Current situation

EnzoSmithers · 27 Apr 2012 at 09:34

Morning all,

i'm in a bit of a predicament at the moment. I currently use a i5 750 @ 4.0 ghz, 4gb of ram and an asus motherboard that the name of escapes me at the moment. I bought these as an overclocked bundle through OCUK as im hopeless/scared of flames when it comes to overclocking.

Recently I contacted OCUK about purchasing more ram,and adding it to the bundle, and if they could supply me with a few settings to reapply the clock however they advised me they could not do so.

I have in the case a xfx 5850 1gb gfx card, and im currently playing BF3 at about 55 fps which is not really ideal for me (@ 1920x1080 res).

My predicament is:-

do I buy an SSD, 16gb of ram and new GFX card and keep my existing mobo and CPU, and run them at the stock 2.66 ghz or try and work out how to mildly clock them?

or buy a new motherboard, an ivy bridge chip of some sort and run it stock which will probably give me a lot better performance over my i5 750 running stock clocks.

Obviously, the Ivy bridge option is about ~400-450 more than option A, but overall would it be a better (safer) bet?

Cheers for the opinions,

Rob

Doomedspeed · 27 Apr 2012 at 09:43

G4cE said:
I have in the case a xfx 5850 1gb gfx card, and im currently playing BF3 at about 55 fps which is not really ideal for me (@ 1920x1080 res).

That seems quite good to me, what setting are you on med/high?

To improve the FPS a new GPU would be your best bet. Increasing the amount of RAM wouldn't do anything noticable. An SSD will speed up your boot times, not really improve in game experience.

Your rig is not hugely outdated, id just keep it OCed and see what you can get from it.

You got a budget?

Rusty0611 · 27 Apr 2012 at 09:43

You'll still be able to overclock it. It's just the saved BIOS settings from OcUK may not be stable. I would go ahead and get more RAM and a new graphics card if I was you and then a 128GB SSD at the same time/later down the line.

Your 5850 is still OK though so you might want to consider holding fire on a new card as of yet.

You don't need 16GB RAM btw. I know it's so cheap but 8GB is generally more than enough so having double this is a little overkill. Even though it's cheap you could put the saved money to something better like a better graphics card.

EnzoSmithers · 27 Apr 2012 at 10:32

thanks for the advise, your right i was going to go with 16gb purely due to how cheap it is but if its not really needed (i only use the machine forgaming web videos etc) then 8gb will suffice.

BF3 settings wise is a mixture of High with a few things on Medium, with a few things off (im at work and cant remember the names of them).

Budget wise, I have £1000 to spend in my bank account now that I have saved for this, however if I can not spend some of it to use for other things, then great. Im not going to spend for the sake of it, but also will not scrimp for the sake of £50-75 etc.

GFX wise, I really fancy a change to nvidia, with my current (and previosu) ATI drivers, whenever I minimise/maximise a youtube video, or open/close media player/VLC etc I get black flickering lines across the screen for a second. This only started to occurr after I updated the drivers last year, and upped the clock speeds on the GFx card, trying ot get a few more frames for BF3 upon its release.

I have done a lot of reading on the subject, tried to undo everything I had done, installed newer drivers etc, but to no avail. So i live with it for now, and plan to move to Nvidia now-ish.

Below a 680, whats the next best option, money/performance wise? I hope at my resolution it would see a sizeable increase in performance for BF3, and GW2 when it is released (omg beta starts tonight!!! majorly excited lol)

thanks again,

Rob

Rusty0611 · 27 Apr 2012 at 10:39

G4cE said:
Below a 680, whats the next best option, money/performance wise? I hope at my resolution it would see a sizeable increase in performance for BF3, and GW2 when it is released (omg beta starts tonight!!! majorly excited lol)

thanks again,

Rob

nVidia will hopefully release a 670/670ti soon which should take aim at the 7950 price point.

It's difficult to recommend any nVidia 5** card at the mo as the AMD 7950 and 7850's are simply better options. You're best off waiting in my opinion.