Getting the best performance on a tight budget?

oO_KoPiTe_Oo

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Basically I don't want to upgrade Mobo and i want the maximum game performance upgrade possible.

I've just ordered 8gb of Kingston HyperX Fury for £60

My Mobo supports PCIe 2.0 x4 and I was thinking about installing a Corsair 128GB Force LX just for my games. I want them running as smooth as possible.
I've seen a few reviews on retailers from people saying these controllers are not getting the performance they expected due to the fact they're not using a x4 slot, My board has a x4 PCIE 2.0 slot so does that mean i'm going to get the 560 MB/s from the SSD? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-004-SR
This would cost me around £80 in total but I need another drive. My 500gb fills up fast and games start to run real slow. I need a dedicated drive

As for the CPU, I can pick an i7-8xx/9xx up from Ebay for under <£50, Is it worth spending like £70+ for a 960, would the performance justify it. How much extra FPS would this give me from my current i5-650 in games say with my 5870 atm???
I don't intend to upgrade my Mobo until the i3/i5/i7 series are done with. When will that be btw, they've been going for so long. After broadwell?

I'm hoping to spend a decent amount on a gpu but want to get the best bang for buck. I want to get an r9 290 but when I think about it. If I can pick up a 7970 for £100 is a 290 worth twice that for an extra 10fps?

So that comes to

Kingston HyperX Fury for £60
SSD Controller + Corsair Force LX 128gb - £80
CPU Let's say £60
7970 = £100
 
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What resolution do you game at? What games do you play/want to play? How many games do you want to install? What motherboard do you currently have? What is your actual budget?


I assume by the fact you have looked at controllers that your motherboard does not support SATA III, if it's the one in your sig it also doesn't support PCIe 2.0 x4 according to Asus.

If you are indeed on a tight budget then I would absolutely not buy components that will only be useful to your current build. The only way to get the most out of the money invested in your hardware is to buy decent stuff and use it for as long as possible. Getting a 960 or whatever even for £50 is pointless because if your motherboard dies or you change it you have a useless piece of silicon. Sticking with your i5 is fine because that's a fair bit of processing power for no more money. Same goes for the SSD + controller, just get a decent big SSD now and run it on SATA II, it will still be fast and low latency and you won't have invested in a controller for no reason. I would go for a Samsung 840 now they are super-cheap or a bigger Force LX. Don't go less than 240 if you want to put games and OS on it. Another alternative would be to look at a M.2 drive such as the Plextor one Tom reviewed, you could run it in it's PCIe adapter and then one day when your motherboard gets replaced pick one up with an M.2 slot and boom.

Once you've got yourself a respectable storage setup and a decent PSU then spending money on your GPU is the best way to go. If your looking at new cards then the R9-290 is certainly the best price/performance ratio. If your looking used I would hang about until 780 prices fall off a bridge when the 9 series hit, the same is true of AMD, you can already see prices are getting unstable just see what happens it's unlikely to be many weeks.

I don't know why your waiting for the iSeries processors to be over, they could continue that branding for years and most of them have been phenomenal so far. If you want to change out your MB/CPU just do it but it won't bring you many extra FPS.

JR
 
Oh sorry, my screens 1080p
My Mobo is an Asus P7H55-M LX
according to the Asus site I'm using it supports a x4 pcie 2.0...
http://gyazo.com/5d1aeab6df6157b1cd88ea33e396086f

I really want a sata III for future use when I do eventually update my Mobo. I was just thinking of using it on my Sata II but if I would get a performance boost with a controller for an extra £30 why not?

The i5-960 is getting pretty damn close to an i5-4590 with Futuremark? If I can pick one up for 3 times less?
I think that would see me good for another year, maybe 2.
I'd love to see some benchmarks of different cpu performance in game with the same gpu. I googled it but can't find much. I'd love to get some foundations rather than stabbing in the dark. As far as i'm aware upgrading my cpu won't increase fps too much... what will it do?

128gb will be fine for my games, I only intend to have 2 or 3 games installed permanently. Fifa 15 / GTA 5. Other games will be added and removed within a couple of weeks most likely.
I'm surprised with my Fifa 15 FPS, I'm getting over 100fps maxed out. I know Fifa is easy to run but I thought it would be a lot slower.

Yeah I keep changing my mind on the GPU every other day.
Sometimes I just can't comprehend the price difference.
But in games like Project Cars and I intent to play GTA 5 I guess 10fps is a lot rite, hhhmmm...
 
I don't intend to upgrade my Mobo until the i3/i5/i7 series are done with. When will that be btw, they've been going for so long. After broadwell?

Skylake and Cannonlake are up next after broadwell.

I dare say i3/i5/i7 style branding is here to stay. At least for the forsee able future.

What is it that you don't like about the "i series" branded cpu's?
 
Skylake and Cannonlake are up next after broadwell.

I dare say i3/i5/i7 style branding is here to stay. At least for the forsee able future.

What is it that you don't like about the "i series" branded cpu's?

I'd love to upgrade to a Haswell but forking out like £250 for a Mobo and CPU when I could spend £50-£70 for a cpu which is very close according to Futuremark rankings.
What advantages would I see by upgrading to say a 4670k over a 960?

I know it's advantageous having newer hardware but surely it would make sense for me to upgrade to an i7 on this socket and see what performance boosts I get.

I really don't know much about CPU's tbh
 
What resolution do you game at? What games do you play/want to play? How many games do you want to install? What motherboard do you currently have? What is your actual budget?

JR

What is your name, what is your quest, what is the airspeed velocity of an unlaiden swallow??

I'd love to upgrade to a Haswell but forking out like £250 for a Mobo and CPU when I could spend £50-£70 for a cpu which is very close according to Futuremark rankings.
What advantages would I see by upgrading to say a 4670k over a 960?

Bragging rights, good man! Bragging rights!
 
What is your name, what is your quest, what is the airspeed velocity of an unlaiden swallow??

African or European swallow? :lol: :lol:

For factual record "Although a definitive answer would of course require further measurements, published species-wide averages of wing length and body mass, initial Strouhal estimates based on those averages and cross-species comparisons, the Lund wind tunnel study of birds flying at a range of speeds, and revised Strouhal numbers based on that study all lead me to estimate that the average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow is roughly 11 meters per second, or 24 miles an hour."

According to the article, kinematic data for the African swallow species is hard to come by, so as of right now the velocity of an African swallow is unknown.

Although if it were to be carrying a coconut that would be a different matter. :lol:
 
i7-9xx is for socket 1366.
Get a decent cooler and clock your i5-650 as high it can go at reasonable temps.
No need to upgrade cpu.Save the money for future platform upgrade.
But i must say your other choises are good.
 
Also OP if you do end up looking for a 290(x) on eBay, be wary of ones that were used for mining purposes, especially ones that have reference coolers on them.
 
Also OP if you do end up looking for a 290(x) on eBay, be wary of ones that were used for mining purposes, especially ones that have reference coolers on them.

Yeah, I don't want to pick up the gpu from ebay tbh. I might just hold off until early next year (when gta's released) and see the situation. XD

I just got a counter offer of £60 for a i7-960, I'm tempted... hhhmmm.
 
It is a lot of performance for the money i'll grant you that, but is it performance that will benefit you? It's easy to justify new tech with synthetic benchmarks, afterall that's what benchmarks are built for, to find the limit whether it is usable power or not.

Spending money on a 960 or a PCIe SATA controller is dead money, soon there will be absolutely no use for them and there would be no point in taking them forwards with your next upgrade. A bit more money spent on a bigger or higher quality SSD or GPU would be of more benefit long term. So yeah I would save the £30, get a bigger drive, stick your OS on it too and improve day to day performance both now and when you get a new board. SATA II is going to hold you back to about 300mb/s which is still pretty fast. After a point there is little noticeable difference. It's hard to distinguish my 960mb/s RAID0 array from my 500mb/s straight SSD, not bragging, well maybe a little e-peen but i'm sure you will catch my drift. Also remember SATA III is really a bandwidth improvement, you will still get the full latency improvements of switching from HDD to SSD.

I'd wait to see how the new GPU's and GTA V pan out too. My friend tells me the Fifa 15 beta runs like poop on his 780, hopefully that's EA rushing things but anything could happen. Get yourself a dirty big SSD ;)

JR
 
TBH I'm really confused, I keep changing my mind every other day. I'll just order this i7-960 cpu i'm watching and see how it performs compared to my current i5-650. If i'm not satisfied I can easily re sell it for exactly the same price. Compared to how garbage my cpu is now, probably the worst i5 possible for, for me it would be a big upgrade.

You're rite about the SSD dude, spending £30 on a controller is a bit silly, I'm not even sure about the speed I would get through them. Spending more on a 256gb would be far more practical for the future. I used to have a 64gb when they first came out from corsair which died when my power cut for some unknown reason. Up until then I was very satisfied with the speed.

Yeah Fifa 15 is running like poop on everyones gpu, I would achieve 90+fps maxxed out and locked to 60 but it would stutter like. After 20 mins it would become unplayable.
I formatted my HDD and reinstalled windows and now it's running fine.
I also disabled Vsync and unlocked the frames through the game settings then ran a profile through RadeonPro using MSAA and Dynamic Vsync and it's running beautiful on my machine.
 
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