Hey, Iv recently been thinking about upgrading my PC. Im going to spend around 400 dollars, And i can't decide on getting a GTX 670 to go with my i3 8GB ram and 750wart psu, or if i should get an i5 2500k and a GTX 560 Ti for the same price. My worry is that the i3 will bottleneck the GTX 670, and i probably won't be able to buy a i5 to go with it until the end of the summer. so here is what my question is, I'm wanting to record BF3 at 1280x720 with 4x AA and settings turned up with 60 fps, will i be able to do this with a GTX 560 Ti + i5 (going to OC it to 4.6 GHz) or should i get a 690 and then get a i5 at the end of the summer?
I don't think the i3 will bottleneck it, and if it does it won't be by that much. I'd get the 670 and upgrade to the i5 later
Yup, although the 560ti is good, it's old, the 670 is more expensive to buy than an i5 so it is important to get the best gpu now. You can offset the cost of upgrading from i3 to i5 by selling your i3. I specified an i3 2120 for a friend last week. He went from a 6600 with ddr2 to an i3 with 16gb 1600mhz ram on Z77 mobo. Thus he can easily upgrade to an i5k later and get maybe £50 when he sells the i3.
Instead of spending so much on an i3, go for a Pentium g620 as it only has lack of hyper threading and a touch less mHz and otherwise the same essentially. This way you get something functional now and even more saved towards an i5 later on.
How much CPU power does recording a game take up? I would have thought a quad core would be more beneficial in this situation. BF3 can already make good use of more than 2 cores, especially with large maps with many players. As for graphics, If you want to run Bf3 at full settings you'll want at least 1.5GB of video ram, although you could sacrifice MSAA (and just use FXAA) or turn down the texture setting a notch to free up vram if you only have 1GB. The textures will still be as detailed close up but you notice them change as you move around. Afaik a 2GB 560TI would give you playable framerates at full detail, not quite 60fps but still very playable.
1gb 560ti will run ultra at 1080 with AA x 2 or better zero for very smooth gameplay. Ran very well for me. I woudln't go for a 560ti now though. Not when I could get a 670.
I would too generally but the op wants to record games, so given the choice between a dual and quad core CPU, the quad would be more suited for the purpose I would have thought. Does anyone on here record games whilst playing?
So a considerably weaker GPU just to record games. Nah. Difference in cost between i3 2120 and i5k isn't great. Much greater difference between i5k and 670 in price. 670 of greater use to someone who plays games and surely the i3 can be sold later to reduce upgrade cost to i5.
Might as well go for the 670, you'll have way more power no matter what game you're playing, even though it's ridiculous overkill for 1280x720. I reckon an i3 would bottleneck it at such a low res, but it's much easier to pick up a cheap second hand i5 than it is to get a cheap 670. Both should be fine for recording, just make sure you record to a fast hard drive and I recommend using Dxtory as recording software, it's way better than Fraps.
Good point on the hard drive, would be good to have a separate hard drive to record to so it doesn't interfere with the game streaming data from the first hard drive. 6-8GB of ram would probably help eliminate swap file usage and again avoid disk thrashing. Of course if you had 3 separate drives, 1 for the OS and game, 1 for the recording and one for the swap file then 4GB Ram might do the job.
Fcuk it. Just buy an ivy bridge, 16gb, 240gb SSD, 670 for recording. I personally wouldn't bother cos I lost interest in BF3 months ago.
Why not save a little more monney and get a gtx670 and i5 ? You would have a kick ass pc for a long time then
