Question about upgrades to PC

[cdbob]

Ever since the summer I've been trying to prepare my system for a 2560x1440 'eyefinity' upgrade. Firstly I bought a single 7950 as a stop gap for when I first get the cards. When the next gen Nvidia/AMD cards come out I hope they can run that res on a pair of cards. Next I went for a case/ PSU upgrade. A Fractal Arc Midi meant for water cooling and a Corsair HC 750 for dual GPU upgrades. My latest upgrades have been a EVGA Z77 FTW and 16GB of Samsung 30nm ram. The last thing I look at before I buy 3 Monoprice monitors is the CPU. The biggest problem with my 2500k isn't speed but the lack of PCI 3. From what I've seen in Vega's threads at that sort of resolution it seems PC 3 really does make quite a difference. My question is, do I keep my CPU or do I upgrade to a 3770k?

The benchmark is question is this one from Vega.

 

[Mrt1989]

PCIE 3 makes little or no difference at all,(at the moment) where did you heard such rubbish ?

 

[SnW]

PCIE 3 makes little or no difference at all,(at the moment) where did you heard such rubbish ?

What this man said

Ray......

 

[MacLeod]

At very high resolutions and multiple GPU's (especially Nvidia) you will see a slight increase with PCIE 3.0 but it will be much less than 10% and usually around 5%. This ain't gonna mean much in real world gaming. A single card setup wont have enough grunt to saturate a 3.0 setup so you wont see an increase at all there.

So yeah, there is an increase with 3.0 but its pretty slight and unless you've got $1500 invested in GPU's, you wont notice it.

 

[Feronix]

Agree with the above, from what I've heard there aren't even video cards that use PCI-E 2.x to it's full potential, let alone 3.x (with the exception of the GTX 690 maybe). You won't really see much of a difference, but if you have the money and really care for 3-5 fps, by all means go ahead

 

[Rastalovich]

Doesn't surprise me that there's an increase in performance when you're thinking of installing something like quad sli, or xfire for that matter.

Some of those numbers look pretty big to me tho. I'm not saying the test is incorrect - just didn't expect that. If you get a minute performance shot from a single card using 3.0 over 2.0 - four times that might make a little sense if you thought the scales would be logically. They're often very much not.

Quad sli/xfire anyone ? Didn't think so. Tri sli/xfire ? mmmm perhaps. Single card performance increase - not much to write home about. Sli/xfire - fairly popular, 2x not much to write home about maybe.

 

[cdbob]

Well I'm think I'm going to go ahead with the upgrade. The option of going 16GB Samsung Green ram, EVGA Z77 FTW and 3770k for less than $300 new is a no brainer.

 

[airdeano]

cdbob,
you might wanna read a bit more on the evga FTW motherboard. its hit or miss
on combinations that "work" or need work.. the blab on the forums is BIOS. it
needs BIOS work. if you are a tinker-er and don't give up easily then this might
be the one for you. but for a turn-key, hats-off over-clocking machine look to
the MSI GD55/65/MPower or ASUS boards. i got tired of waiting for the BIOS
re-writes and all the BETAS.. the 1.12 has calmed the crowd down a bit, but RAM
and TDP are still a concern. fantastic looking board, but if it don't work.. get s'mthing
else. so i did, got a GD65 on the testbench warming the room as we speak..

airdeano