🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 15:52:25 -0400, DMP <nom...@nodomain.com> wrote:

>On 3/16/2015 2:12 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>> On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 11:02:08 -0700 (PDT), Justisaur
>> <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Looks like there's about a 10% performance difference between a 980 and an 970.  There's about a 25% difference between a 970 and 960... and just to compare even the 960 is about 5x faster than my 275. :)
>> See the links in my earlier post in thread about the 970 stuttering
>> after the first 3.5GB being used.  Most people just compare framerate
>> numbers on benchmarks between cards and think that's the only thing to
>> consider.
>>
>> Just randomly pulling a recent RPG for a look, Dragon Age Inquisition
>> seems to be good for about 55 frames per second with a GTX980 at
>> 1080p.  I think this means your video card would produce a slideshow
>> at less than 10fps :)
>>
>> http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/dragon_age_inquisition_vga_graphics_performance_benchmark_review,7.html
>>
>> Investing the extra bucks to build a machine right, that far exceeds
>> what current gen consoles can do, will provide many years of gaming
>> without upgrades.  Skimping and running shitty equipment will just
>> lead to regrets when running modern games.
>  Thanks to all who replied; I think I'm going to go with the one of the 
>X99's and a 980; 16GB of mem and an Asrock mobo; 250 SSD and 2 TB WD 
>Black. I have an 28 Samsung UHD, so I'm all set there. I went to GPUboss 
>and did compare the CPU & GPU; I must admit I was impressed with how 
>close the performance of the GTX970 was with the 980 though.
>
>Right now, my i7 920 that's o'clocked to 3.65 or something like that is 
>choking on DA:Inquisition, but the PC only came with 6GB of 1333MHz ram. 
>I updated the videocard once to a GTX770 which is the only upgrade I've 
>done since I bought the PC 5 1/2 yrs ago. It's being passed on to a 
>non-gamer who will get plenty of use out of the system because under a 
>lighter load it runs flawlessly. Perhaps adding memory would help, but 
>I'm entitled to new. :-D
>
>Diane
>

I think you'll find that the new Haswell-e chips benefit your gaming
in ways that defy specs on paper.  I don't have DA:Inquisition, but
Battlefield 4, Watch_Dogs, and some of the other games that came out
in the last year or two started really taxing my CPU (which was an
i7-965, no slouch of a quad core in its day).  It would run old games
fine, but start running hot and the cooler getting loud.  I have a
i7-5930k now, and its really nice to have on some of these CPU
intensive games. Runs them so smoothly, so cool and quiet.  I never
see my CPU temp go over about 30C with air cooling.  So, the
clockspeeds of chips alone do not tell the whole story.

The one thing I would suggest if you wanted to get more bang for the
buck, just get a large regular HD for your primary.  The reason is
that unless you reboot 25 times per day, your gaming hobby will not
benefit from the SSD purchase and 250GB is small for a drive these
days.  

I have 2TB (C) and 3TB (D) drives.  I have installed next to nothing
on the C drive except some dev tools.  This means ALL my applications,
data, and games  have been going on the D drive, yet my C drive
currently has about 250GB already used.  This is because so many
Windows apps will simply tend to use that drive, the documents folder,
appdata and so forth by default, so it won't be long until you wish
you had more than 250GB.

Don't get me wrong, SSDs are nice but 1TB ones are still pricey, and
most of the PC sellers gouge even further on pricing.  I just put an
SSD in one of my other machines to replace an aging 7200rpm drive, but
part of that was because the old drive was kind of crappy and
extremely noisy.

Remember that by having a very large drive and using only a portion of
the space, things like rebooting are still blazing fast (traditional
HDs get slower as they get closer to max capacity, while SSDs get
slower with time due to the number of writes that slowly damage the
memory over time).