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Will I be bottle-necked?

Liamz51

Liamz51

Liamz51

Associate
Joined
19 Jan 2012
Posts
147
My current build is as follows:

i5 2500K at 4.3Ghz
8gig of Corsair DDR 3
MSI Nvidia GTX 570
120GB Corsair SSD
3TB WD Black HD
550 Antec PSU

I want to be able to play BF4 on ultra at 1080, obviously a graphics card upgrade is in order, my question is, would any part of the rest of my rig bottle-neck an upgrade to a R9 290 or 290x or similar in a single card config. And is this a reasonable expectation on the rig with the proposed GFX upgrade.
 
I think a 290 flashed to a 290x would be a perfect choice of upgrade, making it very well balanced for bf4. It wont bottleneck at your overclock and is a sensible upgrade if you plan on upping the resolution of the monitor before your GPU upgrade again.
 
Liamz51 said:
My current build is as follows:

i5 2500K at 4.3Ghz
8gig of Corsair DDR 3
MSI Nvidia GTX 570
120GB Corsair SSD
3TB WD Black HD
550 Antec PSU

I want to be able to play BF4 on ultra at 1080, obviously a graphics card upgrade is in order, my question is, would any part of the rest of my rig bottle-neck an upgrade to a R9 290 or 290x or similar in a single card config. And is this a reasonable expectation on the rig with the proposed GFX upgrade.
Click to expand...

A R9 290/290X will be a fine choice if you want AMD. And any factory overclocked (1000+ mhz) GTX780 will serve you as good, and be quieter. :D
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

Quick additional question; I've just noticed that the 290x is listed as requiring a 750w or greater PSU.

Is that accurate? If so I'll have to factor in a new PSU as well :(

I don't see any such requirement listed on the 290s - I thought graphics cards were supposed to be less power hungry then back in the days of the 8800 Ultras?
 
Liamz51 said:
Thanks for the replies guys.

Quick additional question; I've just noticed that the 290x is listed as requiring a 750w or greater PSU.

Is that accurate? If so I'll have to factor in a new PSU as well :(

I don't see any such requirement listed on the 290s - I thought graphics cards were supposed to be less power hungry then back in the days of the 8800 Ultras?
Click to expand...
The 750W recommendation is more of a general recommendation factoring people with poor PSU that has low output on the 12v rail (i.e. 12v rail can only output 60% of the overall output rather than 90-100% on the good quality PSU). The 290 should be consuming up to around 300W max even when overclocked, and your overclock i5 shouldn't consume more than 100%. If your PSU's 12v rail output is at 500W or there about, you'd still have reasonable amount of headroom left.

For playing BF4 online, I would however recommend you to overclock your i5 2500K high if possible (but when Mantle get patched it, it would probably reduce the stress that are being put onto the CPU).
 
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rajravat said:
Wow you have a very similar spec pc to me and i am in the exact same position, except i'm looking at getting a 780 :D
Click to expand...
The one I got is actually the 290Pro flashed to 290x. I have already fitted a 3rd party cooler...IMO for those that are not bold enough to get a 3rd party cooler to fit onto the 290/290x themselve, the 780 with custom cooler is good option, until the 290/290x has custom cooler come as default that is.
 
Is the GTX780 a better performer then the 290s?

Although I would definitely prefer non-stock cooling solution (for instance the MSI Twin Frozr I have on my 570 is great) the Nvidia cards are around £50 more expensive and crucially don't come bundled with BF4. On that basis alone I think there would need to be some significant performance advantage to go down the Nvidia route.
 
rajravat said:
which custom cooler do you have? i remember fitting a custom cooler onto my old x800 pro back in the day :D
Click to expand...
I gotten the Gelid Icy Vision Rev 2. It does a great job cooling the GPU despite it is just a £30 cooler, but the vrm sink is not quite up to the job when using high voltage to overclock, so I gotten a bigger vrm sink...will probably replace the one that comes with the Gelid tomorrow when I'm bothered (or less lazy :D).
 
rajravat said:
What made you move from 290 to a 780? noise and heat? (afaik the performance is very similar, if not a bit better on the 290)
Click to expand...

All of the what you listed, the 780 is just a better, smoother card.

And know it brought up all the time but the drivers just 'work' with no problems.

It's just a more polished product with a much better driver set.

Clocks to 1.25Ghz too and flies at that clock!!
 
almighty15 said:
All of the what you listed, the 780 is just a better, smoother card.

And know it brought up all the time but the drivers just 'work' with no problems.

It's just a more polished product with a much better driver set.

Clocks to 1.25Ghz too and flies at that clock!!
Click to expand...

These are the reasons i'm considering an nvidia card too, even though they don't offer the best value, they are solid all round performers (heat and especially noise is a big problem for me)

That custom cooler looks great, from reading posts online it really does a great job on cooling the 290
 
rajravat said:
These are the reasons i'm considering an nvidia card too, even though they don't offer the best value, they are solid all round performers (heat and especially noise is a big problem for me)

That custom cooler looks great, from reading posts online it really does a great job on cooling the 290
Click to expand...
Yea it's really down to what you want and expect. One of the problem with the 290 is the potential "blackscreen" issue...some people don't have this problem, I myself and lots of others only get it when overclocking the memory clock, whereas there are a very few people get that problem even with memory at stock clock. But even with the stock memory clock the memory bandwidth on the 290s is very high due to the 512-bit bus size with 320GB/s out of the box- which the GTX780 need high overclock on the memory in order to match due to the lower 384-bit bus.

In terms of reliability, "at this stage" I would agree with almighty15 that the GTX780 would probably be a more polished product- which is not really surprising considering the GK110 architecture is very matured now; on the other hand the 290's Hawaii architecture is still in its infancy, therefore there's bound to be some hiccups. However like the 7950/7970 which also had issues at launch, it's reliabilty should improve overtime, and the performance potential would be greater than that of the GTX780. And then there's Mantle as well...the good thing about Mantle not only it will further increase the performance of the card, but also it would reduces the requirement of CPU as well. I mean for people like me who uses 120Hz, if I was to play BF4 online using high instead of ultra, my overclock i5 would likely to bottleneck the GTX780 with the card can push 100-120fps but my CPU cannot keep up, and would most likely need to upgrade to a i7 to fully utilise the card; if I was using the 290/290x, with Mantle it would mean it need less CPU grunt, and I can probably push 100-120fps on the 290/290x even with just a i5. But of course this is still speculation, but from the leaks so far it does point toward it will work like that.

This is the way I see it...people that game on 120Hz monitor, the 290s with Mantle would be a better a better match; whereas people that are only interested smooth gaming on max settings on 60Hz monitors and planning on getting a Gsync monitor when they are out, then going with GTX780/780Ti would be better. This is of course only my opinions.
 
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