Looking for a decent 2014 Pc

[Bells]

I have a Mostly 2009 gaming PC, if i look at games from September 2013 to April 2014, i'm finally starting to lagging out hard enough to make me consider a full reboot of my machine.

I'm not good with that stuff... my pc is competent enough, but i shoved a ATI video card (a zotac) in a NVidia preferencial Motherboard, so there is that...

Here are my current specs

Processor: 2,60 gigahertz AMD Phenom II X4 810
MotherBoard: ECS A785GM-M 1.0
Ram: 8Gb
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO 512 (Zotac)

And a really cool super silent Energy Font to hold all that stuff up.

So, i'm eerie of updating just my video card and Bottlenecking with the other stuff, also my CPU is already walking near the edge of what's required and i'm not really seeing all the benefits i thouhg i would have by now with a quad core over, say... a beefier dual core.

So, what would be the sensible leap to get me cover for 2014 gaming?

[Azisien]

Assuming you stay single GPU, you can get basically the best hardware on the market for about $2k US (One mighty GPU, Haswell processor, tons of ram, big hard drives, gold plus PSU, good mobo, etc), also assuming no super awesome deals. And that price just drops for every concession you make on each piece. Like enh, maybe you don't need THAT much ram, or maybe you're fine with the second-best GPU, or what have you, or an i5 Haswell over an i7 Haswell (for most uses, you will not see the difference).

[Bells]

My personal PC is pretty much for 3 things, i play games, i encode and edit videos and i watch my animes and movies on it,

Considering now i'm working with a Gameplay channel on youtube, i feel i kinda have to be able to show a game's best light. I don't need to play everything on Ultra with 60 FPS... my current PC can Run BF4 on Low-to-Medium settings and i put something around 800-900 USD on it in early 2011.

Initially i was even interested in Dual GPU but i came to learn it was for the wrong reasons... my MOBO has a onboard graphical card, which is an ATI card that allows for crossfire X. But my video card is an Nvida one, so i done goof on that.

There ARE ATI cards compatible with my onboard mobo card, but the investment seems silly at this point.

The Zotac is cool for a feature that sucks in extra RAM to give it a video boost, i don't know how effective it actually is, but i felts it has served me nicely. It payed off from having extra RAM, so i would have that again... also for video Editing, extra RAM seems to be the right mindset...

Also, NVidia is calling me back...



Considering i might be able to salvagem my RAM from this PC to the next, and also considering that my RAM is the most basic RAM stick you can get... maybe i can take the cash that would go into RAM and putting it into replacing a 2nd grade video card for a 1st grade one... Then having a MOBO and Processor that will prevent Bottlenecking on that and a beefed Sourced to hold it all nice and safe.

[Azisien]

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...pk=gtx%20titan

This ought to do you for 2014 AND 2015!

But in reality I'm kind of in a similar boat myself. Got my rig in 2009 and some of the parts are wearing thin now. Looking at a 2014ish upgrade. With new consoles coming out, it may set new standards. The next generation of hardware might be real good. Right on the brink of new major game engines, steamOS, 4K resolutions, too. It's a good year for a new PC.

[Sithdarth]

Considering i might be able to salvagem my RAM from this PC to the next, and also considering that my RAM is the most basic RAM stick you can get... maybe i can take the cash that would go into RAM and putting it into replacing a 2nd grade video card for a 1st grade one...

No don't ever do this not ever. For starters the saying a chain is only as strong as the weakest link definitely holds for computers. It's better to spread things out as evenly as possible or you end up with components that just can't operate at full capacity and thus are a waste of money. Generally speaking rendering a whole bunch of frames at HD resolutions is the most memory and computationally expensive part of a game but luckily that basically all goes to the gpu which is designed for it. However, the game AI for every character, basically all of the bookkeeping, and a lot of other stuff you will never know about is done by the cpu and your main system memory. If you graphics card isn't top tier you can turn down the graphics settings if your main memory is bottle-necking or your cpu is sluggish there are essentially no settings to change to improve game performance. Just in terms of pure functionality of the game main memory (RAM) and cpu can be more important than a good gpu (assuming they are below a certain level). If your cpu hasn't finished doing all the calculations it needs to do because its waiting on memory fetches from slow ram your frame rate is still going to plummet and the game play is going to suck. Also, trying to say record a game while playing is probably going to rely pretty heavily on your cpu and main memory.

If you are going to compromise then do it a little bit on everything and not all on one thing. Otherwise you end up with a 20 str barbarian that can't figure out how to put on a shirt because he has an int score that barely qualifies as sentient.

Another option is buying things a bit at a time. There are things that can be put off until later. For example, maybe you could reuse your ram for a few weeks/months while you put away cash for some nicer ram but you should have a definite plan to upgrade it asap. Perhaps your current monitor and hard drives are sufficient for your needs and may never need an upgrade (or can wait for a year or more). Perhaps your power supply is still sufficient for the needs of your new board and will fit into your case. You could also go with a cheaper graphics card again with an eye toward upgrading (but that can get expensive over time).

Basically there are a few core things that are a pain to upgrade later and should be as good as possible from the start:

1) Motherboard (Duh)
2) CPU (Also duh)
3) To a much lesser extent the gpu. Longhaul it might be cheaper to shell out of the best you can afford right now. But there is always the option of getting the minimum that you need to do what you want now and getting the really good stuff later.

After that things are pretty easy to upgrade but you should definitely not plan to keep any component at a significantly lower quality/performance level as that will drag everything else down. When I upgraded my computer recently I decided to go with 64 Gbs of almost top tier ram and it made so much difference to the performance of basically everything even with a mid range (slightly on the high side of mid range) graphics card.

In light of this:

My personal PC is pretty much for 3 things, i play games, i encode and edit videos and i watch my animes and movies on it,

I recommend nVIDIA and I don't just mean the graphics card. Try to grab a motherboard with nVIDIA branding on it. The ones basically designed to work as well as possible with nIVIDIA cards (they come with drivers specifically designed to work as well as possible together and general don't have issues with conflicts). Also, plan to get a video card with as much ram as possible as soon as possible and almost definitely plan for at least Dual SLI if not Quad SLI. I say this for the encoding and editing aspect you mentioned more than even the gaming. For example, Adobe Premier (and I imagine at this point most serious encoding/editing software) supports nVIDA CUDA based GPU acceleration of encoding. Which means better video quality in significantly less time. The on board ram of your GPU cards and the shear number of cores is going to be basically the most important things. (Potentially even over raw speed of each individual core but only to a minor extent.)

Basically, salvage slightly less performance critical bits like peripherals, possibly the PSU, and drives (optical and hard drives) if possible. Go nVIDIA from the ground up. CUDA is superior to ATI's Stream because it's been around longer and is therefore more mature and nVIDIA has higher market penetration into the high performance computing market and therefore more software vendors support GPU acceleration through CUDA. Look up the Titian supercomputer. It is one of the largest supercomputers in the world, was just recently completed, and a major section of it uses nVIDIA Tesla K20 cards which utilize the new Kepler architecture. The Kepler architecture is basically about high performance computing but basically still runs the same CUDA that runs on a more consumer oriented GPU for say accelerated encoding of videos. Its just the way things are now and even though the open source community will tell you nVIDIA is the devil (and they are to a certain extent) I hear rumblings that nVIDIA is starting to make concessions in terms of making their divers and cards more open source friendly. Of course nVIDIA's proprietary drivers for linux are absolutely amazing (as long as you aren't using a bleeding edge version of the kernel) because they pay people to write them.

Man I did not intend for that to go that long.

[Bells]

But it was super helpful, so, thanks!!

I like Mah Hardwares but i'm not really all that tech savvy, so it helps a lot to get an actual "why" to X instead of Y, which is NOT what i usually get in 90% of forums i ever ask anything about this in.

And for damn sure i'll buy piece by piece. You save a lot of money doing that, and stuff here is super expensive for eletronics! ( PS4 is R$4000 / 1800USD for crying out loud!) So, i'll pick up parts less likely to be obsolete first and work myself up to something good and fully compatible.

I haven't even considered a MOBO with nVidia branding... but you just sold me on it.

[Azisien]

One other thing - having an enormous amount of RAM* these days means you can keep a huge amount of your processes in the RAM and keep them in the RAM, which is super super fast. In fact Sith ought to be enjoying all the ancillary benefits of this right now. The less hard drive read/writes, the better, as this will always be slower, whether you rock SSD or HDD. This same logic applies to SSD longevity, which by user standards is already pretty long unless you get a defective drive, but less read/writes to the SSD = longer life. I forget where I saw the benchmark for it, but they tested RAM's effect on hard drive read/writes and 4GB vs. 32GB saw a little over 50% reduction. I say "a little" but that's pretty huge. In theory your SSD will last twice as long. And you're just saving nano/micro/milliseconds all over the place on a regular basis.

On a related note, try to work even a basic SSD into your next rig as a boot drive.

*Sith where did you manage to get a 64GB kit? I was looking for one on my usual sites the other day planning a 2014 PC, but I only saw 8x8GB kits. I was hoping for 4x16GB kits but have those not hit the main market yet? Mainly asking because I haven't seen any LGA1150 (Haswell) motherboards with 8 memory slots.

[Sithdarth]

*Sith where did you manage to get a 64GB kit? I was looking for one on my usual sites the other day planning a 2014 PC, but I only saw 8x8GB kits. I was hoping for 4x16GB kits but have those not hit the main market yet? Mainly asking because I haven't seen any LGA1150 (Haswell) motherboards with 8 memory slots.

My current computer is about a year old now so I think I might still be on Sandy Bridge. I'll have a look later tonight when I get home and get you the specs. But I am pretty sure I am running an 8x8GB kit and last generations architecture.

[Bells]

One good thing the Zotac had was taking any Ram i didn't use and pulling it in for GPU power. Often benchmarks would misread my card as being more powerful than what i knew it was, and quite often i was able to run games nicely with a Board that i would expect to perform much worst. And that's with the most basic 8Gb Ram you can get

So, yeah... a nVidia Mobo GPU combo and a beefy Ram pack seems like a sincere bet.


Here is an issue though...

I live in a tropical area, it gets hot quite easy. And my Room is dusty, it gets dust and dog hair on the floor with ease. Should i worry about some extra solutions for that or just keep cleaning it as usual is good enough?

Cause i expect new current hardware to be hotter with just stock cooling solutions and i do like a silent non-hellfirey pc by my feet...

[Azisien]

Heat might go up, might go down. It's honestly a little hard to judge given you're switching up the hardware. A powerful GPU is going to pump out a lot of heat. Haswell runs pretty hot, too. I might consider not going with stock cooling given the tropical location. Higher quality thermal paste can go a long way, or if you're afraid of that, grab a heat sink for the CPU and maybe even custom fans to ensure good air flow through the box.