New enthusiast!

JackG4 · 25 Sep 2013 at 09:05

Hi all, early this year I decided to ditch console gaming and delve into the world of custom pc building. I aim for smooth gaming on 1920x1080p at High resolutions.

In Feb 2013 I built the following with an £800 budget:
Display: 40" Samsung Smart LED TV (not in the budget)
3570K 4.2GHz oc on stock volts
Z77 Pro3
Radeon HD 7870 Vortex II 1150MHz 2GB
Samsung 840 120GB SSD
Seagate 1TB 7200rpm HDD
Hyper 212 Evo
CM 550W PSU

Next upgrades:
Gigabyte GTX 770 Windforce III 4GB
850W+ PSU

Any other recommendations? Every 6 months I'm willing to spend £500+ I primarily game i.e. Battlefield, Bioshock, Skyrim, hopefully GTA5

Occasionally I drop from 60fps to 30fps (v-sync enabled) on Bioshock and it does make me twitch somewhat... GTX770 will be the best solution?

Thanks!

Doomedspeed · 25 Sep 2013 at 09:15

Welcome.

Solid looking build you have there..

I would hold off upgrading your GPU for now as AMD has a new GPU annoucement tonight, which is generating a lot of hype, so it may be best to wait for reviews of them to appear before delving into a new GPU..

Why the PSU upgrade? SLI/Xfire? Your board only supports x16/x4 so i wouldn't bother to be honest, just leave it as a single card system.

JackG4 · 25 Sep 2013 at 09:28

Thanks for the advice

I'll keep an eye out for the announcement then! I'm leaning towards Nvidia for their advanced PhysX which I didn't have a clue about when I built the system, but, happy to stick with AMD if the new cards are decent.

I wanted a bigger PSU to accommodate the larger GPU and to futureproof me in case I upgrade MOBO and SLI/Xfire in the future.

drakt · 25 Sep 2013 at 10:38

JackG4 said:
Thanks for the advice

I'll keep an eye out for the announcement then! I'm leaning towards Nvidia for their advanced PhysX which I didn't have a clue about when I built the system, but, happy to stick with AMD if the new cards are decent.

Bear in mind if AMD releases cards which beat Nvidia at their current price point, Nvidia may have to drop their prices in a month or so.
Also some games can run PhysX straight off the CPU, though its pretty gimped.

JackG4 · 25 Sep 2013 at 11:01

drakt said:
Bear in mind if AMD releases cards which beat Nvidia at their current price point, Nvidia may have to drop their prices in a month or so.
Also some games can run PhysX straight off the CPU, though its pretty gimped.

Yeah I've installed the driver for this. I'm mainly interested in BF4 and they do PhysX off Frostbite if I'm not mistaken so hopefully 7870 should be fine or perhaps 7970 if that's what people recommend

jamiehavok · 25 Sep 2013 at 11:05

i wouldn't worry about physx, only about 5 games use it anyway, most games use cpu physics including the original Crysis which still has the best physics of any game imo! its likely to be used even less now as Radeon are in all the new consoles! i doubt developers are going to be bothered trying to add in physx when 2 out of the 3 platforms their game runs on cant use it!

JackG4 · 25 Sep 2013 at 11:13

Very good point, thanks! Leaning towards AMD again now

jamiehavok · 25 Sep 2013 at 11:41

Also to note that physx does also run off the cpu as well as being gpu accelerated, so any physics in a game that use physx which would be game breaking if they weren't there will still be there eg destructible buildings etc. You just miss out on bit of eye candy..maybe stuff on the ground that moves around when you walk into it etc, or in the case of the upcoming Witcher 3 it looks like Radeon users will miss out on dynamically moving fur! but you probably wont notice this much anyway after a while.

JackG4 · 25 Sep 2013 at 12:00

Not the fur!

Won't be the same experience without it

Okay I'm starting to see the light and realise that I shouldn't be too worried about PhysX, thanks

jamiehavok · 25 Sep 2013 at 12:20

JackG4 said:
Not the fur!

Won't be the same experience without it

Okay I'm starting to see the light and realise that I shouldn't be too worried about PhysX, thanks

cool and looking at your earlier post I'm pretty sure battlefield 4 uses Havok physics like bf3 did, Havok is the cpu only physics engine and the only competitor to Physx i believe.. most games use that instead of Physx, some games have there own physics engines also like cryengine 3.