Temporary GPU upgrade - upgrade CPU now, or wait?

[ballzac]

Hi all,


I'm in a bit of a difficult situation because of the recent death of my graphics card...

I had:

Core2duo E8400
4GB RAM
8800GT

I was planning on holding off on upgrading until the release of the consumer oculus rift and also the GTX800 series, but my 8800GT seems to have died. I had a 7300GT in an HTPC, so I moved that to my PC so I can still use it, but it's excruciatingly low powered. It also seems to be malfunctioning, as I had driver crashes on windows and GPU lockup on ubuntu.

So, I decided I need to get a new graphics card. I still want to wait for the 800 series to get a top end one, so I'm thinking of getting a GTX750 or similar to last me for the next few months.

I will probably be gaming a little bit in the interim (which is why I'm looking at a GTX750 and not a GTX610 to get me by), though I'm mostly interested in VR performance in the long run; i.e., when the consumer rift is released.

So my questions are:

1. If I get a GTX750 (or something else in that price range) will I need to upgrade my CPU to make the most of it?

2. I want to maximise the performance I get out of the 800 series card I get when it's out (will be getting whatever is the 800 series equivalent of the 780ti). Would I be able to do this with a reasonable priced CPU now? Or in other words, I have the money for CPU, motherboard, RAM, and a GTX750 now, so should I just get all of those components now and upgrade the graphics card (and case/GPU if need be) when the 800 series comes out, or would I be better off dumping the GTX750 in my current system and replace my whole system when the 800 series is out?

3. If the answer to both questions is that I should upgrade the CPU now, what would be a good choice that would be future resistant enough that I wouldn't be needing another CPU upgrade for the GTX800 series? I'm thinking of a 4670k, but I really don't know what would be a good choice. There are other tasks (other than gaming) that I use PC for, but I have another PC that has a 2500k in it that seems to perform reasonably well for most things I want to do, so I'm confident that I won't need an i7 for those tasks.

My instinct is that CPUs probably won't change much in price or performance between now and when the 800 series comes out, so I'm inclined to upgrade now, but want to check with others who are more in the loop regarding what's happening with CPUs these days, because I really haven't been keeping up to date on that.


Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Cheers

 

[beers]

What kind of budget are you looking at?

The Haswell refresh is due out around mid May and Haswell-E should be available shortly as well. If you were to buy a Z87 board now it would be superseded in a month

Why don't you use the 2500k PC instead? I probably wouldn't bother with trying to game on the E8400 unless it is more legacy or older games.

It'd probably be more cost effective to pick up a cheap 630 (384 version) for the interim and call it a day, would be a large improvement over the 8800 without breaking the bank.

I also noticed you omitted PSU..

 

[ballzac]

What kind of budget are you looking at?

The Haswell refresh is due out around mid May and Haswell-E should be available shortly as well. If you were to buy a Z87 board now it would be superseded in a month

Why don't you use the 2500k PC instead? I probably wouldn't bother with trying to game on the E8400 unless it is more legacy or older games.

It'd probably be more cost effective to pick up a cheap 630 (384 version) for the interim and call it a day, would be a large improvement over the 8800 without breaking the bank.

I also noticed you omitted PSU..

Ah, yes. I forgot to even mention budget.

I don't have a set in stone budget, but so far I've saved up $1200 (in AUD). I don't want to blow all of that on parts now because I may not be able to save up for the entire cost of the graphics card and other things I may need like a more powerful PSU and a larger case between now and when the flagship of the 800 series is released. So I'm looking at around $150 for the interim graphics card, and up to a maximum of about $700 for the rest of the parts in the short term (CPU, MOBO, RAM). Though that is flexible because the $1200 is there if I need it. I just want to avoid being left short later on.

RE the 2500k: I normally use both PCs at the same time. I use synergy to control the 2500k from this one and have two monitors in each. The 2500k has no discrete GPU, so I just use/d the core2duo/8800GT for any gaming that I do. The 2500k is mostly for work. I do physics simulations, so I use it for coding, and a lot of the time I'm literally maxing out the cores for several days in a row while a simulation's running. So it's not really viable to not have a second PC, and if I got a graphics card for it, it's not like I could swap the graphics card from that one into my other PC (because there isn't one). Also, I have the monitor permanently in portrait mode for coding. So yeah, a few reasons that it's not viable.

Would the 630 really be a large improvement over the 8800? It would be able to run games that the 8800 couldn't because of the dx version, but looking at the raw numbers, it looks like it's a lower performing card in general.

As for PSU, I've got a generic 500W one in there at the moment, which should be plenty for whatever interim card I get, but I'll obviously need to upgrade that when I get a more powerful card.

Thanks for your help

 

[ballzac]

The Haswell refresh is due out around mid May and Haswell-E should be available shortly as well. If you were to buy a Z87 board now it would be superseded in a month

I should have probably addressed this before, because it really gets to the heart of my question about whether I should wait or not.

What concrete benefits do you see in waiting for the upcoming benefits? I know you say the Z87 board would be superceded, but in my experience this doesn't really mean much in and of itself. I've never upgraded a cpu before the socket it obsolete, for example, so in my mind CPU and motherboard pretty much go together. There is only one time in my life, out of maybe a dozen or more builds, that I've had one of those two parts die and replaced it without replacing both.

This means that whatever CPU/Mobo combination I go for, I will be using them together until they're no longer viable because either the CPU is getting too slow (in which case I probably won't find a fast one that fits the Mobo), or PCI-e has been superceded and I need to replace the motherboard (in which case my CPU probably won't fit). By the time one of these two things happen, it doesn't matter which generation of CPUs I wait for, there will be no way of upgrading one without the other. This has been my experience in the past, and I expect it to be similar in the future. I hope that made sense

So I generally think more about whether the board has future resistant technologies in other respects. For example, if a new PCI-e version is coming out in the next generation of boards, I wouldn't want to be stuck with the current one. Is there anything of that nature that I should look out for? Or were you thinking only about CPU/Mobo compatibility (which wouldn't bother me as much)?

 

[Calin]

About the 750: The coincidence is that I own the exact chip too, I recently changed it to a fx 8350 but I still have it, in the 8350 box. I used a gtx 650ti with it and it was bottlenecking bad (the 750 performs almost the same as a 650ti, maybe a little bit better).
About the 4670k, since you do other tasks, I go with an i7 or a FX 83x0, because the i7 has HT and the 83x0 more cores.

 

[Okedokey]

A 750Ti will not bottleneck an E8400. You can get one of those for about $160, and sell it later for around 100 or keep it as a physx card.

 

[ballzac]

About the 4670k, since you do other tasks, I go with an i7 or a FX 83x0, because the i7 has HT and the 83x0 more cores.

Yeah, it's a tough decision. If I end up getting an i7, I'd probably end up using this computer for work more than I use my work one. That would be okay, because I don't game all the time, and if I can use some cores on each for running simulations, and just stop running them on this one if I want to game.

It's mostly cost that makes me hesitate. It's possible that I won't notice much difference with the i7, even with my simulations. They support some level of multithreading, but not all multithreaded applications benefit from extra threads if the number of cores is the same, and I don't know enough about how it works to know if my own code will show a performance increase with the extra cores.

A 750Ti will not bottleneck an E8400. You can get one of those for about $160

That's great if it's true. I think I would go for a 750 though. the 750ti is closer to $200 around here, and I started off looking at a 610 when someone said that for only a few bucks more I could get a 630, then I found another card that was only a few bucks more that would perform even better. Rinse and repeat. I have to stop somewhere, otherwise I'll end up getting a 780ti

A 750Ti will not bottleneck an E8400. You can get one of those for about $160, and sell it later for around 100 or keep it as a physx card.

I'll find a use for the card when I upgrade again. I've now got an HTPC with no graphics card, and even if I put the 7300 back in it, it looks like that card is on its death bed and won't last much longer. I can put the 750 in my girlfriend's computer when I upgrade, and put her HD4870 in the HTPC, or I can put it in our more used HTPC (the loungeroom one) and put the GT220 from that into the other HTPC. Got lots of options there.

 

[Calin]

A 750Ti will not bottleneck an E8400. You can get one of those for about $160, and sell it later for around 100 or keep it as a physx card.

I mean, the E8400 bottlenecking the 750Ti. It is true, I have a 650ti and the e8400 was bottlenecking it.

 

[spirit]

The 750 Ti would be a good option if you want something cheap.

Or the Radeon R7 260X.

Shouldn't be any bottlenecks anywhere with one of those and an E8400.

 

[Calin]

The 750 Ti would be a good option if you want something cheap.

Or the Radeon R7 260X.

Shouldn't be any bottlenecks anywhere with one of those and an E8400.

There will be, trust me, I experienced them with an e8400 and a lower end card.

 

[ballzac]

The 750 Ti would be a good option if you want something cheap.

Or the Radeon R7 260X.

Shouldn't be any bottlenecks anywhere with one of those and an E8400.

I'm going to avoid AMD mostly for the fact that software I use tends to utilise the Nvidia cards better (such as GPU rendering in Blender). As stated before, I'll probably go for the GTX750. I can pick up the Gigabyte OC for $140AUD, but the cheapest 750ti I can find near me is ~$200AUD. There isn't a huge amount of info on the 750 in terms of real-world FPS benchmarks in games, but from what I gather looking at the specs and some of the other benchmarks, the 750ti may only outperform the 750 by a fairly small margin, but would cost me an extra 40% of the cost.

What I'm leaning towards at the moment is picking up the 750 and seeing how I go. Then I might upgrade the CPU/Mobo/Ram in, say, three months, and then upgrade to an 880ti (or whatever it's called ) along with case and PSU. If I have any serious issues in the mean time, I can upgrade the CPU/Mobo/RAM early.

 

[ballzac]

Thanks again to everyone for the help and advice.

I ended up upgrading almost everything. I thought it would be nicer to just be able to drop the new graphics card in later on than have to mess around with it, and this way I can avoid any possible bottlenecking.

I went with the i5-4670k, an MSI Z87-GD65, 16GB RAM, a Corsair RM750, and as I had planned, the GTX 750. The PSU might be overkill for the 800 series, but as there's no specs released yet I wanted to be sure. I could have gotten by with the one I had until I upgrade again, but I wanted the modular design.

 

[spirit]

750W is overkill yes, but you're not doing any harm by having a 750W unit.

Nice stuff you bought. :good: