Upgrade Advice

Inaharry

Inaharry

Inaharry

Associate
Joined
3 Aug 2004
Posts
252
Hi,

I've been really happy with my system, (spec shown in signature) and it still plays everything at full detail on a single 1080p monitor and fairly well with lower settings across 3 in surround mode. A couple of months ago, I bought an Oculus DK2 and noticed that some of the apps are dropping below 75FPS which as a lot of people know, can indude motion sickness after a while. I know that some of this is down to the current resolution of the DK2, latency and where apps aren't necessarily optimised, but it made me think about whether it's time for an upgrade, especially after reading that the GTX 9 series will support VR SLI.

The problem is, having 2 x GTX 670 4GB cards makes it difficult to justify changing to one GTX 980 as there's not a massive difference in performance and I can't afford 2 x GTX 980s without leaving the rest of the system without an upgrade.

My wife said that she'd buy me part of an upgrade for Christmas, around £300-350, (I know, I'm a lucky man! ;)) and I could probably buy myself some bits equalling around the £400 mark, but I'm not sure which of these options to go for:

1. Upgrade the rest of the system with a high-end Z97 board, an i7-4790K, new memory,(maybe) and then keep my GTX 670s for a while until I can afford 2 x GTX 980s.
2. As above, but not upgrade the memory and use that money to stretch to buying one GTX 980 and then add an additional one when I can afford it.
3. Buy 2 x GTX 980s and replace my existing GTX 670s leaving the rest of the system as it is, (although I'm not sure whether this will be a bottleneck).
4. Wait for Skylake and associated motherboards and / or wait for NVIDIA's next generation of cards.

Any recommendations on which option to go for would be very much appreciated. I just want to make sure that if we're spending around £750-800 on an upgrade now instead of waiting, that I'll see some kind of noticeable difference.

Thanks! :)
 
as you said the graphics is not the worry here so processor and mobo would be best bet i74790 and black edition motherboard would be best bet
 
I would personally get a used dirt cheap 2600k/3770k and over clock it massively :) do you have a CPU heatsink? There is not much difference at all from the 3770k/2600k/2700k to a 4790k at all, especially when overclocked. Not enough to justify spending £350 ish anyway!
 
I would not get any other CPU at all, you don't need it, you already have a [email protected], thats fine.

Now you say VR right?

Well one of the selling points of the GTX970/980 when they were announced was a specific feature for items like the occulus rift to help improve latency.

http://www.geforce.co.uk/whats-new/articles/maxwell-architecture-gtx-980-970

One being VR direct.

• Low Latency
• VR SLI
• VR DSR
• MFAA
• Auto asynchronous warp
• Auto stereo
 
Thanks very much for your suggestions and thanks for that link stulid. I'd read a bit about the VR support, which is one of the reasons for looking at the 9xx cards, but I thought it only helped when running in SLI, I didn't realise that you also benefit under a single card configuration.

I forgot my sig still showed running at 4.5GHz. It hasn't been that for a while because it was unstable when running certain games for around 10-15 minutes. I'm sure that it's because I was leaving auto voltage set in the BIOS and with my almost non-existent knowledge of overclocking, I need to learn a bit more about setting manual voltages before attempting to run at that speed. I've been using it at stock for a while which is why I was considering the 4790K to run at 4.0GHz / 4.4GHz without the need to manually overclock.

If you think that the 2500K still has life in it, I'll spend some time trying to work out what manual settings to use on my MSI board to see if I can get a stable overclock.

If I keep my existing spec, I was thinking about using the money to get the Galax GTX 980 HOF because of the base core speed being the highest of the available overclocked cards. However, for the £500 it costs, I could almost get 2 x Galax GTX 970 HOF cards which run at 1228MHz / 1380MHZ. Do you think that would be a good option or would I be better to get one GTX 980 HOFs and then add a 2nd one when I can afford it?

Thanks again!
 
Auto voltage is a massive pain. You could easily get a higher OC using the BIOS. As stupid said use those settings or readca few guides. Its easy really.

The 2500k is still pretty good.
 
I appreciate the link stulid, I'll give that a go over the next few days and do some testing.

Looking around, it does seem that a decently overclocked i5-2500K isn't that different in real world performance to an equivalent i5-4690K, so I'll hold on to the existing kit for now and put the money towards the GPU upgrades.

Now I just need to decide whether to go for the GTX 670 HOF and have SLI now or the GTX 680 HOF and SLI it later....or maybe one of the other makes of card if I can get them to overclock to the levels set on the HOF cards by default.

Thanks again to all of you. :)
 
Yeah, your CPU is grand.

I assume you meant the 970 & 980 right?

Most cards will PC beyond those ratings. I had the GTX 670 PE (non OC) and managed to manual OC it to OC edition levels on the core and +500 (which is a lot) on the memory. That was easily done too. So most 970s will go to HOF levels, its just that the manufacture can't 100% garentee it. I like the look of the Galax black editions, take a gander at those.
 
Yeah sorry, I did mean the 970 and 980...it's been a long day! :o

I was looking at the black editions earlier and thought that the Infinity one looks good with a decent core clock and the coil whine reduction / guarantee.
 
Yeah, I like the Gigabyte cards and I notice that the card you mentioned has the same core speed as the Galax Infinity.

At the moment though, I'm back to considering a single GTX 980 HOF as this will give me slightly higher performance than I'm getting with the 2 x 670s, but without the need for SLI, particularly as I've heard that some applications for Oculus don't currently work with / support SLI.

Which brings me onto one more question with the GTX 980s....time to head off to the Graphics Cards forum. :)

Thanks again for your suggestions.
 
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