upgrade from a e6300

[bru]

OK my sons machine is currently running a Intel Pentium e6300 overclocked to 3.6 Ghz on a p31 ds3l motherboard with 4 Gb of DDR2 ram and a Nv260gtx (was a NV8800gs)

He plays loads of various games, including a lot of WOW and D3. Also half life 2 deathmatch, LFDead2, LOL and minecraft. Now he was complaining of very low FPS in D3, LOL and minecraft and yet WOW was OK, so I upgraded his previous Nv 8800gs to his currant 260GTX. Frame rates improved slightly but not to a point that made D3 any more playable.

Now I was thinking of a new CPU board and memory, something like....

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £49.99
1 x ASRock H61M-GS Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Micro Motherboard £38.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED38192M1600HC11DC) £29.99
Total : £118.97 (includes shipping : FREE).



but I'm not totally convinced that it will be a significant step forward if one at all judging by this.... (note this doesn't take into account the overclock)

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/406?vs=94

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

 

[JonSmith]

I don't understand why that system should be slow. My brother runs LoL on his SB laptop (6GB RAM, GT540m, i3 @ 2.1GHz) and Skyrim decently. CPU is slower than your son's PC, GPU about the same. I actually run MC with optimine on my 1.3 dual core laptop with 4500mhd at about 30 FPS! Only with low draw distance, but still...

 

[ubersonic]

I don't understand why that system should be slow.

D3 is about as well refined as something ported from xbox

Generally speaking it responds much better to GPU upgrades than CPU, as long as you have more than one core and 2.5-3ghz per core it will be happy. In benchmarks multiple CPUs were tested at varying clock speeds, it was found 3ghz-4ghz on the same chip provided almost no effect in fps (single figure increase on a couple of chips), the 2ghz-3ghz increase was noticable in minimum fps but nothing massive. Likewise having more than two cores available made no difference.

If its D3 your looking to improve the money you were thinking of spending will snag a HD7770 OC, which will give a much bigger boost in D3 than the new CPU/mobo/ram (in fact as that CPU can't be overclocked the loss of 1ghz per core may even hurt D3)

 

[JonSmith]

Have you looked at the settings that he's got the game at? He might have them too high and is saying it's "slow" because of that. I'm assuming he'll have WoW maxed, which is not difficult. It's just that a G620 is slower than an e6300 at 3.6GHz unfortunately. You'd have to get an i3 2120 or an i5 to notice any difference. For MC more RAM seems to help, but you can actually gain a massive performance boost from using optimine and java 1.7 beta. It practically doubled the FPS on my laptop and the game didn't look any different.

 

[bru]

If its D3 your looking to improve the money you were thinking of spending will snag a HD7770 OC, which will give a much bigger boost in D3 than the new CPU/mobo/ram (in fact as that CPU can't be overclocked the loss of 1ghz per core may even hurt D3)

I really don't think that spending £120 on a another graphics card is really a good idea especially one that isn't really that much quicker than the 260GTx that Ive just paid £40 for.

But I do agree that the CPU probably isn't a big enough step up to make much difference.

 

[bru]

For MC more RAM seems to help, but you can actually gain a massive performance boost from using optimine and java 1.7 beta. It practically doubled the FPS on my laptop and the game didn't look any different.

Ill have to look into optimine, cheers for the suggestion.

 

[JonSmith]

Apparently it's been changed to optifine, you can check it here:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic...c6-fps-boost-hd-textures-aa-af-and-much-more/

Adds multicore CPU support, which will really help.

 

[FatRakoon]

Quad core 6600 can be had for about £50 these days and lets be honest, its possibly one of the best CPUs around for the price.

 

[Darg]

Yep get a Q6600, I upgraded to one about 6 months ago from an e6300 too. Paired it with an overclocked nVidia 470 and I've still to find a game I can't pretty much max out.

Like said above have a look at the settings he's running the games on. If all else fails the Q6600 is your best bet, got mine to a 3.6ghz OC without a problem, didn't see the need to push it further. It also has the benefit of not needing a new motherboard/RAM.

 

[bru]

but a q6600 will only be better in games that utilize more than 2 cores, for anything else it will be very similar to the [email protected]

 

[FatRakoon]

but a q6600 will only be better in games that utilize more than 2 cores, for anything else it will be very similar to the [email protected]

If we went on that logic, a Celeron would be just as good if we clocked that up too!

No seriously, sure, the E6300 clocked up is a great CPU for sure, but its simply not a patch on a Q6600

POlus, whats to stop you running the Q6600 at 3.6?

That way you get the extra cores and the extra cache

 

[bru]

Well my wifes machine has a q6600 in it also running at 3.6Ghz and I can tell you now when I upgraded her machine from the e6300 to the q6600 both running at 3.6Ghz there was next to no difference in most things, as at that time next to nothing used more than 2 cores and even now the games my son plays still don't utilise multi core CPU's particularly well.

Furthermore going from a running a q6600 ( 65nm kentsfield CPU 95/105w) at 3.6Ghz will definitely require a much better heat sink and fan than the artic cooling freezer 7 pro that he currently has on his E6300 (45nm wolfdale CPU 65w) at 3.6Ghz which will mean another £20 or £30 on top of the £60 for the q6600. So thats £80 to £90 on an upgrade that will still leave him with only 4Gb of ram on an ageing socket 775 system which isn't going to actually give much better performance than his currant system in the games he actually plays.

but thank you for the comments anyway.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

OK my sons machine is currently running a Intel Pentium e6300 overclocked to 3.6 Ghz on a p31 ds3l motherboard with 4 Gb of DDR2 ram and a Nv260gtx (was a NV8800gs)

He plays loads of various games, including a lot of WOW and D3. Also half life 2 deathmatch, LFDead2, LOL and minecraft. Now he was complaining of very low FPS in D3, LOL and minecraft and yet WOW was OK, so I upgraded his previous Nv 8800gs to his currant 260GTX. Frame rates improved slightly but not to a point that made D3 any more playable.

Now I was thinking of a new CPU board and memory, something like....

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £49.99
1 x ASRock H61M-GS Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Micro Motherboard £38.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED38192M1600HC11DC) £29.99
Total : £118.97 (includes shipping : FREE).



but I'm not totally convinced that it will be a significant step forward if one at all judging by this.... (note this doesn't take into account the overclock)

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/406?vs=94

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

One of my mates has a Phenom II X6 1045T and an HD4830 and seems to be able to run the D3 reasonably well. D3 only really uses 2 threads IIRC.

I have a Core i3 2100 and an HD5850 1GB and can run the game at maximum settings at 1680X1050 at around 100FPS. It sometimes can dip to around 80FPS and even for short periods lower. However,D3 has been known to stutter at times and this is more down the the game AFAIK.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

D3 does also run OK on lower end hardware too.

I recently tested it on on the HD6530D IGP found in the AMD A6-3670K.

The game was run at 1440X900 at High settings with shadows and clutter switched off. Using FRAPS,I did a three minute run through two areas in Act I. The first was through the Old Ruins and the fields surrounding it . The second was the Cemetary of the Forsaken which has numerous crypts. Both areas have a decent number of spawned enemies.

An overclocked E6300 and a GTX260 should be fine IMHO.

 

[andybird123]

as you rightly mention in your first post, the G620 will not be much of an upgrade from his current CPU and certainly won't allow the GTX260 to produce any higher frame rates than it already is, you would be better off waiting till you can afford the cheapest 1155 quad core you can find even if it's second hand - this will be about an extra £60-70 on the list you produced at the top... but then you are only talking another £30 and you can get a brand new 2500k which can then be overclocked in the future

ultimately, even after this full upgrade, he is still going to be needing a better graphics card than the 260 to bring big improvements in more modern games

pretty much everything in his PC would be considered obsolete so at some point you/he are going to have to bite the bullet and replace the whole thing if you/he seriously want a big improvement in frame rates

unless as CAT points out you can pin his current problems in specific games down to needing driver updates or a windows reinstall or something

 

[bru]

Thank you all for your comments.

It would seem that a CPU/MB upgrade that will fit within the sort of budget I was thinking (£120) isn't going to solve his D3 performance issues judging by what has been said above, also after reading this review. Maybe its a memory issue as he is always running several things at once including skype, steam and sometimes even league of legends as well as D3, I will have to check.

 

[JonSmith]

Thank you all for your comments.

It would seem that a CPU/MB upgrade that will fit within the sort of budget I was thinking (£120) isn't going to solve his D3 performance issues judging by what has been said above, also after reading this review. Maybe its a memory issue as he is always running several things at once including skype, steam and sometimes even league of legends as well as D3, I will have to check.

As I suspected. Did it not occur to you that running two games at once was the cause of the problems? Sometimes they still render even if the game is minimised. Tell him that it's slow because he is misusing it, and he should close one game before opening the other. Skype and steam are fine as they don't consume that much RAM or processor cycles. He probably has the graphics details on maximum as well, which doesn't suit such a system.

Back in the day I had a kyro 1 graphics card without TnL on it, I used to have hours of fun trying to bodge the more modern games to run on it. Then I got a 9600 pro which made it less fun by running everything perfectly .

 

[bru]

Yes I have told him hundreds of times to close down stuff he isn't using, and I haven't seen a 17 year old yet that actually listens to their parents, but with all that aside I have tested his machine myself and it runs D3 fairly poorly, even though i haven't tested it on inferno difficulty which is where he says hes getting the worst slowdowns.

I wasn't saying that he always runs two or more games/programs at once but I have seen him do that before. I will have to get a log of the memory usage over a typical nights gaming to see if more memory might help.
Suggestions as the best way to check memory usage that will log it to a file so I can see if more memory will help?

 

[JonSmith]

One of the easiest things you can do is check CPU usage using the resource monitor in task manager (under windows 7 and vista). You can break it down by process to see if anything is hogging resources. AV programs like Norton are notorious for this

Also, throttling due to excess heat can occur, so it's worth using something like HWmonitor to check the core temps whilst running the games. Wouldn't be the first time I've seen a loose 775 heatsink cause problems.

 

[bru]

Heat is a good point, ill have to check.
As for resource monitor it only show memory usage at that moment in time I really need something that will log it so I can look at it latter.