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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Upgrade my PC Video Card or Pick Up a PS4?

 

Updated Graphics card or PS4

Graphics Card! 105 36.46%
 
PS4 152 52.78%
 
Other 10 3.47%
 
I Like Clicking Bubbles B... 21 7.29%
 
Total:288

upgrade your PC now and get a PS4 later when they have more games and more exclusives to make the purchase more appealing



Steam/Origin ID: salorider

Nintendo Network ID: salorider

PSN: salorider

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To the few people who asked me what my current specs are, I'm not super computer savvy.  I bought a pre built HP Pavillion and just installed my own graphics cards (two 5750's in Crossfire)  and a 850W Power Supply.  

I have an Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 GHZ Processor

I have 9 GB Of Ram  (what DDR is I'm not sure I'd have to pull out the ram and find out although if the kind of RAM will make for a  possible bottlekneck I'll do it and find out).

Do you think  that a more advanced card would bottlekneck with these specs?  In addition if I do pick up a card should I wait until black friday and any other recomendations on cards between $300 - $500 that would put me at a level above a PS4?

It's funny how the poll is heavily PS4 Sided, but the comments have been majorly graphics card oriented.  Based on what I'm hearing right now, I'm still up in the air on it.  Based on the arguements it seems like a graphics card would be a better investment, I just don't want to miss out playing with some of my buds online.   Does anybody know if The Division, Destiny, or DriveClub will have crossplay between games?



shakarak said:

To the few people who asked me what my current specs are, I'm not super computer savvy.  I bought a pre built HP Pavillion and just installed my own graphics cards (two 5750's in Crossfire)  and a 850W Power Supply.  

I have an Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 GHZ Processor

I have 9 GB Of Ram  (what DDR is I'm not sure I'd have to pull out the ram and find out although if the kind of RAM will make for a  possible bottlekneck I'll do it and find out).

Do you think  that a more advanced card would bottlekneck with these specs?  In addition if I do pick up a card should I wait until black friday and any other recomendations on cards between $300 - $500 that would put me at a level above a PS4?

It's funny how the poll is heavily PS4 Sided, but the comments have been majorly graphics card oriented.  Based on what I'm hearing right now, I'm still up in the air on it.  Based on the arguements it seems like a graphics card would be a better investment, I just don't want to miss out playing with some of my buds online.   Does anybody know if The Division, Destiny, or DriveClub will have crossplay between games?

With that CPU you should be alright with the cards you have now, you could slap a higher performance card in but the price of a card that outperforms the ones you have isnt worth the additional performance without upgrading the supporting infrastructure, prebuilt with i7 920 would suggest at the time your pc was sold it was fairly decent spec, however such is the nature of prebuilt systems they rarely have good motherboards, so you most likely have a pcie-2.0 motherboard and relatively low spec DDR3, if you were upgrading the whole system it would be a lot more effective in boosting performance.

however the games you are having trouble with need large blocks of video memory and video bandwidth which your current board isnt going to support very well, while you will see a performance increase over your current cards, it isnt the sort of performance jump that is worth spending that sort of cash on - my suggestion is grab a PS4 at some point over the next 7 months and upgrade your PC late next year when component costs for the current new cards have dropped due to being replaced by newer models.

This suggestion comes from someone running a i7 3970X, 32gb of ram and two GTX Titans.



shakarak said:

To the few people who asked me what my current specs are, I'm not super computer savvy.  I bought a pre built HP Pavillion and just installed my own graphics cards (two 5750's in Crossfire)  and a 850W Power Supply.  

I have an Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 GHZ Processor

I have 9 GB Of Ram  (what DDR is I'm not sure I'd have to pull out the ram and find out although if the kind of RAM will make for a  possible bottlekneck I'll do it and find out).

Do you think  that a more advanced card would bottlekneck with these specs?  In addition if I do pick up a card should I wait until black friday and any other recomendations on cards between $300 - $500 that would put me at a level above a PS4?

It's funny how the poll is heavily PS4 Sided, but the comments have been majorly graphics card oriented.  Based on what I'm hearing right now, I'm still up in the air on it.  Based on the arguements it seems like a graphics card would be a better investment, I just don't want to miss out playing with some of my buds online.   Does anybody know if The Division, Destiny, or DriveClub will have crossplay between games?


Its just simple if you like PS4 exclusives then buy it now because we have games like Killzone, drive club, Knack, Infamouse, Resogun, Rime, order 1886 and many unannounced titles coming in 2014 along with PS3 Gaikai library and almost every PC title being published will be on PS4(though it will cost more since Sony has R&D for thier hardware where Steam doesn't need to worry about that since their hardware is not developed by them so they offer for low price). If you have no intereset in it (or) want to purchase after all these are released then wait for a year and purchase PS4. But, I'd go with PS4 right now and get a better graphic card models from next year since those models will be more power effecient and powerful even though prices are on par with current models and also you can get current models for cheap.



GAMING is not about spending hours to pass/waste our time just for fun,

its a Feeling/Experience about a VIRTUAL WORLD we can never be in real, and realizing some of our dreams (also creating new ones).

So, Feel Emotions, Experience Adventure/Action, Challenge Game, Solve puzzles and Have fun.

PlayStation is about all-round "New experiences" using new IP's to provide great diversity for everyone.

Xbox is always about Online and Shooting.

Nintendo is always about Fun games and milking IP's.

Frequency said:

With that CPU you should be alright with the cards you have now, you could slap a higher performance card in but the price of a card that outperforms the ones you have isnt worth the additional performance without upgrading the supporting infrastructure, prebuilt with i7 920 would suggest at the time your pc was sold it was fairly decent spec, however such is the nature of prebuilt systems they rarely have good motherboards, so you most likely have a pcie-2.0 motherboard and relatively low spec DDR3, if you were upgrading the whole system it would be a lot more effective in boosting performance.

however the games you are having trouble with need large blocks of video memory and video bandwidth which your current board isnt going to support very well, while you will see a performance increase over your current cards, it isnt the sort of performance jump that is worth spending that sort of cash on - my suggestion is grab a PS4 at some point over the next 7 months and upgrade your PC late next year when component costs for the current new cards have dropped due to being replaced by newer models.

This suggestion comes from someone running a i7 3970X, 32gb of ram and two GTX Titans.


PCI-E 2.0 won't be holding him back even if he wen't Dual-Titans.
See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7089/geforce-gtx-titan-twoway-sli-scaling-pcie-2-vs-pcie-3
Biggest difference is in Shogun 2 with 5fps, but that's a small drop in the bucket considering it's running in excess of 100fps. :P
Couple of percentage points, that's it, tops.

Compute is an entirely different ball game however... It loves PCI-E bandwidth.

The i7 920 isn't much of a slouch even today, although, if you pre-built it (I.E: Decent motherboard), you could have easily added another 800mhz~ give or take which would have made it last several years longer.

Personally, I think a Radeon 7950 would be a perfect fit for that system as it is now, they can be found for roughly $200 USD, would be plenty for 1080P for the immediate future, if you wanted later you could pair the 7950/7970  up with a Radeon R9 280 when they're cheap.
If you play your cards right and avoid the early adopter tax and save a few pennies you could still get a Playstation 4 to go with it.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

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Pemalite said:
Frequency said:

With that CPU you should be alright with the cards you have now, you could slap a higher performance card in but the price of a card that outperforms the ones you have isnt worth the additional performance without upgrading the supporting infrastructure, prebuilt with i7 920 would suggest at the time your pc was sold it was fairly decent spec, however such is the nature of prebuilt systems they rarely have good motherboards, so you most likely have a pcie-2.0 motherboard and relatively low spec DDR3, if you were upgrading the whole system it would be a lot more effective in boosting performance.

however the games you are having trouble with need large blocks of video memory and video bandwidth which your current board isnt going to support very well, while you will see a performance increase over your current cards, it isnt the sort of performance jump that is worth spending that sort of cash on - my suggestion is grab a PS4 at some point over the next 7 months and upgrade your PC late next year when component costs for the current new cards have dropped due to being replaced by newer models.

This suggestion comes from someone running a i7 3970X, 32gb of ram and two GTX Titans.


PCI-E 2.0 won't be holding him back even if he wen't Dual-Titans.
See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7089/geforce-gtx-titan-twoway-sli-scaling-pcie-2-vs-pcie-3
Biggest difference is in Shogun 2 with 5fps, but that's a small drop in the bucket considering it's running in excess of 100fps. :P
Couple of percentage points, that's it, tops.

Compute is an entirely different ball game however... It loves PCI-E bandwidth.

The i7 920 isn't much of a slouch even today, although, if you pre-built it (I.E: Decent motherboard), you could have easily added another 800mhz~ give or take which would have made it last several years longer.

Personally, I think a Radeon 7950 would be a perfect fit for that system as it is now, they can be found for roughly $200 USD, would be plenty for 1080P for the immediate future, if you wanted later you could pair the 7950/7970  up with a Radeon R9 280 when they're cheap.
If you play your cards right and avoid the early adopter tax and save a few pennies you could still get a Playstation 4 to go with it.

When you say pair up with an R9 280 do you mean in a crossfire setup?  Would I run into other bottlenecks at that point due to my other aging parts?  Also I seemed to have a ton of issues with Crossfire (may games not working correctly with it) does crossfiring different cards like that cause any more of an issue?



Pemalite said:
Frequency said:

With that CPU you should be alright with the cards you have now, you could slap a higher performance card in but the price of a card that outperforms the ones you have isnt worth the additional performance without upgrading the supporting infrastructure, prebuilt with i7 920 would suggest at the time your pc was sold it was fairly decent spec, however such is the nature of prebuilt systems they rarely have good motherboards, so you most likely have a pcie-2.0 motherboard and relatively low spec DDR3, if you were upgrading the whole system it would be a lot more effective in boosting performance.

however the games you are having trouble with need large blocks of video memory and video bandwidth which your current board isnt going to support very well, while you will see a performance increase over your current cards, it isnt the sort of performance jump that is worth spending that sort of cash on - my suggestion is grab a PS4 at some point over the next 7 months and upgrade your PC late next year when component costs for the current new cards have dropped due to being replaced by newer models.

This suggestion comes from someone running a i7 3970X, 32gb of ram and two GTX Titans.


PCI-E 2.0 won't be holding him back even if he wen't Dual-Titans.
See here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7089/geforce-gtx-titan-twoway-sli-scaling-pcie-2-vs-pcie-3
Biggest difference is in Shogun 2 with 5fps, but that's a small drop in the bucket considering it's running in excess of 100fps. :P
Couple of percentage points, that's it, tops.

Compute is an entirely different ball game however... It loves PCI-E bandwidth.

The i7 920 isn't much of a slouch even today, although, if you pre-built it (I.E: Decent motherboard), you could have easily added another 800mhz~ give or take which would have made it last several years longer.

Personally, I think a Radeon 7950 would be a perfect fit for that system as it is now, they can be found for roughly $200 USD, would be plenty for 1080P for the immediate future, if you wanted later you could pair the 7950/7970  up with a Radeon R9 280 when they're cheap.
If you play your cards right and avoid the early adopter tax and save a few pennies you could still get a Playstation 4 to go with it.

Its not so much the revision being 2.0 but the likely hood only one slot runs 16x, or if 16x works at all, I've seen a lot of ore quilts using boards that can only muster 2 8x slots or even one 8x and one 4x

And if there's a 4x or 1x slot being used for something else it could easilly sharing lanes across the bus like cheap boards often do.



shakarak said:

When you say pair up with an R9 280 do you mean in a crossfire setup?  Would I run into other bottlenecks at that point due to my other aging parts?  Also I seemed to have a ton of issues with Crossfire (may games not working correctly with it) does crossfiring different cards like that cause any more of an issue?


Yeah I mean a Crossfire set-up.

You *might* run into bottlenecks.
In-fact, every PC has one piece of hardware that's holding something back and that can change randomly depending what's happening on your screen.
Some games will rely soley on your GPU or might rely on your CPU more.

But even if you're CPU limited, you can still dial-up the GPU-based effects like Anti-Aliasing and receive a minimal performance impact, what *will* happen though is your average framerates will be lower.

As for Crossfireing a Radeon 7950/7970 and the R9 280X/280... There is a really simple explanation. The R9 280X and 280 *are* Radeon 7950's and 7970's, just with a different name, thus they are completely compatible with being crossfired with each other.

As for crossfire specifically, once AMD fix the frame latency issues, you will be far better off (Coming soon!)
You will also notice less issues if you crossfire 2x fast cards rather than 2x low-end or mid-range cards, one being microstutter, plus the Radeon 5000 series is pretty neglected these days in the driver support department, the Radeon 7000/R9 280 will have 3+ years of dedicated improvements.

Besides, you might end up being perfectly happy with a single 7970/7950, which is still more than enough for most games at 1080P easily.

Frequency said:

Its not so much the revision being 2.0 but the likely hood only one slot runs 16x, or if 16x works at all, I've seen a lot of ore quilts using boards that can only muster 2 8x slots or even one 8x and one 4x

And if there's a 4x or 1x slot being used for something else it could easilly sharing lanes across the bus like cheap boards often do.


Impossible to know unless we know the make and model of the PC, even if it is only using a PCI-E 2.0 8x slot, he/she will still see very decent gains.



--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--

Honestly, I was faced with this problem a couple of weeks ago and decided that it would be best to go with the PS4 this year and get a new gaming rig later next year.



This is the Game of Thrones

Where you either win

or you DIE

Don´t expect JRPGs on the PS4 any time soon !

If I were you, I would look into a PS3 there are a lot of great games (and even some great JRPGs) that can be bought for cheap.

...I wouldn´t touch the PS4 this holiday season, the line up is severly lacking (compared to what the PS3 and WiiU are getting) and let other poeple be the beta testers for you.

My recommendation: PS3 or Graphics Card !