Sorry guys...CPU upgrade advice

thebumb · Post by **thebumb** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 3:18 pm

Hi all,

Sorry for `yet' another asking for advice thread........
I'm thinking about upgrading my MB/CPU and would like opinions if it's worth it for RW.

Currently have on Win 7 64 bit:

i5-760 @ 2.8 (not overclocked)
Asus P7P55D LE X-fire MB
8GB of DDR3 1600 (4 stick of 2)
650 PSU
HD5850 1GB GPU

I'm looking at

i5-2550K which will be overclocked (to ??? depending on the memory) by the vendor who is doing the upgrade for me
Asrock Z68 Pro 3 Gen 3 MB
Arctic cooling freezer pro 3 CPU cooler

I'm not confident to overclock the 760 myself!!

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks
Stu.

lemberg · Post by **lemberg** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 3:38 pm

make sure the MB bios has been flashed to the latest one as I can't get mine to accept it no matter which way I try, ezeflash- dos flash. On retrospect I would go for the Asrock or Gigabyte boards.
My i5k runs dead easy at 4.5gig using a hyper212 cooler, 35 deg on load with RW, make sure your case is wide tho' , had to make new side as it's a big ..

Keith

secludedsfx · Post by **secludedsfx** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 4:33 pm

Go with a better motherboard than ASRock

rivimey · Post by **rivimey** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 4:48 pm

Basically, unless you have some other overriding reason to change things, I wouldn't bother changing anything except, just possibly, the video card. That is somewhat underpowered, but only slightly. I did in fact update such a system in much the same way at the end of last year and the benefit in RW was slight (in my case, the upgrade was nothing to do with RW).

If you have "pennies burning holes in your pockets" as my Mum used to say, then a SandyBridge i5 is a fine CPU. As for component selection I'd go trawling the magazines and websites: the "best" changes all the time, though these days by much less of a margin than it used to. What I picked when the time came was an i5-2550K, 8GB DDR3 RAM, WD Velociraptor 600GB, RadeonHD 6870 Gfx, all on an Asus P8Z68-V. It works fine, though I couldn't say it works better than any other option. I do think RW benefits from the Velociraptor though.

HTH
Ruth

lemberg · Post by **lemberg** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 6:39 pm

Use a ssd as a cache for your main drive, works well on a z68 board.

Keith

thebumb · Post by **thebumb** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 6:50 pm

Generally fps are ok. With low detail shadows, 20-40 except built up areas on WH, WCMLN where they can drop to 15. Also looking into Waverley at night (E-G 2012) is a real killer, 14 indicated but well below that in reality. When I up to medium shadows frameratres drop by around 5.
I would really like to have framerates of at least 20-40 with at least medium shadows night and day. Would you say I'm being limited by my current CPU or GPU?

gptech · Post by **gptech** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 7:38 pm

Have to agree with secludedsfx, Asrock make decent boards--used 'em myself--but if you're spending a reasonable amount of money look for something better. I can heartily recommend Asus boards. lembergs suggestion of an SSD as cache using Intel's RST is a sound idea too.

Ruth is right to point out that you won't get an earth shattering performance boost in terms of FPS, but you'll be able to crank up the quality settings. It may be worthwhile to wait a while though, and review how Ivy Bridge CPU/Motherboards perform, reuptedly these will be in the same price bracket as Sandy bridge.

thebumb · Post by **thebumb** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 9:56 pm

For info,

I Have just checked the resource monitor on a typical WCMLN scenario, with medium shadows on, and although the cores are running at around 25-50% the frequncy is at 110%. Does this mean a benefit would be had from a faster clock speed?

rivimey · Post by **rivimey** » Wed Apr 11, 2012 10:37 pm

You should be able to overclock your '760 to much better than 2.8GHz: look here for more information: http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_ ... 0_review/2
it should be possible to get well over 3.5GHz.

Getting a faster hard drive should help general stuttering and so forth; for me it does anyway. I like the Velociraptor, but then I haven't tried an SSD.

Getting a better video card will help somewhat, but don't expect massive gains: you may well be able to get consistent 20fps in a detailed route, don't expect 40 - though it's not impossible! An upgrade to a HD 6870 or nVidia 570 is the obvious choice.

You have enough RAM already... no point AFAIK in going over 8GB for the 32-bit RW.

One thing that might well make a difference hasn't been mentioned. Put Windows 8 Preview on a new partition, install RW and run; for me it's way better than Win7 x64 (which in turn is better than XP or Win7 32 bit).

Generally, RW is just not well optimised at present: even very good hardware doesn't run it well. The best most people achieve is "acceptable", and not always then.

HTH
Ruth

lenfish · Post by **lenfish** » Thu Apr 12, 2012 5:28 pm

Got my 760 at 4GHz, but you need a decent cooler.

Regards,

Len

Gatso · Post by **Gatso** » Thu Apr 12, 2012 5:38 pm

My 920 is overclocked from 2.67 to 3.5ghz and I don't notice any difference in performance whether it's OC'd or not. One area I feel may be a bottleneck is the hard drive controller. My system has an X58 board so the SATA2 interface only supports a maximum of 300MB/s. My hard drive is a Crucial M4 which needs SATA3 to achieve it's full performance. I wonder if moving to a Sandybridge board with SATA3 will improve the performance of RW as some other threads mention that hard disc performance is one area that can make a difference.

thebumb · Post by **thebumb** » Thu Apr 12, 2012 8:19 pm

Have decided to upgrade the GPU to a GTX570. CPU o/c may be next!! Will let you know the results.

rivimey · Post by **rivimey** » Thu Apr 12, 2012 8:56 pm

Gatso wrote:One area I feel may be a bottleneck is the hard drive controller. My system has an X58 board so the SATA2 interface only supports a maximum of 300MB/s.

It's possible: an SSD will definitely appreciate 3GBps SATA and might appreciate 6GBps (depending on model). For a rotating disk drive, it will depend. You may benefit from 3GBps SATA if the drive supports it and you are making good use of the drive buffer (the 16 or 32MB thing oft quoted). For streaming reads the buffer is less important and the throughput depends more on whether the drive must seek a lot (e.g. lots of small files, fragmented files) and what the raw disk transfer speed is. To mu knowledge rotating disk drives can only benefit from 6GBps SATA in buffer transfer speed: none can read the disk fast enough to saturate 3GBps, yet.

If you have a spare 16x PCIe slot (e.g because you have a MB that support SLI and only have one installed then it might be worth looking at this:

2 Port eSATA + 4 Port SATA II PCI Express x4 SATA Controller Adapter Card

I bought it fot £65 recently and it is so far behaving fine in a file server running Linux; can't vouch for it under Windows. It needs a 4x PCIe slot, minimum (x8 or x16 is fine too).

HTH
Ruth

rivimey · Post by **rivimey** » Thu Apr 12, 2012 8:57 pm

thebumb wrote:Have decided to upgrade the GPU to a GTX570. CPU o/c may be next!! Will let you know the results.

Good decision

Ruth

gptech · Post by **gptech** » Thu Apr 12, 2012 9:29 pm

rivimey wrote:To mu knowledge rotating disk drives can only benefit from 6GBps SATA in buffer transfer speed: none can read the disk fast enough to saturate 3GBps, yet.

Spot on, adding a 6Gb/s interface to a spinning disc is of very little benefit, unless the disc is part of a striped RAID array which would give it time to re-fill it's cache before its 'next turn' in the read/write cycle.

Atomic Systems