Thinking about upgrading, check me spec, what about RAM?

phil675

phil675

phil675

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Joined
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So I have what's in my sig, I recently upgraded the graphics card to a GTX670 which has been great for games, but now I feel that the rest of the PC is lagging behind a bit. So I'm after a new mobo, cpu and RAM.

Intended use is gaming (mostly old stuff but who knows what the future brings) and trolling forums.

Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3P Intel Z170 (Socket 1151) DDR4 ATX Motherboard
Intel Pentium Dual Core G4400
GeIL White Dragon 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C15 3200MHz

Now the motherboard will let me overclock and can take high frequency RAM which seems useful for the future, the processor is a dualcore since I think a quadcore would be wasted on games and isn't worth an extra £100 in my opinion.

With RAM, would it would be better to get some with a lower frequency and lower timings? Is there a way to work out the best balance here?
 
I'm going to assume this isn't a troll despite you saying "and trolling forums". ;)

8gb of ram is easily enough, maybe 12gb if you're paranoid, especially at 3200mhz. (even though I don't find speeds matters too much)

Personally I'd buy an i5, although granted I've not owned a pentium since about 10-12 years ago.

Pentiums are not great imo, especially as we're now in 2016, but only you can decide if it's worth the extra money for an i5 etc. They're fine for slightly more casual gaming, but I assume as you've got a 670, that's probably the case here as that's a few year old card.

What games are you planning on playing?
I hope by the specs you're giving, Witcher 3 isn't on the list. ;)
 
At the moment I'm playing vanilla WoW, Civ 5 on and off and just got Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, I'm not after balls-to-the-wall performance I just want to pick up on areas which are now lagging behind.

When I look at benchmark scores the G4400 kicks the poo into my E8400, in terms of single core performance an i5 isn't a massive leap for an extra £100 like I would expect. I don't think multicore stuff is going to be a big thing in games just yet especially with the stuff I play. However if I do want to upgrade in the future say in 2 years I can whack another Skylake in and be fairly current, not like when I upgraded from an E2220 to the E8400.
 
phil675 said:
the processor is a dualcore since I think a quadcore would be wasted on games and isn't worth an extra £100 in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Whilst another £100 isn't worth it, I would look to spend an extra £50 and get th i3-6100. Although it is still a dual core, it supports 4 logical threads, so will give you a benefit (Even WoW benefits slightly by having more than 2 threads). The i3-6100 is also 400Mhz faster, and will have better resell value if you did upgrade further down the line.


phil675 said:
With RAM, would it would be better to get some with a lower frequency and lower timings? Is there a way to work out the best balance here?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry one bit about RAM timings (especially when you are looking at a Pentium Dual Core?)- outside of synthetic benchmarks the fastest ram gains maybe 5%. Buy whatever the cheapest DDR4 kit is at the time - it will make no realistic difference.
 
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