PC Gaming and Upgrades

[Lucid1]

My current PC is one that I custom built myself waay back in 2008. Through much research, and a lot of money, the components I chose have allowed me to make incremental upgrades over the years and keep my machine viable for gaming and video streaming. I consider myself lucky that I've gotten almost 10 years out of this rig without any component failures aside from a HDD failure.

Well, I'm now at that point where my tired old machine just can't handle 4K content and the newer games coming out. So, it's time to upgrade again. The problem I'm having now is that my "research" isn't providing definitive answers about the longevity I will get from components. I know that SSD's, newer processors and memory will provide a substantial performance increase, it's just that I'm not getting that warm and fuzzy feeling inside about the longevity I should expect from a new system as I did when I built my current system.

Is anyone else here on the fence about upgrading? And if you're choosing to wait, what exactly are you waiting on?(besides money, of course).

 

[DJ_Pioneer]

CPUs have become more tricky after the release of Sandy Bridges launch in 2011 not much happened for a couple of years because of AMD's failed Bulldozer launch there wasn't much of an incentive for Intel to do much except give us 5-10% increased CPU performance with each new CPU generation. However with death of Intel's Tick-Tock release model and AMD's the launch of the Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs earlier this year the CPU market has finally become interesting again. It looks like the push is going to be towards more cores for the foreseeable future so in that case If you want to build something right now with longevity in mind I would pick the Ryzen 1700X. Even though at the moment Intel makes the best CPU's for gaming I am of the belief that games in the future will be better optimized when it comes to multi threading which will make the Ryzen 1700X last a little longer. Also more cores is great for encoding video streams.

GPU wise on the 7th this month Nvidia released the first graphips card of the Volta micro architecture, the Titan V. Volta gaming cards of the same are expected to follow in early 2018 I expect we will have some news about those during CES, but a price increase compered to the price the Pascal cards had when they were released is to be expected. AMD is going to release their next generation of graphics cards based on the Navi micro-architecture during 2018 probably late Q2 or early Q3, not much is known about them at the moment. Longevity is hard with graphics cards, I would suggest picking up a used GTX 1070 when the Volta gaming cards releases.

Motherboards is a little more boring look for one that supports the CPU you want and lets you overclock it. The only difference between the motherboards is what features they have such as the amount of USB ports, SATA ports and stuff like that so buy one that has the features you require.

With Ram we a are probably not going to see anything interesting happen for some time so you are safe to buy any DDR4 sticks that are 2666Mhz and has good timings and they should last you quite a while at least 16GB is recommended. Memory prices have been quite high with producers trying to meet the demands of NAND memory for the phone market so prices are higher than they could otherwise be. Samsung is investing $18 billion in the memory chip production so prices are expected to start to decrease during 2018 but we are not likely to see any big drops in price until 2019. The recommendation therefore is to buy 16GB 2666Mhz of DDR4 from any manufacturer and then buy 16GB more when prices have dropped if there is a need for more RAM.

SSD's are having the same problems as RAM has with high prices due to a lack of memory modules. My recommendation is to buy a 500GB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 drive and use it as a main drive it has high enough read and write speeds to be relevant for at least three years and hopefully the prices on the bigger drives will have gone down. For any storage needs I suggest getting HDDs from Toshiba or Western Digital according to Backblaze they have had lower failure rates than Seagate's drives during the last couple of years and there isn't a huge difference in price.

For a PSU I would suggest the Corsair RM750x it is 750 Watts and has a 80 Plus gold certification so it should outlast any other components in your system.

A system based off my recommendations should last at least five but after that I would recommend into getting a new CPU and motherboard because after that the CPU will start bottle necking the system. With a system from 2008 My guess is that you are sitting on a Core 2 Quad and that can't have been much fun to use for gaming for the last five years or so.

 

[Lucid1]

Actually, this 10 year old system can still play games from very recent. A week or so ago I downloaded the Doom demo from 2016 and I was actually surprized that it ran at a playable framerate on Medium settings. Yes, I'm using a Q9550 Duo-Quad Core on an EVGA Mobo with 8 gigs of ram and a GTX-760 video card. Good Guess!

Since posting this I've went ahead and ordered a Z370 Pro4 board from ASRock, 8700K processor, GTX-1080 video card from EVGA, a nice new Mid-Tower Case from Cougar(Panzer-S), 800-watt PS and 250gig SSD from Samsung. The only thing that sucks is that the new chipsets(Z370) and processors wont allow me to install Windows 7. Seems MS is pushing everyone to upgrade to Windows 10. So that will be an added expense for the OS that I wasn't expecting. The ability to run/display 4K content is the main reason I'm doing this upgrade. Gaming is mostly secondary in terms of what games I play and the PC requirements to run most of them. But I should be safe either way.