Upgrade Suggestions/Specs

[Thorsbrew]

Hi guys. I see someone just posted a similar question but as I have more to ask I didn't want to hijack his thread.

I'm long overdue for a system upgrade. Going to be upgrading my GPU as soon as the RTX series launches and then the CPU perhaps in octoberish when the new intel line launches. Currently sitting on a 4790k and 2x SLI GTX 970s. Even for only 6 instances of Anarchy Online this system isn't cutting it running on the games new engine. Even with settings turned down and background windows set to 15fps my foreground can sometimes drop into the 30s.

For the CPU I was wondering what would be better with multiboxing in mind. Assuming the new 9900k is going to launch somewhere around the $500 mark do you think the 12 core AMD 1920X (which is $500 on newegg right now) would be better than a newly launched 8 core 5ghz (apparent boost, and since i'm watercooled I can reach that if not more) 9900k? I multibox 6 and occasionally 8 instances of Anarchy Online. I know it's ideal to have 1 physical core for each instance (in that case how much worse would a non hyper threaded 8 core 9700k be compared to one with HT?). 12 cores allows me those 8 instances per core and more room for anything running in the background. With 8 cores i have limited background room. Obviously the intel is better for single gaming but i ask for MB (though if the answer is its not gonna be an appreciable difference then id rather more single IPC for other stuff).
I know theyre not out yet but lets just assume based on say a current 8 core intel on the enthusiast line. Point is 8 core high IPC intel vs more core lower IPC amd. Or even have more room to spare if I wanted to bump that to 10 instances or whatever. I'm wondering if 8 cores leaves me little room, and even less if i add more instances. Or are there even any intel enthusiast line CPUs around this price to consider. Or soon to be released ones? (I also love that they are finally soldering the IHS, i'm too much of a chicken to delid).


Onto the GPU. Maybe even a bigger bottleneck than the CPU. Perhaps due in large part to limited Vram (this game isnt well optimized with their graphics engine). I'm looking at going for an RTX card when they launch. And if rumors hold true thatll be this monday. And rumors also say that the Ti variant, 2080Ti, may launch alongside the others. That's virtually unprecedented to have the Ti so soon. One questions why, perhaps the performance boosts arent so great. Also since they are still on 12nm. I'd ideally prefer to wait for 7nm but if thats going to be 2 years off then that's not an option (not going navi).

So the question is, RTX 2080Ti or 2 SLId RTX 2070s? On my last system upgrade I had a similar dilemma, GTX980 or 2 GTX 970s. I went 2 970s. The extra 3gb of vram on the 2080Ti makes me feel im better positioned for another 2-5 year upgrade cycle and im shooting myself in the foot if i get 8gb 2070s (especially considering the pace of increasing vram requirements, i was expecting 16gb on this lineup). On the other hand we're looking at nearly confirmed 4352 (iirc) cuda cores on the 2080ti vs i think 3k'ish on the 2070 and that gives you at least 6k'ish cuda cores with 2 of them. Even considering a little scaling loss its a lot better. And my game does work with SLI when enabling AFR2.


Thanks for everyone who read my post. Always long posts. I always write as i think and it always ends up being long lol.

PS: With the tariffs potentially hitting on the 23rd and the new RTX launching on monday the 20th I want to jump on these now. Sucks for the CPU side of things though.

PSS: I'm going to be needing a full cover water block so should I just go straight for a founders edition to ensure compatibility?

[WOWBOX40]

Hmm, if i were you i would try run the max amount of games you are able to, on your current machine, while being very very satisfied on how they run and play.

Then, start up (eh..was it HW info 64?, im not at home, but its able to log realtime min, current and max figures/numbers: reset all values after logged in into the games, and then play for f.ex 1 hour) and then afterwards find out how many cores/threads you are using...the max % load on the cpu....the max amount of RAM used...the max amount of VRAM used...the max % load of the grafixcard.
It can also show temps for everything.

When you have these numbers, you should hopefully be able to calculate the upgrade parts you need as a minimum to run everything to your future likeing. If you want, you could also make a small extrabuffer by picking a little bit better gear than that.

F.ex:
On wow, i prefere to play all on 1080p, 60 + fps front, 30 fps back. Good settings on main and lowest on the others, except a few settings, which i turn up a bit. For each 5 accounts i use a dedicated pc: 2 threads for each game on a 6 core/12 threads i7. The two first cores i leave for system. Then 32 gb RAM, a random ssd and a gfx card with 6 gb VRAM. And the best air cooler i can fit for the cpu. Running them at 4 ghz is fine, i try do a little bit of overclocking, if the cooler handles it and its stable.
If i were to build a machine today, to make it a little more futureproof, i would get a cpu so that each game get dedicated 4 cores and get a gfx card like the 1080 or so. But it doesnt look like i have to upgrade these for wow in the coming years, so il save my money for other things

[Thorsbrew]

Thanks for the reply.

So by saying 4 threads per game you are suggesting that the 24 thread AMD i mentioned would be better for this than the 16 thread intel?

Although posting this now nvidia just released the skinny on their new gpu's. The pricing is laughable. I won't be getting that. And I'm not sure its worth it to get a 2-3 year old (how long now lol) pascal. Im thinking about just waiting for 7nm on the gpu side of things. Navi is launching with 7nm early next year I think, so nvidia shouldnt be far behind. Probably why theyre trying to milk the hell out of us now. As well as why theyre releasing the Ti right away, which is unprecedented.

[Thorsbrew]

Reopening this thread as I still have some questions. I'm now playing anarchy online with 6 accounts and I am getting spotty performance, glitchy load times and low fps with my current setup. I will also quite possibly be increasing that to 8 accounts soon as well.

For the CPU I'm pretty sure I've decided i'm getting the 9900k when it launches hopefully next month. Am I right in going with this even over something like the amd threadripper 1920x with 4 more cores? I really would like to know if the somewhat weaker but more cores will be decidedly better than an 8 core 9900k (especially since i'll likely be using 8 accounts). I tend to lean away from amd as i've used them a few times before and things never just *work* together like they more often do on intel and nvidia. Be that mobo or whatever. It's not a fanboy thing, it's just my real world experiences. But if those extra cores will be extremely important for my case i'd like to know. I don't want to miss out because of a bottleneck if its very valuable and a waste not to pony up.

On the GPU front I'm still sitting on my 2x SLI GTX 970s. The gpu usage itself is not an issue in this game. SLI works with AFR2 enabled and i usually use around 50-60% usage with 6 instances. My question is the 4gb vram. Is this the bigger issue here? Certain areas of the game can take quite a while to load after zoning despite my recent upgrade to a 1tb crucial mx500 ssd. And it just isnt generally smooth. So i'm feeling that may be the vram limitation. So:

Is my first bottleneck here going to be the limited 4gb vram on the 970s? If even after upgrading to 32gb ram and one of these cpus will i not get much improvement because of these gpus limited vram? If thats the case im thinking i shouldnt bother waiting until next year for hopefully 7nm as I was planning on and just grab an 11gb 1080 Ti now (i was already planning $800 for an RTX 2080 Ti but they made a joke of themselves).


Really appreciate anyones answers!

[Kicksome]

Is this the bigger issue here? Certain areas of the game can take quite a while to load after zoning despite my recent upgrade to a 1tb crucial mx500 ssd. And it just isnt generally smooth. So i'm feeling that may be the vram limitation.

You might want to consider a M.2. NVMe drive. They are ~4x faster than a SSD drive and they have direct access to PCIe lanes , and just a bit more expensive - even if you just get a 128gig one for games only. Almost all new motherboards support them.

When you zone to a new area, it needs to load all the assets from the drive e.g. skins, terrain, all the items people are wearing in a certain radius around you etc...

To double check if it would make any sort of difference, you can open taskmanager in windows 10. Go to the performance tab - > select "Open Resource Monitor" at the bottom. Then

Select the "Disk" tab - then find the graph on the right that is your drive - and says "Queue Length". If you watch this, and other indicators on that tab, while you load into a zone, if the Queue Length spikes significantly, it's an indication you should look at it more closely to see if that's a bottleneck. And if it's pushing 100's of MB/s when you zone, that's another indication you should look more closely to see if the SSD is the bottleneck.

So I'm not saying it will make a difference, but it's something you can look at and determine if that's a problem before you buy. There are ways to see if the disk is (at least one) of the bottleneck(s), I just don't know off-hand how to tell you in windows what that number would be in the graph/grid. There are a bunch of unix utils to easily show it, but those won't help you on Windows.

It would also be helpful to know what resolution you are running your game clients at exactly. That would let us estimate the amount of video memory you're using and how many pixels you're trying to push. I might have missed this in the posts above.

[Thorsbrew]

Hi. My mobo doesn't support nvme so id be upgrading anyway. Only running 1080p.

It makes a lot of sense to me that limited vram could be the (or a) cause (especially 1 area in particular that takes forever to load). I know if youre limited on ram it slows things down while moving things in and out of the paging file (im not), but im not sure if this is the same with vram. Also not sure if this would affect actual FPS after things are loaded. Also would still like to know what CPU to get seeing as the 9900k is coming out any day now and we just had news about basin falls refresh which might be a consideration as well. Cheapest would be that 12 core amd i mentioned but im leary of amd from past experiences. If its good though id consider it.

[WOWBOX40]

Start up the relevant version of HWmonitor for your pc.
Make sure you track min and max values of all the cpu cores usage, ram, vram and temps. It will tell you how much vram you are using out of the total 4gb you have available etc.

Load up 1 game in the settings you want. I assume it has assigned 2 cores. Clear all values in HWmonitor. Now play a bit and then take a look at the values in HWmonitor. Will your pc cope running x 6 games without ideally reaching 90% constant usages of cpu, ram and or vram?

Alternativly run all the 6 games and get the numbers. Once you have these, it will be easier to figure out which system you need to upgrade to.

If any of the values are maxed often while you play (after you have cleared the values, once all the games have fully loaded), it indicates a possible bottleneck on said pc part.

Which means, if all you want to do is play 6 games, you might be able to keep some parts = money saved. Like, maybe you can keep the 970's?

If we cant get these spesific numbers, its hard to help you out, cost effective.

[Thorsbrew]

For the sake of argument let's just assume I am out of power and CPU bottlenecked. I just want to know if more cores (12 core threadripper) is stronger than 8 a bit stronger intel cores when it comes to multiboxing. The answer for regular gaming is obvious, intel.

[Kayley]

I think the independent reviews for the 9th gen Intel Cpus are out in 4-5 days. I'm sure the boys/girls can give a more accurate answer (based on your budget) then
At least by waiting, you now have the price drop on the 2700x

[Thorsbrew]

So noone knows if more slightly weaker amd cores are better or worse than less slightly stronger intel cores (8 vs 12 cores, 9900k vs 1920x)? Or put another way...if isboxer is able to properly spread the load between the cores well so each client can get their own core and actually use all that power even though these older games themselves dont use multi-threading well on a per client basis (basically if each core or 2 is like a mini computer for each client that will only use that anyway)?

Hopefully that made sense and was more clear.

I'd really like to place my order before these american tariffs hit very soon. And the 9900k launched more expensive than expected. Its now basically the same price as the 1920x.

Thanks!


Edit: Actually scratch that pricing. I could have sworn when i checked when i started this thread the 1920x was $550. Now the 16 core 1950x is $680 which is only $100 above the 9900k at $580 and the 12 core 1920x is only $380....wow. Although that still doesnt change my base question. But wow. If you guys can confirm my hunches intel may well have lost me with their pricing thinking they can get away with it, even though i was prepared to pay the premium, just not this much, they went too far. Double the cores amd for only $100 more or 50% more cores for 2/3 the price.