMD's FirePro range). Of course these pro-level cards can be used for gaming but you're wasting thousands of pounds if that's the only thing you do with it...!

These expensive GPU's are typically found in high-end workstations where stability, reliability and accuracy is more important than it would be for your average user. Hence you tend to find them used for CAD applications, advanced mathematical simulation, special effects studios and so forth. The incredibly high prices reflect the additional features of the cards and, to a degree, help cover the work that goes on "behind the scenes" in terms of the extra effort that goes into developing the specialist drivers for them. The drivers have to be a lot more stable than those we use for gaming and a heck of a lot of development goes into the continued development of driver software / technology; an expensive business. Likewise, the cards need to be incredibly stable when used for hours and hours under high loads; performing calculations, rendering millions and millions of primitives accurately, etc. The cards also have increased internal colour accuracy and reproduction (better DAC's and other components) for those that need it - film makers, movie post-production studios to give a couple of examples. They also have better double-precision capabilities that helps maintain a higher level of accuracy in terms of data that is held and manipulated by the card (basically more bits are available for storage of numerical values hence larger and more accurate values can be maintained internally and rounding errors are reduced). On top of that you also tend to find that they come with whopping great big frame buffers (useful for high fidelity work) and outputs that can drive many monitors. Oh, and usually some support for various inputs, too.

Apologies for the brief and basic overview - dinner's ready and I'm starving! :tonguewink:
 

SharkyUK

ClioSport Club Member
Oh - before I go (and talking of GPUs) I knocked up some new software recently for a simple CPU / GPU comparison. I wrote a very basic path tracer implementation and ran it on my new beastly CPU utilising 7 of my 8 cores (i.e. 14 logical processors, Intel i7-6900K). I then wrote it in CUDA so I could run the same thing (more or less) on my nVidia GTX 1080 GPU...

The GPU version was 22x (twenty-two times!) faster than the CPU-based version... :tonguewink:
 

Darren S

ClioSport Club Member
No mate, it would not improve things for the work I do (or, indeed, for the work of the majority of people). For real time rendering and gaming then there's no point in spending thousands on a Pro-level GPU when your mainstream gaming graphics card can perform every bit as well (and likely even better). As @Silent_Scone has already suggested, that sort of graphics card has use in very specific roles (as does AMD's FirePro range). Of course these pro-level cards can be used for gaming but you're wasting thousands of pounds if that's the only thing you do with it...!

These expensive GPU's are typically found in high-end workstations where stability, reliability and accuracy is more important than it would be for your average user. Hence you tend to find them used for CAD applications, advanced mathematical simulation, special effects studios and so forth. The incredibly high prices reflect the additional features of the cards and, to a degree, help cover the work that goes on "behind the scenes" in terms of the extra effort that goes into developing the specialist drivers for them. The drivers have to be a lot more stable than those we use for gaming and a heck of a lot of development goes into the continued development of driver software / technology; an expensive business. Likewise, the cards need to be incredibly stable when used for hours and hours under high loads; performing calculations, rendering millions and millions of primitives accurately, etc. The cards also have increased internal colour accuracy and reproduction (better DAC's and other components) for those that need it - film makers, movie post-production studios to give a couple of examples. They also have better double-precision capabilities that helps maintain a higher level of accuracy in terms of data that is held and manipulated by the card (basically more bits are available for storage of numerical values hence larger and more accurate values can be maintained internally and rounding errors are reduced). On top of that you also tend to find that they come with whopping great big frame buffers (useful for high fidelity work) and outputs that can drive many monitors. Oh, and usually some support for various inputs, too.

Apologies for the brief and basic overview - dinner's ready and I'm starving! :tonguewink:
I notice you get 3 years engineer support with one of these too! Pretty impressive stuff...
 


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