Hi guys, it's been a while since A) I upgrade my PC and B) since I last visited these forums! (moved country 3 years ago and haven't really done much PC gaming- sad times!) Anyways, it's now been so long skeletons are forming in my head and I can't even remember if I have DDR3 or 4 in my rig, and PU: Battleground is running slower than a slideshow, and my technical knowledge is......well I've forgotten everything. I'm off to Hong Kong this weekend and am looking to replace my gear for what's in the Bittech Buyers guide. Parts that probably need replacing are: MOBO RAM GPU (current GPU was bought for Battlefield 3....THREE!) So my questions are: My CPU is an intel i5 (bought in the last 2 years) so probably ok. First off, how do I check what RAM I have and if I need a RAM upgrade? Second, anything I should be aware of in terms of hardware compatability? Cheers Sotu
Any half-decent utility like CPU-Z will tell you what you have, but if it's Haswell [4xxx] or older it'll be DDR3, DDR4 if it's skylake [6xxx] or newer.
Welcome back semi-local Bit Techer! There's a couple of us in Bournemouth, and TMDD until he emigrated to the USofA. I've found Piriform's Speccy good for seeing what's in your PC - they're the same people that did Ccleaner. If you've got a Haswell (4xxx) i5 on 8 or 9 series Intel chipsets, it's still pretty strong. There have been 2 newer generations, Skylake and Kabylake, but the incremental IPC is not huge. What you have gained are new toys on the motherboard: USB 3.1, M.2 slots [fast NVME storage] and latterly, RGB LIGHTING! Graphics cards have come on well, and the Nvidia 10xx cards are great and power efficient. AMD's Polaris cards 4xx and now 5xx are good too, but not as efficient and the higher level 1080 and 1080 Ti beat everything pretty much HTH
Probably, yes. Although we haven't seen your system specs so it is hard to judge! There hasn't been much progress in CPUs over the last few years, and as long as you've got 8Gb or more you'll have enough for games! Personally I'd look for a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 in Hong Kong and leave it at that.
Not knowing what the i5 makes it a bit tricky. If it's i5 6xx or i57xx, you probably need a new board and CPU If it's from the next generation onward, i5 2xxx or i5 3xxx, you still have some mileage left in the system. If you look at this chart, your Radeon HD 6950/6970 in teh right hand colum is some way down the ranking. Conventional wisdom (from Tomshardware, the creators of the chart) says that you need to get a GPU at least 3 lines up the chart to get an appreciable gain in performance. Oasked what spot on with the GPU recommendation, a GTX 1070 will be way better than your HD69x0 card, and still more power efficient than most AMD cards. Depending on your requirements - 1080 gaming? An AMD RX480 would be potentially good too at less money, but may stretch your PSU more.
^ agreed So, if the system was built 2 years ago on an i5 platform I would say the CPU and MOBO are probably fine. DDR4 wasn't a thing but for 2011 socket types 2 years ago IIRC. That leaves you simply upgrading GPU to a 1060 or better. Aside from that, I wouldn't stress anything as PUBG is poorly optimized. Kinda like dayz and everything else built off of the arma platform. Optimization isn't really the strong point of that platform. i7 5820k & GTX 1080 and the game gets choppy for me still.
I'm still very happily using an i7 2600 (non-K) with 12GB ram. I just keep graphics card up to date. I second/third getting a GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 and *maybe* a bigger PSU - I'd suggest 800watt and try for a silver or even gold efficiency for stability and quiet running.
Going through your old posts it looks like you had posted your specs some time ago: For 1080p: The Radeon RX480 / RX580 is a little bit more than twice as fast, the 580 is just a rebranded 480 and launched recently, should be possible to find some rebates on the RX480 due to that. The 580 is a bit too spendy for the performance. If you want to come over to the green camp the equivalent would be the Geforce 1060. For 1440p: The Geforce 1070 is really pretty much the best option, nothing available from the red camp until Vega eventually maybe sooner or later gets released. I would leave the rest as is for now and aim for an upgrade of everything else at once sometime down the line, because RAM is currently stupidly expensive, you can't really get all the latest toys from a mobo without replacing CPU and RAM and you can't get a modern CPU without replacing mobo and RAM which does require a healthy budget thanks to Intel switching sockets like socks. The 2500k certainly isn't the fastest CPU any more, but in gaming the graphicscard is mostly the limiting factor anyway, so you can get away with saving up for a while first.
How to get the dxdiag report of your pc: use the search box in your start menu and type "run" then in the box type dxdiag. Yes you want to run it. Then wait for the loading bar to complete and use the option save results as a text file. This file will tell you exactly what hardware you have and the driver dates. Sent from Bittech Android app
Well I upgraded to a gtx1060 3gb and whoa what a difference. Literally jumped from slideshow at lowest setting to playable at ultra. I'm still **** at the game... Cheers for the tips. Looking like I'll be gaming for a few more years on this rig!
Good news, the GTX 1060 is a powerful little beast. It is a shame that it doesn't help you play better though. I had a friend who changed gaming mice regularly when he wasn't getting on well in a game - that didn't help really, all it did was empty his wallet. When I started going to my friend's weekly gaming, my name as 'god I'm crap' - not a lot's changed really if I'm honest
