GPU advice

Hello,

I am looking to build my first PC and I would like to keep it fairly affordable (in the $500-600 range). My goal with this PC is to be able to play all of the upcoming next-gen games without any trouble. Ideally the PC will be able to do this for at least the next 3 years. My question is, do you think that a radeon r9 270x would be capable of this? And if so, could you recommend an affordable CPU that won't bottleneck it?

For what your describing you might actually be better off just going for one of the new consoles. That card will be okay for now but I wouldn't hold my breath that it'll be able to play all next gen games without any trouble for the next 3 years. For budget CPUs I would go with an 8-core AMD chip, people will suggest Intel but they are better granted, but you'll at least have an 8-core CPU in your machine which no game even uses 50% of it right now as it is and its almost half the price of an i7. i5's I don't suggest because their longitivity is not great for the seeable future in my opinion no way. Going with an AMD will give you some extra cash to splash out on a decent GPU rather then struggling to find a happy medium between CPU/GPU pricing. Intel motherboards are also twice as much as AMD unless you buy a really shit one. Not too familia with the R9 270x but i believe its one of the weakest AMD GPUs in that new lineup. Might be better off going with the GTX 750 ti which runs Titan Fall well, thats all I know about the GTX750. Do a search online for GPU benchmarks and you should get a good idea of what price/performance ratio you can expect from the cards. Intel is the CPU you'd want, IF you can afford it, otherwise the AMD FX8320 or FX8350 are REALLY under-rated cpus and would be adequate for another 3 years.

Take a look at this chart - it's updated regularly.

http://www.logicalincrements.com/

I advise waiting and saving up a bit more money. In my opinion the 270x is the bare minimum GPU you should even begin to consider, leaving you under $400 for everything else. While doable, I don't think you're going to get quite the experience you are expecting from that budget. That's even if you spend $10 on a mouse & keyboard, use an existing display for your monitor, and get an MSDN copy of Windows for $10 instead of spending $100 on it.

@captainspider91: You are not going to be able to play all of the upcoming next-gen releases for at least three years on a budget of $600. A console is probably your best bet.

Anyone picking stuff based on that chart should note that Intel's Haswell line has been refreshed. It would be pretty pointless to buy something like the i5-4670 recommended there when the i5-4690 is now available at the same price point.

@vackillers said:

There's no point in getting an 8-core CPU just for the sake of having 8 cores. As you say yourself, games don't take advantage of those cores. AMD bet heavily on multicore performance paying off, and it really hasn't worked out for them. They haven't been competitive for years outside of their APUs at the super low budget end. I'm not sure what you mean about the longevity of i5s. i5s give excellent price/performance for gaming. i7s are a total waste of money for gaming. There is pretty much zero chance that a GTX 750ti is going to run even a slightly demanding title without trouble three years from now. I don't want to be rude man, but this is horrible advice.

@vackillers: Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate it!

@pcorb: Good point on the Devil's Canyon chips! Also agreed on the 750 Ti...that is really an entry level card that is already struggling with games that are already out. It is going to be severely obsolete in a year, let alone three years from now.

@pcorb: 8 cores might become more important now that both the Xbone and PS4 have 8 cores.

@corruptedevil: They might, but that's kind of speculative. By the time developers are taking full advantage of the new console architecture, any $600 PC will be obsolete anyway. If/when multithreading becomes common practice, buying an 8 core processor will make sense, but it really doesn't right now. You're always better off building the best machine you can get for your money today than trying in vain to futureproof your system.

@pcorb: Oh definitely, a $600 gaming pc is an oxymoron.

270x is amazing if 1080p is enough for you... affordable cpu that wont bottleneck it... i3-4130 is enough.. don't let people tell you otherwise but don't expect it to hold up if games start using all those cores(don't count on it yet) because as of right now it's better than the 8 core amd(for gaming) in many cases.

simple youtube search

Don't buy an fx 8320 or 8350 because the 8 cores are going to matter for future gaming (theres no way of telling if that will be true) buy it because its still pretty powerful (not brand new luxury sports car powerful like an i7 or a really good i5, but still powerful like a brand new car is) and you get a good amount of bang for your buck if your on a tighter budget. Still if you want the best out of pc gaming then you are going to have to shoot for a budget closer to a grand or watch for sales like I did, I got a build last year that normally would've been around $900-1000 for about $750, so its not tottaly impossible to build on a budget.

AMD/ATI offer a better price to performance ratio than Intel and nVidia. I have a 8350 and 7970 and they have been performing more than satisfactory. If you are willing to pay top dollar, go with Intel/nVidia, but if you are on a budget, AMD/ATI is the way to go.

@soldierg654342: I'm just one step under you with an 8320 and a 7950, haven't played crazy, fuck off tier, shit like the witcher 3 yet, but so far 97% of my games have been running perfectly.

@pcorb: totally respect your opinion. And I really wasn't sure on the GTX 750 TI, I just know it runs well for Titan Fall and that only just came out, all I have to go on for that. When it comes to the 8-core though yes nothing uses the full 8 unless your doing very specialized stuff like streaming, encoding, video or music editing stuff like that. I just wanted to give my opinion because of his very limited budget and what he was wanting it for, thus the best case scenario would be that. People do cream AMD for their lack of performance but with my 8320 I outperform most midranged I7s to be honest and for a CPU that is half the price of an I7 you can't really beat that. My experience with this chip has been nothing but absolutely outstanding and I haven't even overclocked it yet, its paired up with 16GB DDR3 1866 RAM and a GTX 760. Total price for the machine was barely over $800. Total bargin lol.

As I said before, totally respect your opinion, and thats the general concenses of most people, but with my personal experience with owning one, totally the opposite. FPS in things like BF4 on high is 60 / 40FPS on X-Rebirth (extremely hard to reach above 30) Minecraft with 15 mods and SEUS shaders at fullscreen 1920 is 60FPS / Crysis 3 is a steady 50 FPS on Ultra / Far Cry 3 is 60+ on Ultra / UT3 FPS is in the 100s with highest settings possible.

@vackillers said:

The FX-8320 isn't meant to compete against i7s. i7s are for CPU heavy work which makes use of multiple cores and hyperthreading. They're not made to provide good value for gaming.

The Intel equivalent chip would be the i3 4130, which is significantly cheaper than the 8320 (£79 vs £104 over here) and as you can see here, it out performs the 8350, which is a step above the 8320 and costs around £130.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be satisfied with the performance you get from your CPU, but AMD really does not offer good value with anything outside of their APU range.

I've got an 8350 @4.8Ghz and an R9 290 at basically stock settings (slight bump on core, not much on memory) and haven't run in to a game that I can't play at "max" (all details and effects maxed out and 2-4x AA in most games). If you go look at PCPER on youtube, a tech video channel that I like, they do a cost/performance breakdown of all the CPU's including the new devils canyon stuff from intel. Long story short, the most performance for your dollar in almost all cases is the 8350. Sure, you can get some extra FPS with an i7 or sometimes an i5 part, but it's rarely if ever the difference between playable and not and for a lot of people isn't worth the added cost.

AMD does in fact offer one of the best values for your dollar in CPU performance, and I would never compare an 8350 to an i3. Sure, in games that use only two cores (which are shrinking in number) performance may be similar. However, in anything that uses more, whether that is gaming, video encoding, content creation, etc, the 8350 punches way above an i3, and often above an i5 as well when programs can address all 8 cores. It's no i7, sure. But don't make it out to be on par with an i3.

There are current generation i3s which would be able to max out the same games when paired with a R9 290 (although in both cases I'd suspect the CPU would be a bit of a bottleneck). I'm making it out to be on par with an i3 because actual in-game performance is comparable in many instances to that of a Haswell i3. See these benchmarks of an i3-4340 paired with a R9 280x for example:

I dont mean to hijack the thread but I dont think its worth of its own thread. I want to upgrade for the Witcher 3. So sometime in Feb next year. Are their any new lines coming out that would push down cpu/gpu prices between now and then?

Uh... wow. Don't listen to these guys who say a $600 PC can't work, I'm using a 2-year-old $150 card and I can still play new games fine and better than a console. If you use a $100-200 card you'll just have to turn down settings sometimes, you won't be incapable of playing games.

@pcorb: Also worth noting though, is that that i3 and the 8350 are running at stock speeds. Overclock that 8350 and rerun that and see what happens. I bet that gap closes a lot.

@tribeard: That's true, but then you have to factor the cost of aftermarket cooling into your build, and suddenly the 8350 becomes a lot less budget friendly (and it's already more expensive than the i3 4340 to begin with).

These suggestions are mostly fine for running current games at console level framerates and resolutions. But if you want something that will last you 3 years then you are going to need to spend closer to $1000 and then expect to run far below max settings on games 3 years from now. My computer is about 4 years old and was $1500 when I got it including monitor. It wasn't just for games but the specs were a Radeon 5850 (brand new at the time), Core i7 920, and 6GB of RAM. I replaced the GPU a year later with a 560 ti 2GB. So that 3 year old graphics card today will run your average next gen game at no more than 30 fps on high settings at 1080p. I can't get anywhere near max settings or a flawless 60 fps at anything above medium settings. CPU's right now are rarely a bottleneck if you don't plan on going over 1080p and 60 fps, and for the price you want you simply aren't going to go higher than that. A Core i5 will likely serve you well for 3 years. By that time it will be limiting your framerate compared to a graphics card 3 years from now, but no graphics card under $300 will come anywhere close to bottlenecking a Core i5 or likely even a Core i3. As far as GPU goes, though, people will tell you that AMD gives you better performance per dollar and that is true to an extent, but AMD's drivers are awful, especially their OpenGL drivers. Look on the forums for the recently released Wolfenstein and you'll see countless complaints from AMD users blaming Id for making a broken game when it is AMD's fault for having straight up broken OpenGL drivers. People will debate that also but it is true. Plus Nvidia has several proprietary technologies that you'll actually want to use like PhysX, HBAO+, and TXAA. But the lowest you'll want to go as far as current Geforce cards go is a 760, which is something like $250 on its own which will leave you almost nothing for the rest of the computer and isn't even remotely future proof. For a card that will still hold up in 3 years you are going to want a 780 which costs $500 all on its own. Generally think of each new generation of graphics cards as pushing the previous lines cards back one level. So a 780 will likely be around as powerful as an 870 (next year's card), a 960 ti (2016's card) or a 1060/50 ti (2016's card). So in 2016 you'll be able to play most games on a mix of high and medium settings at between 40 and 60 fps.

If you really only want to spend $500 I would highly suggest waiting at least a year. We are still learning what the minimum specs are going to be for the average game this generation. Last time around a Geforce 8800 was the minimum card for 95% of games for the first 5 years of the generation and maybe 80% of games for the last couple of years. We just don't know yet what card will be the 8800 of this generation yet. Do yourself a favor. Be patient. Save up some more money and this time next year come back and ask the same question and people will be able to give you a better answer. Right now we just don't know enough to even say what parts to get in a $1000 computer that will last you 3 years. But I can say with 100% certainty that no $500 computer will run games at console quality 3 years from now.

@raven10: There's nothing wrong with playing games below high settings. And in comparison to a console, they'll likely be playing games on low 3 years from now, so medium settings will be an improvement.

@manlyburger: No, they won't. Console games are highly optimised, and over the lifecycle of a console developers will push that console to its limit and wring as much processing power as they can out of it. Take something like The Last of Us, for example. It looks far better than pretty much anything playable on even a very high end 2006 PC, let alone one bought for the same price as a PS3.

That's why if you're looking for something reasonably cheap, and with guaranteed longevity, consoles are probably your best option.

For 600 bucks you are seriously better off with a PS4, for 1500-1600 you can build a beast that will run everything now and for the next 2 years but that is just to low a starting point if you have to start from scratch.

Not saying it can't be done just saying it isn't worth it.

still think i made a (somewhat drunken) mistake with the 8350. also kind of sad that AC4 seems to look better on PS4 than on my 8350/R9 290. maybe a bit of overclocking will help.

battlefield 3 and 4 run smooth as shit though, so yaay?

Your system FAR exceeds the power of any console, even without overclocking. The 8350 is a fine processor. There have been some articles about how AC4 on PC suffers from some strange erratic frame rate issues even on high end systems, which really isn't a surprise given that it's an Ubisoft game. It's not you.

@manlyburger: That would be for a $1000 PC. At that point medium settings would likely be close to what consoles were doing, hence why I said you would need a $1000 PC. For $500 you'll be dealing with 720p at 20 fps on medium or low.

@ripelivejam: The 8350 isn't a "bad" chip by any means, and is very capable when paired with a decent GPU. There's just better stuff in the same price range. I doubt an overclock would help AC IV. The PC version of that game's just poorly optimised altogether.

@ripelivejam: if you have vsync on, turn it off. It caps the framerate to 30fps.

@pcorb: True, but that cooling solution will almost certainly be able to be used across upgrades, so while it still does cost money, it's not something you're going to probably have no use for/throw away next upgrade. Also, none of the stock coolers these days, particularly intel ones, are worth much of anything. So if you want to run without throttling at heavy loads, you probably are going to have to invest in aftermarket cooling anyway.

@tribeard: Both intel and AMD coolers are good enough at stock clocks in my experience. A bit loud for my liking, but they do the job. If you do decide to invest in it anyway, an FX-8350 + aftermarket cooler is still more expensive than an i3 4340 with the same cooler, and you're going to have to overclock and run much hotter to reach the same level of performance in anything that isn't heavily multithreaded. Haswell i3s are pretty much the best chips you can get under $200.

@pcorb: I guess my thing is that I use my rig for more than just video games. I do a lot of media encoding, some photoshop and a little bit of video editing too, and for those things the 8350 is more on par with a 3770k, so it's worth the slight trade off to me for pure gaming performance. If all you use the computer for is gaming and some web browsing and such, then I guess an i3 is an option, at least for now.

@pcorb: Half-Life 2 looks better than The Last of Us, and that's a game from 2005. There's marginal improvement in some areas and downgrades (a complete lack of anti-aliasing) in others compared to other PS3 games.

@raven10: I have a $150 card from 2 and a half years ago and I've yet to play anything close to 720p with less than 60FPS. If there will be some point where I'm playing multiplatform games with that performance, it's going to take a while.

@manlyburger: I seriously doubt many people would agree with you there.

For $740 you can play current games at medium-high or high settings, and probably play the next two years of games at somewhat lower settings. If you have some Win 7 or Win 8 cds and don't an OS you could build it for $680.

Orange is the New Black (What I would make myself if going super cheap)
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/MonkeyKing1969/saved/HmbwrH
Advantage to this is it sports a brand new mobo that will take the next five years of Intel chips no problem. (Probably) The base of this system is solid...even extremely attractive...but the cpu, gpu, and ram are basic. That means you can expand in the future..the case CAN take a full size card if you remove the drive bays...but really just putting a 6 inch version of modern cards will fit slicker than eel shit. That case and board are an investment, it is ITX sized, which is fashionable now. Some woudl say, "Spend all you money on the GPU!!!" But I think assthics matter with a nice case, a and that a littel extra RAM,

Even cheaper...but really barebones...getter' done style if you just want current games to run at 45fps to 50 fps
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/MonkeyKing1969/saved/LsF48d
The mobo on this is fine might even last through some Intel revisions, but it will dead-end a sooner. Yet, it would play games just as well. Not as fancy or as fun, but cheap and functional.

Definitely a lot of opinions in this thread lol... all good to be honest... I wouldn't compare an i3 to an 8350 though, its an intel so thread to thread speeds it will still be a little faster, Intel chips access data faster because you have the cpus that are dual threaded, where as AMD chips are out and out cores, so the AMD chips are able to handle more data, at a slightly slower rate, so when games start coming out and actually making use of more cores you see a significant increase in AMD performance over a dual core i3. As I said before I rival most mid-ranged I7s when it comes to FPS so yah I'm extremely happy and pretty future proof for the next 3 years and when its not upto notch, well, it was only 170$. not 300 so its an easy cheap upgrade for me not quite the same when going with intel. Intel is still the best I can defintely give in to that, but in an era where more actual cores is going to be a thing you'll need I wouldn't settle for an i3 and gamespot just did a good article on this very argument you should probably check out OP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewrPDqFuT3Y

You'll see in this video just how good intel is at specific software as it clearly woops AMDs ass on a lot of those CPU bechmarks if not all of them, but when it comes to real world gaming, there is absolutely nothing! between i7 and an FX8350. Very good side by side comparrison because a lot of the testing rigs that other websites do use the most expensive and best equipment on the market that most ppl will never be able to afford like 500$ motherboards. About the best advice I can show ya really beside my personal experiences.

You "rival most midrange i7s" because some i7s are six years old. The FX-8350 is rivalled (and beaten) by current generation i3s when it comes to FPS and price. It makes far more sense to buy the cheaper chip that outperforms the alternative today than speculate about if and when more cores will start to matter.

We've been hearing this "when games start using more cores" argument for years now, and here we are in 2014 with dual core i3's beating octo core FX chips. Buying a CPU because of the core count versus one that actually performs better in games seems like a bad move. In all likelihood those that buy an octo core chip today with the hopes of using those additional cores in the future will be upgrading again before games actually start taking advantage of more cores.

telling ya right now, an i3 does NOT out perform an 8-core CPU and you talk till you're blue in the face. It doesn't beat it in FPS especially in CPU intensive games like ROME II Total War and X-Rebirth. I dare you to post FPS on a little old i3 compared to an FX 8350. You are joking right? intels are better at handling data faster where as FX's can handle WAY more data at a time. Especially if you plan on doing anything like TwitchTV, or any stuff along side just playing games there is no way an i3 will out beat that cpu not in a million years. i3s are bottlenecked by the GPU plain and simple.

As far as the comment about games using mroe cores for years, yeah spot on m8, defintely a broken damn record I hear yeah, the problem with the last generation of games was the games themselves were held back because of the dramatic limitation those consoles had, so the PC ports were not as good as they should have been and now the new consoles have arrived with all the horsepower they can muster, both the X1 and PS4 have 8-core cpu's in them with at least 5 available for processing power for games. This will be the generation of multicore cpu's I can almost guarantee it. Games will be made and created to use many many more cores now then before, and the fact that both consoles are so close to PC architectures its safer to say more now then ever before that games are definitely DEFINITELY going to start using way more cores then before. The GPUs in the consoles are far from the best, not as good as I would have hoped so that raw processing power will have to comes from somewhere and whatever the GPU needs help with the CPU will take over. This is a given really. X-Rebirth is one of the first games of the new generation that really uses every single core you have and its still not enough (regardless of the issues that one game has with performance) Planetary annihilation is another that you will most likely need 32GB of RAM and minimum 4-core CPU if you have any hope in hell playing multiplayer. I couldn't even imagine the types of specs were are going to need for The Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition is another potential one. Star Citizen will use every core you have as does Elite: Dangerous because of the sheer amount of stuff that it's rendering in places like Asteroid fields. Multi cores are here and here to stay. While the i3 can do calculations faster, it is seriously going to struggle as a dual core cpu. We are afterall, looking for 3 years down the line for the OP not only just now. Price of the I3 is only a biscuit cheaper anyway, so not worth it when you consider what you get.

Well...you asked for this. I double dog dare you to raise me a series of benchmarks that favor the 8350, because I can't find any that do.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/intel-core-i3-4340-review/3/

"If you are building a system that is primarily for gaming, the Core i3 4340 will allow whatever video card you use to run at its full potential – there is no need to step up to a Core i5 or Core i7 CPU. The same could not be said for Ivy Bridge Core i3′s, or any AMD APU or CPU we have tested. Newer games seem to be even worse off, as Assassin’s Creed IV would only run at 60 FPS steadily with a Radeon R9 280X when either the Haswell Core i3 or Core i5 were used.

When considering other aspects of desktop performance, it’s not so cut and dry. The Core i3 4340 still only has two physical cores, and that holds it back sometimes, depending on the task. If you are doing something that is highly threaded, such as rendering with Cinema 4D (but not 3DS Max), then the Core i3 will fall behind. The same can be said for video encoding, audio encoding, and more. While Haswell allows it to perform very well, it will still fall behind CPUs with more physical cores. Other times, such as within Photoshop CS6 and the light tasks used throughout Windows that we tested with PCMark 8, the Core i3 4340 performs just about as well as any CPU.

Overall, Core i3 has never been as recommendable as it is now. It will definitely be mentioned on this site again, as we put together our next PC build guide. It will find its way in most gaming systems – you should only need to upgrade to a Core i5 is you do a lot of other intensive multithreaded CPU tasks."

Supported by numerous benchmarks...I'll include a couple:

Gallery

@vackillers: You realize that the i3 has Hyperthreading, right? Those chips have two cores, four threads...the performance in games like Rome 2 is incredible for a dual core chip. It actually destroys any AMD quad or octo core chips in Rome 2....again, the i3 is better for gaming in almost every circumstance than the 8350 or really any of their dual or quad core chips.

@mb: of course, its an intel chip so every chip is dual threaded. I have to strongly disagree with you that the i3 blows away the 8350. Absolutely no way.

http://www.cpu-world.com/benchmarks/browse/960_61,960_63,990_80,991_80,993_80,1030_96,1034_96,1035_96/?c_test=50&PROCESS=Show+Selected

http://www.cpu-world.com/benchmarks/browse/960_61,960_63,990_80,991_80,993_80,1030_96,1034_96,1035_96/?c_test=51&PROCESS=Show+Selected

http://www.cpu-world.com/benchmarks/browse/960_61,960_63,961_61,961_63,962_61,962_63,965_61,965_63,993_80,1026_96,1027_96,1030_96,1033_96,1034_96,1035_96,1084_96,1093_61/?c_test=51&PROCESS=Show+Selected

The last benchmark is very telling, clearly showing how comparable the 8350 is with basically only a 200 point difference between an the 8350 and an i7 3770k which is absolutely nothing. There is no way that an i3 is better then an i5, never lone an i7, and the 3770k is not that old either.

@vackillers: You're misinformed about hyperthreading.

i3 - 2 cores, 4 threads (Hyperthreaded)

i5 - 4 cores, 4 threads (Non HT)

i7 - 4 cores, 8 threads (Hyperthreaded)

The fact that most games aren't utilizing more than 2 cores or 4 threads is why the i3 is such a strong performer, and why it beats the 8350 in real world tests. For games it's virtually equivalent to an i5 or i7, and we all know how well i5's and i7's do against anything AMD is producing right now.

It appears as though you either completely missed the information that pcorb presented with real world game benchmarks, or just don't want to pay attention to it. As far as I'm concerned this conversation is over, when someone refuses to look at objective facts given to them in a clear and concise manner and instead chooses to respond with some information of their own, that isn't a discussion. It's one person convinced that they're right and refusing to listen even when presented with facts that prove otherwise.

Good day sir.