Best Upgrade

[Glacius]

Hey All,

I am basically trying to find the best upgrade I can make to my current system which is as per below:

Case: NZXT White Phantom 820 with a NZXT 810 Side Panel (Bigger Window)

CPU: AMD FX-9370

Motherboard: ASUS SABERTOOTH AMD 990FX

Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance Black (4x4GB) DDR3 PC31600MHz

Graphics Card: Powercolor Radeon R9 290X OC "BF4 Edition" 4096MB GDDR5

Hard Drive 1: Samsung Evo 850 Pro 500GB SSD

Hard Drive 2: Seagate 1TB SataIII

Hard Drive 3: Seagate 2TB SataIII

Power Supply: 1000W Corsair RM Series 80PLUS Gold Modular Power Supply

OS: Windows 8.1

I have at the very maximum about 600-700 to spend and was wondering what would be the best upgrade in order to run games on much higher settings than I currently can, for instance I tried the Division at the weekend and as lovely as it looked on Ultra settings ingame and with my AMD card set to maximum settings it was just so laggy 14-25 FPS and it's the same it other games when I max everything out and this is only on a 1920*1080 screen.

If I got for instance a 980ti or something similar would this improve my FPS considerably, or are other parts in my system bottlenecking me???

Also the system is fully watercooled in a custom loop at the moment, (CPU and Gcard)

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[elrasho]

If you asked 6 months ago I would have said get a 980ti and an i7 based CPU/MOBO. But now that the next gen GPUs re around the corner I'd say wait a few months.

 

[Glacius]

So basically best bet would be to hold off and buy a next gen GPU? would it be worth spending my total budget on one? aka £600-£700 for instance, guess I don't want to buy something as powerful as that and then have other components in my system holding it back.

Thanks for advice.

 

[AlamoX]

that doesnt make sense, with your rig, Division should have been over 60fps, ultra/low settings didnt really work, the impact on performance was minimal, but if you mean fps dip below 20fps sometimes, thats normal, the game is still on beta.

your rig should be enough to wait for the new 14/16nm line up, but if you cant wait as you said 980Ti is best performer, although cant really advise £550 card being so close to new releases.
the cheapest upgarde i can see, is the Fury Nano around £350, and what makes it perfect for you is the waterloop, the Nano has Full Fiji, so with a waterblock you should be able to push it to FuryX performance, 2nd best performer card for £200 less.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Your 290x should be more than capable for 1080 res. What driver version are you on?

Also don't use The Division as a reference for performance of card, as it could well be the case of just issue with the game itself with Ubisoft being Ubisoft . It might just take times for issues to get ironed out.

 

[~>Dg<~]

would wait a few months see whats new.

by then we will have more info on new gpus and new intel cpus.

no games going to test your set up at 1080 this year either.

 

[Glacius]

Very true regarding the Division, wasn't the best example I could have used, just for games such as Fallout 4, GTA 5, Renegade X, most games I play I turn everything to maximum using the latest Crimson drivers and also the ingame settings and it just lags permanently around 14-30 FPS and I would have thought my system isn't that bad... but seems so lately, maybe pushing everything to 16x this and 64x that isn't the best thing I can do but just would be nice to have something I can run on Ultra. Starting to think why my FPS is so bad in games when on high/ultra then.... Its almost like as soon as I change any settings on the AMD Crimson drivers and previous drivers to maximum games just seem to die on my setup

Does sound like holding off on this is the best bet for now then, are the next gen that are upcoming quite abit ahead of what a current 980ti can produce then? as if so I'll just wait, just the pain of having o change the custom loop as well zzzzz

 

[Marine-RX179]

Very true regarding the Division, wasn't the best example I could have used, just for games such as Fallout 4, GTA 5, Renegade X, most games I play I turn everything to maximum using the latest Crimson drivers and also the ingame settings and it just lags permanently around 14-30 FPS and I would have thought my system isn't that bad... but seems so lately, maybe pushing everything to 16x this and 64x that isn't the best thing I can do but just would be nice to have something I can run on Ultra.

Are you using in game settings for the graphic, or are you using custom settings on the Radeon software to "override application settings"? Cause if you enable things like SuperSampling, then it is natural that the 290x wouldn't be able to cope.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Zen is being released at the end of the year and there will be some new 14/16NM cards released too. So I would wait.

 

[Glacius]

Thanks again for the advice, and seems I will just be patient and wait

Regarding my settings then Yea I do tend to make everything override the application settings and I guess that is where I am going wrong then, just leave the radeon software settings on default and only change ingame settings to ultra?

Assume to run the radeon software on override settings maxed out and ingame you would need 2 cards at least?

 

[Marine-RX179]

Thanks again for the advice, and seems I will just be patient and wait

Regarding my settings then Yea I do tend to make everything override the application settings and I guess that is where I am going wrong then, just leave the radeon software settings on default and only change ingame settings to ultra?

Assume to run the radeon software on override settings maxed out and ingame you would need 2 cards at least?

Yea just use in-game settings to max everything. But you can "tweak" things a littler further for example, for games that you just know your 290x has lots of spare GPU grunt (i.e. the less demanding games).

You can use the Radeon software and make some custom over-ride such as using SuperSample AA, but don't go crazy maxing it but to only use may be 2x or 4x, and it would still make the game looks better than the MSAA (even x4 or x8) that are generally used by games settings. Alternatively if you have Super Resolution/VSR enabled, it will allow you to select 2560x1440 res in game graphic settings (even if your monitor is only 1080p), and you might not need to use high level of AA with than possible even 2xMSAA would do.

 

[Glacius]

Thanks for that Marine, never knew you could do that kind of thing with VSR will have a play with that tonight