3440x1440: GTX 970 -> R9 390 "upgrade" worthwhile?

[danoliver1]

Op what games do you play? On my 980 ti at 3440x1440 i get around 70-100fps depending on the game with ultra settings.

 

[Haggisman]

Mostly Fallout 4 at the moment, but I've got TW3 to finish, and dying light to play through as well

 

[fenchu]

dying light would benefit from the extra vram , but as others have said its more of sidegrade. Id wait based on the games your playing to upgrade.

 

[Randall8686]

Total waste of money they are near on the same performance give or take. 980ti is your only real noticeable upgrade. G-sync will smooth out that 40fps to make it feel like a solid 60 fps. Personally i would grab a G-sync monitor and wait for next gen cards. the 390 is good but the 970 is also good. would be a big waste of cash and total disappointment when you get nearly the same frame rate.

your only real "upgrade that your going to notice is 980 ti or a G-sync monitor. i went 980ti from 980 from 970 and the 970-980 jump was noticeable but 980 - 980ti was quite a jump.

 

[Mtom]

I'd stick to the 970 until the new cards arrive. Not worth to fork out money before the new tech drops.

 

[Purgatory]

I have a 3440 x 1440 21:9.

I originally had a 780ti with it and it ran fine, but a 980ti doubled some games frame rates and made others smoother at full settings. The 780ti managed really well I found with some settings turned down on some of the more demanding games.


In your shoes I would get a 980ti only as an upgrade (otherwise you are wasting money and time on a sidegrade) then look at getting a 2600k/2700k/3770k (ivy runs hotter remember and may need to be delided to get to high overclocks) and overclock it to 4ghz-4.5ghz (which is an easy overclock on Sandybridge cpus, mine will do 4.8ghz on not much more than the stock volts, on stock it did over 4ghz from what I remember when messing with it. I just have 2 profiles setup in the bios 1 stock which it lives at 99.99% of of its life and then for FSX set to 4.8ghz profile.


I also tried a skylake system a couple of weeks ago but sent the parts back as there was zero difference from my 2600k setup and was just money thrown away I found, yes it was faster in some synthetic benchmarks, but for real world use it wasn't much faster than my 2600k for gaming and things I do on my pc and funny part my ssds actually ran slower on that system that was setup 100% correct. DDR4 made zero difference too. Only real upgrade from a Sandybridge is a 6 or 8 core setup now it seems and then your power goes up and again a minor upgrade if you only game on the system, you will again probably find the framerates don't change as I have a friend with a 5820k and a 980ti classified as I do and we get the same frame rates when we set to 3440 x 1440. I built him the system then, he loved my monitor and got one too, but for his use the 5820k is great as he does a lot of photo editing and rendering.


If you want to keep it cheap get a 2600k/2700k/3770k and a 980ti and overclock the cpu. Nothing still beats these for the price right now and performance is exactly the same for gaming, I fell for some of the fake gaming reviews stating that minimums and frame times were much better... LOL nope they were not at 3440x1440, they made zero difference, maybe at 640x480... I even tried 1920 x 1080 and saw a 1-5% difference at most, a difference you would never notice in real world use.

 

[Scania]

I have 5760x1080 with two 1.5Gb GTX580's, I'm surprised you don't get more fps, I'm rarely down in the 40's even in games like GTA V.....

My upgrade path is most likely two 970's eventually!

 

[arc@css]

I have 5760x1080 with two 1.5Gb GTX580's

 

[Haggisman]

In your shoes I would get a 980ti only as an upgrade (otherwise you are wasting money and time on a sidegrade) then look at getting a 2600k/2700k/3770k (ivy runs hotter remember and may need to be delided to get to high overclocks) and overclock it to 4ghz-4.5ghz (which is an easy overclock on Sandybridge cpus, mine will do 4.8ghz on not much more than the stock volts, on stock it did over 4ghz from what I remember when messing with it. I just have 2 profiles setup in the bios 1 stock which it lives at 99.99% of of its life and then for FSX set to 4.8ghz profile.

Would a processor upgrade really make much difference? I asked this question a few months ago when considering grabbing a 2600k on the MM and the consensus was that it wouldn't really be noticeable as I'm bottlenecked by my graphics (in Afterburner none of the cores go above ~60% utilisation).

Anyway, had a go at overclocking last night - it's <almost> stable at +120 core / +440 mem, but I was getting driver crashes after running Heaven a few times in a row, it was getting late by that point so I didn't have time to finish tweaking it.

Is it worth bumping the voltage up a bit to try and get it stable (temps weren't getting above 70) or just keep dropping the overclock?


I haven't done any overclocking in about 10 years, so not sure on the resilience of components these days!

 

[Scania]

I got bored whilst replying to this thread last night, my mate was doing some Project Cars laps, thought a potato quality video to demonstrate my surround setup was the answer!

The quality is crap (despite it being a 2.1Gb file on my phone!) - the brightness is too high on the video, it looks a lot better in the flesh...

 

[Purgatory]

Would a processor upgrade really make much difference? I asked this question a few months ago when considering grabbing a 2600k on the MM and the consensus was that it wouldn't really be noticeable as I'm bottlenecked by my graphics (in Afterburner none of the cores go above ~60% utilisation).

Anyway, had a go at overclocking last night - it's <almost> stable at +120 core / +440 mem, but I was getting driver crashes after running Heaven a few times in a row, it was getting late by that point so I didn't have time to finish tweaking it.

Is it worth bumping the voltage up a bit to try and get it stable (temps weren't getting above 70) or just keep dropping the overclock?


I haven't done any overclocking in about 10 years, so not sure on the resilience of components these days!

I run my 2600k at stock for regular games and don't see it causing any issues for games that are GPU bottle necked but when I use some CPU dependent games like FSX then I overclock to 4.8ghz. But if you have a 2500 I would just buy a 980ti and try it, I'm guessing you may see a minor loss in frame rates compared to a overclocked 2600k, but the 2600k helps with games like BF4 as it uses hyper threading, apart from a few games that take advantage of that I wouldn't worry about it and just get a 980ti and enjoy your system until you can save up for a cpu upgrade later or spot a cheap one on the MM.

 

[arc@css]

I got bored whilst replying to this thread last night, my mate was doing some Project Cars laps, thought a potato quality video to demonstrate my surround setup was the answer!

The quality is crap (despite it being a 2.1Gb file on my phone!) - the brightness is too high on the video, it looks a lot better in the flesh...

I'm impressed.

Do you play other games on that res, and if so, is the performance generally okay?

 

[Haggisman]

I run my 2600k at stock for regular games and don't see it causing any issues for games that are GPU bottle necked but when I use some CPU dependent games like FSX then I overclock to 4.8ghz. But if you have a 2500 I would just buy a 980ti and try it, I'm guessing you may see a minor loss in frame rates compared to a overclocked 2600k, but the 2600k helps with games like BF4 as it uses hyper threading, apart from a few games that take advantage of that I wouldn't worry about it and just get a 980ti and enjoy your system until you can save up for a cpu upgrade later or spot a cheap one on the MM.

That's kinda what I figured - I'll probably just wait till Pascal/Polaris to upgrade properly

Just try +100 on the core and +250 on the mem and see if it runs stably. That will give you a decent enough boost

No luck, even with the settings above, it wont get through the Heaven benchmark more than twice in a row.

I even tried it at half that; +50 core/+125 mem and bumped the mv to +37 (max it will go). No temperature problems, it doesn't go above 72c, but on the 3rd run through the benchmark (or if I just leave the demo running for ~15 mins) my screen just goes black and I have to hard-reset the system; event log shows the driver stopped responding.

 

[Kaapstad]

That's kinda what I figured - I'll probably just wait till Pascal/Polaris to upgrade properly



No luck, even with the settings above, it wont get through the Heaven benchmark more than twice in a row.

I even tried it at half that; +50 core/+125 mem and bumped the mv to +37 (max it will go). No temperature problems, it doesn't go above 72c, but on the 3rd run through the benchmark (or if I just leave the demo running for ~15 mins) my screen just goes black and I have to hard-reset the system; event log shows the driver stopped responding.

With Maxwell cards try using as little volts as you can when overclocking. They really don't like extra heat and volts.

My GTX 980 Ti's don't like any extra volts and will crash if they go over 55c but are monster overclockers.

 

[Haggisman]

With Maxwell cards try using as little volts as you can when overclocking. They really don't like extra heat and volts.

My GTX 980 Ti's don't like any extra volts and will crash if they go over 55c but are monster overclockers.

I tried with no overvolting as well - same result.

Might try a more aggressive fan profile to keep the temps down and see if that makes a difference then.

 

[Born_2_Kill_83]

970 will struggle at that res (high settings) and you'll run out of vram, I hit 5.5gb in R6 Seige.

 

[Calin Banc]

You: 3440x1440=4,95 Mpx
I: 5280*1050= 5,54 Mpx

My sys: 2500k@4,5GHz (for test was at 3,3GHz as well), 16GB RAM @1600Mhz, R290@ 1090/1380MHz (which should be more or less at the same level with the R390, but only with 4GB of vRAM - not that it will matter much).

4,5GHz ArmA 3: http://imgur.com/NbTtGWw 48fps
3,3GHz ArmA 3: http://imgur.com/V7xIOKd 38fps

4,5GHz GTA 5: http://imgur.com/ULLCXaH 63fps
3,3GHz GTA 5: http://imgur.com/SpLp5Bs 50 fps

4,5GHz Crysis 3 (one of the grass levels) http://imgur.com/yMmve1V 43fps
3,3GHz Crysis 3 (one of the grass levels) http://imgur.com/RY1r9f1 32 fps

ArmA 3: 26,31% boost
GTA 5: 26% boost
Crysis 3: 34,37% boos

So it looks like that you get a huge increase in performance by overclocking your CPU. Few mentions though:

1. It really depends on you preferences in regards to IQ (Image Quality) and FPS. If you're going for 60fps (or at least as close to that as possible) and you see that your GPU is not that much used or you don't get increase in performance, then it's time to upgrade your CPU as well.

However, if you're comfortable at let's say 40fps where your CPU and GPU are used fairly similar and are not limiting each other (at least not to a high degree), then it's pointless to change anything. But, if you want more FPS and your CPU can still only do 40fps, you'll need to change the GPU and the CPU. Or overclock.

Also I've saw situations in which the GPU wasn't fully utilized at my settings even at 4,5GHz. Moreover, those results aren't 100% of the time present. You can go from a situation in which the CPU doesn't limit your card (at least not by much) to a one where you have the above results. It's present by scenario and by game. As rule of thumb, higher CPU frequencies equal a more stable frame rate, a better overall gameplay.

2. Those tests were made with the CPU locked at 3,3 GHz and 4,5GHz. By default I think the 2500(k) boosts with at least a core or two beyond that. I don't have the patience to go into BIOS to change and test in each game, so all were done via alt+tab and changing the multiplier in Windows with a program that came with the motherboard.

Bottom line: high resolution doesn't really mean GPU is doing all the work. Increase in what you see (as in more space), requires the CPU to handle more data to be send to the GPU, ergo it also requires more power. Probably the only scenario in which higher resolution doesn't imply more CPU power is when you only increase the dpi, but keep the field of view exactly the same.

In your case, the motherboard and the cpu have to be changed together, 'cause the MB does not allow OC. You can either go for a new build now or you can wait for Zen. It really depends on how much money you have to spend.

A faster card will give you some gains depending on the game. From my own testing, I wouldn't buy a 980ti or similar in your case, because what I play, the card will not stretch its legs properly. It all depends on what YOU play in relation to point 1 from above (IQ vs. FPS).

PS: Heaven is not the optimal solution if you want to test GPU stability during overclock. Can run without a problem, but same settings will spell trouble in different games.

 

[~>Dg<~]

a 980ti is what you should be looking at not a 390.

 

[Haggisman]

PS: Heaven is not the optimal solution if you want to test GPU stability during overclock. Can run without a problem, but same settings will spell trouble in different games.

I figured it was at least a good place to start, if it crashes in that then it's likely to have problems gaming as well?

a 980ti is what you should be looking at not a 390.

If I have to spend £300+ on an upgrade, I'd rather just wait till Pascal and do it properly

 

[jenovat]

What's the timeline for introduction of new cards... I'm not desperate to play any major titles (as an exam is coming up in april) but afterwards, I'll have all the freedom in the world.