cpu and mb upgrade ideas

[pinotnoir]

That CPU and MB is a very expensive upgrade for a small gain in performance. I would recommend looking up some comparison reviews on the amount of performance you are gaining with that upgrade. Unless you have money to burn I would put it into a better card. The new AMD 290 cards are the best bang for the buck at $399. You can go higher to 500-700 cards but the gain just does not pay out for the extra money in my opinion. I have the Corsair H80i cooler with a 3770k processor and Asus P8 Z77 Pro V motherboard and my chip runs great at 4.5ghz. That cooler is amazing keeping my cpu around 40C with 11 Eve Online games open and all my other applications running on the other monitor. The Asus Rampage is an amazing board. Having purchased a Rampage II years ago I just cannot justify the price when the more affordable boards do just about everything I need without spending hundreds more.

Bump that CPU you have up with some conservative overclocking and you should be happy.

[Ualaa]

I haven't looked at the 4930K chips.
A few years back, I upgraded to a 3930K based system.

At that point, the Asus Rampage IV was the top motherboard for the enthusiast (who would overclock and generally tweak for maximum effect).
I'd imagine the current Asus Rampage (or if its the same board entirely) would be a good board.

I personally wasn't going for more than a modest overclock.
I ended up going with the Sabertooth X79, as it had the features I wanted, and was a bit cheaper.
No point in paying for a premium overclock board, when not planning on using those extra features.




As far as clock speed goes, a 3930/4930 isn't that much different than a 2600/4770; when playing a small number of clients, you're not going to see major differences.

The big gain is going from 4 physical cores (+4 logical cores) to 6 physical cores (+6 logical cores).

If you're five boxing, that is a physical core per client (plus an extra core for anything else you have running in the background), which should be an improvement if CPU is at all a bottleneck.
Down the road, if you want to play more clients (whether in WoW or another game), having the better ratio of physical cores to game clients is a major benefit.

[CD82]

i am wondering how well the amd 290 video card will benifit with it having 512bit.
where my current card has only 256 bit.. and im wondering if i will gain better video performance from it
then what my current card does

maybe put the cpu and mb upgrade off untill the 8core comes out..

[MiRai]

i am wondering how well the amd 290 video card will benifit with it having 512bit.
where my current card has only 256 bit.. and im wondering if i will gain better video performance from it
then what my current card does

That's a tough call because my GTX 580s have a nice 384-bit memory bus, and one of the problems I had with the GTX 680s was that they only used a 256-bit memory bus. When benched against the AMD 7xxx cards, the lower memory bus seemed to be an issue at really high resolutions. There was also a lot of complaints from multiple hardware communities at the time about the GTX 660 because it only came with a 128-bit 192-bit bus which is pretty weak -- The GTX 760, on the other hand, comes with a 256-bit bus.

Now, I would guess that most people that multibox are playing with all of their clients in either 1920x1080, 1680x1050, or a very similar resolution, but you have to take that number, multiply it together, and then multiply it by the number of accounts you're playing and that's how many pixels you're trying to push down a single memory bus.

AMD cards have always had a wide memory bus on them because Eyefinity is capable of running five (or six?) monitors at once, whereas, nVidia's Surround only works across three monitors, but I've always stuck with nVidia cards myself because I like what their drivers allow me to do.

There are other factors that come into play like foreground/background FPS, video settings, and whatever else, but I think when I upgrade again I'm personally going to stick with a 384-bit memory bus or better -- That's just me, though.

[CD82]

hmm so it might not hurt to try the 512 bus.. i just run two monitors
now when you say (I like what their drivers allow me to do.) do you tweak them or what can you explain a bit more please?

this current card is the first nvidia card i have owend in a long time.
i have always been an amd card fan this 680 is nice but.
i might make the switch back to amd and tryout there R9 290 card..

as far as the creators of the card when i ran my amd cards Sapphire was they way to go..
but im hearing good thing about the Asus amd cards would they work better with my Asus MB??
im really curious if this is going to help me perform a bit better both monitors i run are 1920X1080..
when i run just two accounts both monitors are full screen..
but when i run 3 to 5 i have the window layouts set small..

still trying to find the right path here to go i see some different options
get a new card and liquid cooler now and wait and get a new mb and 8 core cpu next year
with my set up now i have ran 5 but ive not really checked cpu load like with task manager an such..

[MiRai]

now when you say (I like what their drivers allow me to do.) do you tweak them or what can you explain a bit more please?

It means I can use third-party tools like NVidia Inspector to tweak a bunch of settings that I normally wouldn't be able to through most games' video options. I know that AMD has similar tools, but because of however they develop their drivers, AMD users don't have the same options.

With third-part tools I have access to:

• Forcing SGSSAA (my favorite thing in the whole wide world)
• Forcing FXAA (NVidia-only technology)
• Forcing higher levels of MSAA/Anisotropic Filtering/Texture Filtering/Ambient Occlusion
• Force on/off VSync
• Force SLI in games that don't officially support it
• Adjust the FPS limiter
• Adjust the GPU's power management
• And more

The above list is just an example and what's available really depends on the game, the engine that it was built with, and the API(s) it uses. Some of that stuff is available through the basic NVidia Control Panel, but some of it definitely requires a third-party tool. A lot of it is pretty experimental, but I love tinkering with things like this to really get the absolute best visuals my hardware can handle. For the most part, this is while playing games solo since forcing settings to be enabled beyond what the game's settings allow can easily drop your performance in large amounts, but that's why I always try to have the best GPUs that I can afford.

[CD82]

ok got ya i understand now
now in one of your screen shots in your new build post i do thin it was the one.
you had i guess an addon that showed your cpu temps is that something you created with lua?
or is there an addon like that out there on curse or wow matrix?

hmm wonder if i might tinker with something like that with this card i have now?

[MiRai]

ok got ya i understand now
now in one of your screen shots in your new build post i do thin it was the one.
you had i guess an addon that showed your cpu temps is that something you created with lua?
or is there an addon like that out there on curse or wow matrix?

hmm wonder if i might tinker with something like that with this card i have now?

It's MSI Afterburner with certain properties selected to show up in the OSD. Not all games play nice with it, especially if you're using Inner Space, but WoW does happen to work well with it.

[CD82]

ok thank you very much for the tool info..

maybe i can get some other people to chime in on the amd card r 290..
the 512 bit has me very curious im sure its a nice upgrade from my video card.
and i would hope it would increase my performance some

[Kicksome]

I get much better performance on a i7-4930K OC to 4.0 ghz with a GTX 680 and a raid 0 2x250 gig (samsung evo) SSD setup. Just 2 drives total in the machine in raid 0.

Than a i7-3930K overclocked to 4.2 with a GTX 690 (fastest bench marked card on the nvidia site, even faster than titan) and a single dedicate gaming SSD.

Both have 32 gigs memory.

I'm starting to think the Raid 0 SSD makes a decent difference with tons of wow's open.

Just a note - the i7-4930K uses a different socket, so you can't just pop it in your existing motherboard. It can also use up to 64 gigs memory.