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 :D
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.

[mbox_bob]

If you setup a round robin CPU strategy, more cores is going to be better. - vote 1 AMD.
If you don't and throw in all cores (usually because you are limited on cores), then IPC is going to be better - vote 1 Intel.
If you need more processing for a single thread, GHz and IPC matter. vote 2 Intel.
If you need more threads, and as long as the GHz is about 3 - 3.5. vote 2 AMD.
If you are money savvy. vote 3 AMD.
If you are not money savvy. vote 3 Intel.
If you are a brand fan. vote either way.

mmmmm. damn hard to know which way to go. TR's have some interesting quirks to them, but overall performance is pretty decent bang for buck, if a little down on Intel cpus in certain scenarios. That said, not very many reviews focus on multiboxing, so don't quite put them under the same level of diverse strain that multiboxing does, which impacts both CPU and GPU, and floods pretty much all it can in memory and disk I/O. Multiboxing is a funny conundrum that would actually test hardware fairly well, but no well known hardware reviewer out there does it (reviews on it that is).

Personally, I don't think you could go wrong. BUT, I don't have a TR. If I was to fund a new system, I probably would have a TR. My normal use cases do not warrant the extra money for a Intel CPU (video rendering is an area where intel have an advantage), and I could better spend that cash elsewhere, like GPU/RAM/NVMe/food for my starving children.

[Thorsbrew]

Thanks for reply.

Yes these were my thoughts as well. Especially about the CPU strategy functionality in isboxer and what you said about if i need more processing on a single thread. Which was one of my questions if i did actually need more processing power per thread with my intended usage or if more cores are better (and considering its not all that big of a performance difference per thread in comparison to the performance increase from more cores if they can be used).

I just wanted to see if there were any non obvious things that i was missing. Such as i said before if the cpu strategy can make it use the other cores well even though the games are single threaded. And any other quirks
such as the way TR uses the game mode setting to split the cores in half in a 4+4 CCX config. Ryzen 2700x does something similar. And if this would affect the way isboxer can utilize the cores. Explained here https://www.anandtech.com/show/11726/retesting-amd-ryzen-threadrippers-game-mode-halving-cores-for-more-performance Or even the way games and anything else handles this in general. Part of the reason amd benefits from high speed ram. Seems to me that quirks such as these might be what sometimes make AMD performance and compatibility irregular. And i question if there is also less coding for dealing with any of these vs how well people optimize for intel. I'm really not well versed on the answers to those thoughts.

It's never as straight forward as a simple google search of performance, IPC, ghz or whatever lol

[mbox_bob]

If you are multiboxing, I wouldn't be turning on game mode. Defeats the whole purpose of having many cores. If anything, I'd be setting up so each game could only use the threads of one CCX (which is effectively what Game Mode does, but it does it by disabling CCX's rather than using thread affinity which is what ISBoxer does). Then all you do is assign games to alternate CCX's so you spread the load where you want it.

And no game designed in the last 15 years or so is truly single threaded. Sometimes they favour a single thread, but even the most basic apps tend to spin up several threads at a time.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The difference between AMD and Intel if both are well above average spec recommendations is going to be tough to quantify.

The difference between AMD and Intel at borderline speeds and with the rest of your system all borderline components is going to be significant.

Looking back through this thread, I see 6 AO clients. How many cores get utilized when running a single AO client? If the answer is "2" then you're going to start doubling up on the 9900k after the 4th client. With the 1950x, they can all run dedicated 2c/4t each. Assuming the single-client performance is the same on both and there are no compatibility issues to deal with on the AMD, the AMD would benefit you more from a raw power perspective.

All that aside, the assumption is that the AMD is as good at resource sharing as the Intels. We have some very limited anecdotal data around here about this but it is really skinny on detail and not done in the fashion of a pure "only changing the CPU, all other components are the same" benchmark, so it's really hard to say how much better a 1950x would be versus a 9900k. With like 20+ game clients, I think it would heavily favor the higher core count, but at 6, it's tough to guess.

[Thorsbrew]

Thanks. Yeah im skipping intel this time. Although you mention 20+ game clients...even on a 16 core that seems harsh. Im not getting the greatest performance with 6 clients on a 4.7ghz 4790k (15 fps background, 60 foreground and i usually get 30-45 on foreground right now, and im wanting to add 2 more clients). My SLI 970s are running about 60% so that shouldnt be it, at least from a pure performance perspective. Ram is free. I hope this CPU upgrade will do it. Although i would also consider grabbing a used 1080 ti if necessary, like if i need more vram. But its only using 2-3gb. The thing is though that people say how much resources are being used but im not sure that says it all as i know with ram resource management can minimize ram usage but if you have more it will use it and be able to access more more quickly. Id think the same would hold true for Vram. Not sure though. I dont think just looking at how much is being used really tells the whole story as to what can be used.

[WOWBOX40]

if your cpu usage is at 100%... your ram usage is maxed...and your vram usage is maxed.... either will limit your fps, as you are litterarly capped. You cant create more free resources at that point.

If you have to run two games at the same cpu cores instead of having 1 game dedicated to 2 cores, you will also have reduced performance available. 1 cpu core and its 1 hyperthreaded core doesnt mean 2 cores, its more like 1,3 in performance. Your cpu have "1,3 x 4" available and you are running a lot of games on it. That your mains fps dips to 30 makes sense.

Thats it. In a nutshell.

To overcome this, you can either get more computer resources and or play with the settings to try tweak a bit more fps out of it. Though if i were you, i would get a lot more cpu cores.

[Apatheist]

I was debating this exact issue until recently. Someone ( Mirai, I believe) mentioned in the thread I created that the 9900K was due to be released shortly. I did a little research and discovered that Intel will be refreshing the entire Coffee Lake line shortly (Q4-2018, supposedly.)

Since then I've decided to hold off a little on upgrading and wait for the i9-9920X or 9940X. Higher cache, higher clocks 12cores/24threads with Intel IPC & I'm fairly sure should outperform the TR2950X significantly across the board for boxing and single threaded use.



Something I've been wondering lately that's kind of unrelated to this thread but does anybody know if Lax considered leveraging the onboard graphics available on many Intel CPU's? I've read that the UHD Graphics 630 (https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/uhd_graphics_630) is sufficient to run a WoW client by itself. I don't propose to use it for that task but I wonder if there's some way to use it as a resource to alleviate some processing power.