Upgrade help

[Raymac]

OK, it's finally time for me to upgrade. It has been a few years, and my goal at this point is to get a computer that can run Planetside 2 today at a respectable framerate. As of right now, with the tweaks I've made, I get about 60-70 fps in the warpgate and I drop down to single digits in large fights. In a Biolab fight, it hovers around 15fps. So I'm going to answer the questions in the sticky, and I'll be free to answer any questions that come up. Thank you very much for taking the time to help me out.

1. Are you building this computer yourself or having one built for you (Like HP, Alienware, or even a small shop)?
-Building it myself.

2. What is your budget and does that include shipping/taxes?
-$400 - $500ish

3. Where do you live (Please list town, state, and country)?
- California (knows how to party)


4. What do you need this computer to do (like gaming, Photoshop, and so on)?
-Planetside 2...period.

5. What parts will you need for the computer?
- CPU, Motherboard, RAM, (hopefully not a PSU)

6. Are you reusing any parts for this computer?
- Case (Good sized alienware, not sure of exact type), GPU (EVGA GTX260 Core 216, 896MB, I know it's older but that upgrade is for later), PSU (OCZ ModXstream-Pro 600W), Hardrive (HDS722516VLSA80 ATA, ancient), two DVD drives, and even a floppy drive.

7. What kind of monitor/resolution do you have or want to get to use for the computer?
- HP S2031 at 1600x900

8. Do you have already have a OS or do you need one? What OS is that?
-Windows 7 Home 64-bit

9. What are you looking for the motherboard to have feature wise?
- Unsure, probably SLI but other than that I'm open to suggestions.

10. Any plans to overclock the CPU or GPU?
- I'll OC the CPU slightly. It will be air cooled with an after market fan which I already have. (Not sure of the make model yet, but will update if I can)

11. What time kind of time frame are you planning on ordering these parts?
- Now

UPDATE: OK, I've pretty much decided on the i5-4670K. The upsides are worth the minor price increase. Still looking for suggestions on the mobo and RAM. Or I'm open to hearing why I am wrong for going with the 4670K.
___________________

Current specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.6Ghz
GTX260
ASUS M3N78-VM
4GB DDR2 RAM

[Goku]

Good choice on the CPU, you cannot go wrong with the 4670K. For a motherboard I would get the ASUS Z87-A (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131981"), a lot of good features for a good price. For the ram this 8GB DDR3 set (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148544) from Newegg should do the trick. I also highly suggest getting a new hard drive like this Western Digital 1TB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236339). That will be a great deal faster than what you even have now. Not to mention all the extra space you will have.

I suggest figuring out what air cooler you have. It may not support the Intel 1150 socket is all.

Sorry for not responding sooner. Been really busy this week.

[Raymac]

Thanks for the response! I actually just pulled the trigger on my purchase. I went with the 4670K and the ASRock Z87 Extreme6 LGA 1150 since newegg had a deal where they threw in 8GB of RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148661 (which looks to be almost exactly the RAM you suggested).

That savings leaves some room for a harddrive upgrade and/or a cooler if needed. I'll be sure to post the results I get once I get it assembled this week. (Or I'll be here asking for help on something I screwed up)

[Raymac]

As for my cooler, it's a Cooler Master very similar to the Hyper 212 (but it looks slightly different and has 90mm fans.) It does have the dual fans and the 4 copper heat pipes. Not really sure if that will work or not. How can I tell?

EDIT: If I had to guess (and I do) I'd say it is this one. It looks identical. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103057

[Goku]

The CPU cooler should work as the mounting holes are the same for 1155 and 1150 last I knew.

Concerning the ram. That was only a single stick of ram. You need another one as you will be losing out on half your bandwidth available to the CPU otherwise. This is important as the PS2 is dependent on your memory bandwidth, so thats another $66 you will be spending. At least you have 16GBs now I guess.

[Raymac]

Sh*t

EDIT: Facepalm. Thanks for the headsup. I ordered the 2nd stick of RAM. That would have been disappointing had you not tipped me off. Thanks for your help.

[Goku]

You're welcome. Be sure to post the results of the new build!

[Raymac]

The parts have been shipped and will arrive by Wednesday. I'll definitely be sure to post my results here. I'm really curious to see how it shapes out since my GPU is so old. I'll post my current UserOptions.ini because obviously I've made a few tweaks there to improve performace and compare it to the new options I'm able to run after the upgrade.

[Raymac]

Preliminary results...HUGE SUCCESS!

After a couple of glitches in the installation, partially to some ignorance by me (didn't know I had to reinstall windows) and partially to some crappy drivers (driver from the disk was giving me a BSOD), I've got the new hardware up and running.

The bad news is, my old fan doesn't fit the new mobo. The good news is, on the default settings I'm GPU bottlenecked 100% of the time so I really don't need to worry about overclocking for the time being.

I've gone from single digit fps in a Biodome fight to not seeing it drop below 30. While some people might have a problem with that, I'm freaking thrilled. Previously, I had graphics settings turned down to maximize performance, so just the default settings look amazing. Since I have the old GPU, I likely won't be able to turn them up, but that really doesn't matter to me. It still looks much better than before and the performance is fantastic.

It took me years to get to this performance level in Planetside 1, so you can just imagine my excitement of being there after only 6 months in Planetside 2.

Thank you very much for the advice, Goku. It proved to be extremely valuable. Now all I have to do is fiddle with my key bindings and play around with the settings a bit. Thanks again.

[Traak]

Good choice on the CPU, you cannot go wrong with the 4670K. For a motherboard I would get the ASUS Z87-A (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131981"), a lot of good features for a good price. For the ram this 8GB DDR3 set (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148544) from Newegg should do the trick. I also highly suggest getting a new hard drive like this Western Digital 1TB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236339). That will be a great deal faster than what you even have now. Not to mention all the extra space you will have.

I suggest figuring out what air cooler you have. It may not support the Intel 1150 socket is all.

Sorry for not responding sooner. Been really busy this week.

I wanted to mention one thing about HDD capacity. An HDD that has, say, four times the capacity will have it's data, on average, 1/4 the physical distance from the "neutral" position of the wands that read and write data.

So more capacity is good. If you have 200MB of data on a 200MB drive, in addition to bottlenecks from having to scatter data into all the last few remaining spots on the drive, your wands have to travel all the way to the very end of the drive, far from the "home" position, to read and write data.

However, if you have a 1TB drive, the wands only have to travel, on average, 1/5th the distance to get to the last crumb of data, if you keep them defragmented regularly, because the data will be on an area that is as close as possible to the "home" or beginning position of the wands.

If you have a 2TB drive, the wands have to travel even less. And so on. These are some factors most don't consider when sizing their drives.

Since the platter diameters do not change, you either have more platters or higher data density per platter on larger capacity drives, both of which mean less travel for the wands per unit of data stored.

Imagine how much less the wands have to move to get 100MB of data from a 3 1/2" form factor 2TB drive versus the old 5 1/4" size 9GB drives! (which was, at one time, the most awesome drive you could get from IBM)

And, of course, there's disc RPM, also. But 2 cheap 5400 RPM drives in RAID 0 will garner better I/O speeds than one 7200 RPM drives of the same combined capacity.

In fact, if you do like MSI on their latest laptop, and run RAID 0 with triple or more drives, I/O goes even higher. MSI has triple 128MB SSD's in RAID 0 as the primary working drive. I/0 speeds of awesomeness.

You could always go for RAID 5 instead, with three or more drives, for data security and speed boost.

[Goku]

I'm glad you noticed such a boost on even a older card like that Raymac. Really exciting when just a processor can make that much of a difference!

I totally remember PS1 with my sub 20 FPS in Red Alerts. Took me almost 2 years after playing to get a playable frame rate in those situations. Drove me nuts.

@ Traak not totally sure what you are talking about. Regardless his old HDD was very OLD, so even if what you are saying is true the new one will be far faster.

[Rbstr]

He's not really even correct, if you're comparing two modern drives. Making many platters with different densities is highly inefficient. They mainly change size by changing the number of platters in a drive.

A range of 1, 1.5, 2 and 3 TB drives use 1, 2 (with half disabled in firmware), 2 and 3 single-TB platters, respectively.

[Raymac]

Yeah, my hard drive is incredibly old. I really do need to upgrade it at some point, not so much for the speed, but because of the space.

Another minor update, for shits and gigs, I bumped up the settings to high and I'm still getting pretty much the same performance. It maybe dropped a frame or 2, but I still never see it get below 30. It stays rock solid between 30fps-45fps. Not only does the game look amazingly better, but I've gotten better. I don't suck nearly as much as before. I think that's the 1 thing I'm most happy about, I'm enjoying the game more because I'm being more successful. I've never been a stat whore, but it is nice to notice an increase in your K/D.

[Traak]

Raymac: a larger drive will have, by dint of higher density of data on its surface and/or more platters, less distance for the wands to travel to read and write the data. So a higher-capacity drive, of the same RPM, will also be faster, generally, because the time spent by the wands travelling back and forth over the disk surface is reduced.

[Rbstr]

Traak: It's not the fact that it's larger that really matters. It's that it's newer.
As stated you're not technically correct and potentially misleading. So stop saying it like that:
A 1TB drive based on a 1TB platter is going to be faster than a 1.5TB drive based on 3 500GB platters. And it hardly matters at all within a manufactures range of current drives because they all use the same platters.

And seriously, it doesn't even matter for frame rates, just load times.

[Traak]

Traak: It's not the fact that it's larger that really matters. It's that it's newer.
As stated you're not technically correct and potentially misleading. So stop saying it like that:
A 1TB drive based on a 1TB platter is going to be faster than a 1.5TB drive based on 3 500GB platters. And it hardly matters at all within a manufactures range of current drives because they all use the same platters.

And seriously, it doesn't even matter for frame rates, just load times.

Only load times? So you have zero HDD activity from the second a continent loads until you leave for another continent? You are telling me that your HDD light does not come on, not one time, not for a millisecond, for the whole time you are fighting on one continent?

If that is not the case, then HDD i/o speed matters.

Also, I will explain it again: how far the wands on a HDD have to move impacts the speed of data i/o. if you have six wands putting data on six platter surfaces, you will move data faster than you will with two wands putting data on two platter surfaces, because it will mean less wand movement, laterally, per quantity of data.

Stacking extra HDD's in RAID 0 leverages that and the extra i/o bandwidth of having extra drives and their attendant data handling speeds. Twenty drives in RAID 0 will input and output data faster than one drive will. Part of the reason is that the drives have a certain quantity of cache per drive. Another part is that it is 1/20th the wand movement per quantity of data.