My current setup runs most games fairly well with those pesky AA, bloom and depth of field off (I hate any kind of blur), however, I am thinking of upgrading my rig. As Planetside 2 and the upcoming Star Citizen, which I may or may not decide to play in the future, doesn't/will not run well. My current specs: Some random Intel motherboard with the T socket (AKA LGA775) Core 2 Q9400 @2.66Ghz Nvidia 650 GTX w/ 10mm fan Twin sticks of unspecified DDR3 RAM (2Gb each) A fairly powerful power supply, the specs of which I've forgotten (I originally intended to get the 670 GTX) The story behind how I got the 650 GTX instead of 670 is quite shot: the store I wanted to buy the 670 at sold out and replaced the inventory with 650, which they deemed easier to sell. While other stores demanded exorbitant prices for the same card. I looked the 650 up and it was roughly twice as good as my previous 9600 GT, so I just got the 650 instead. As for why I bought the PSU -- my old one broke down, so I got it in anticipation for the 670 GTX. At the current time, for upgrades, I'm eyeing i7 4770 (not S or K, just the letterless variant) which has twice the power of my current CPU and has a grudgingly acceptable price of 924 LTL (370 USD, in America it costs 310 USD -- all hail imported goods price hike). Unfortunately, it needs the H3 socket (AKA LGA1150), that my current motherboard lacks, which means I'm going to have to also get a new motherboard. Now, I'm no expert in motherboards and have never had to find and buy my own before, so I don't know what I should be looking at or what numbers would be considered good. So I'm turning to our forums for suggestions in that regard. In addition, there's the matter of DDR3 vs DDR4 and the fact that specific motherboards are (apparently) needed to use the clearly superior DDR4, which poses an other question: should I plan on getting a motherboard that can use DDR3 and get twin sticks of 8, or instead aim for a motherboard that can use DDR4 in anticipation for the future. My general upgrade strategy is to keep individual component costs under 1000 LTL (400 USD), while getting the most of the component in question. Then to wait about 5 years before ever thinking of a new upgrade.
DDR4 is not out yet, the only modules really available are for custom computers in server situations and Intel R&D facilities for future platforms. Intel will be releasing a new enthusiast level socket later this year for Haswell-E processors that supports DDR4. AMD wont be releasing a platform with DDR4 support for more than a year from now. There are lots of good motherboards made by either ASUS or Gigabyte, generally stay away from their cheapest offerings but any midgrade board will be fine. High end boards from either company would be things like the Sabertooth, ROG series, or -UD7 boards. All motherboards will have DDR3 slots, and you should be looking at 8GB (or 16GB if you feel you need it) in DDR-2133 speed or higher. You will not be able to do much upgrading of the memory down the road because things are changing over to DDR4 soon and it will make DDR3 expensive and hard to find. Which is why you shouold get the last memory you will ever need in this PC now. Getting a K series processor will make overclocking easier, which is something you will need to do down the road if you plan on keeping all the parts for gaming 5 years from now. 3.x GHz is pretty slow really. If you want a GPU upgrade you should go with something like a GTX770 4GB graphics card. It has enough power to play games really well in 1080p and will last you a while. It wont be enough for 1440p or 4K though, not even close.
High-end is usually a bad idea, because it's overkill for what games actually need. I found that getting an optimal setup, that's slightly better then what the games need at the time of upgrading is good enough to last. Thus my 650 should last me quite a while, even though it's not considered an enthusiast level card, it's not like I care about 4K anyway. My 7600 GT lasted until 2009 before breaking down, at which point I got a 9600 GT, that lasted until now (and still wasn't fully used by my needs, ran Witcher 3 without much issue once I killed SSAO (which made no difference even when closely inspecting the screen) and got the optimization patch). 650 GTX is roughly twice as powerful and I said it before that I don't care about any kind of blur, which is usually the main draw on resources in games these days. There's no need for overkill, I'm perfectly fine with running games (with recording software at times) at a steady 30 FPS, 1280x1024 (or 1920x1080 in the future, if and when I get off my preferred 5:4 monitors). What did you mean by the K series processor being easier to overclock? The vanilla 4770 can already be taken up to 3.9 GHz and is unlocked, the only thing that the K version added was apparently +0.1GHz by default, which could also only be overclocked to the same frequency, which I didn't find worth the added 100 LTL price tag. Which motherboards do you consider midgrade and what do the highgrade ones have over the midgrade ones? Data transfer speed? Does it actually make a noticeable difference?
There's no choice to be made right now about DDR4 - it's not part of anything for a consumer yet and won't be for the near future. I really doubt the -e chips will make it worthwhile except for the "must tick the most expensive box" people. Once it hits the mainstream i5-type part it'll just become the new default choice. That won't be until "skylake" which is the generation after next. If you're looking for best value you're certainly going to want to bump "down" to a i5 -k CPU (like the 4670k). Hyperthreading doesn't bring anything to games and if you're overclocking anyway there's no point in an i7. 1280x1024 is pretty low res these days so any "big boy", non-bargain bin card will get you pretty far. Once/if you step up to 1920x1080 you might find you need/want a bit more than that 650. The real difference between mid and high end mobos is extra ports. Support for quad/tri SLi/crossfireis the major thing. Otherwise it's more SATA, more USB3, ect. Sometimes the power delivery is better, lots of times there's tons of marketing BS that doesn't do much. If you look at performance between two mobos with the same z87 chipset in them you're not going to see terribly much difference in performance all held equal. At the bargain end they may cut a few corners on the quality of capacitors and things that's more of a reliability issue than a pure performance one. Something like the Asus z87-A is about where I'd tend to recommend.
Well, the 4770 has the same clock speed as the 4670(k or otherwise). You get get 100mhz more of turbo, 2mb of cache, and hypterthreading for your $. Unless you do a lot of something that will make use of hyperthreading it's certainly not worth it.
Well actually... I like to record footage, when it's a possibility. I wonder if it were to be less of an impact to run the game on the normal threads and dxtory or FRAPS on the hypered threads. I did similar splits in the past, by dividing my four cores in half -- one half runs the game, the other the recording, allowing for less impact on game's FPS and a smoother recording, as the whole thing doesn't jump cross-cores in the middle of work.
It's almost always better to just let Windows and the drivers to sort out what runs where. You think "Oh I'll just force this to run on this core and then it won't interfere" but in reality things are more complicated in a dual/quad core than simply having 4x CPUs to do tasks. HT is not similar in any way to doubling your cores. It's a way of prioritizing action so a single core can lower its idle time by running a second thread if one thread is stalled. FRAPs won't be helped by hyperthreading. It is helped by having a CPU with multiple cores. But the biggest thing is a fast hard drive. In fact HT often hurts when you do two different computationally intensive things at once. Hyperthreading helps if the two threads are not rate-limited by the execution or instruction decoding. It typically helps doing one single, but highly parallel, task. (3d rendering, video transcoding) Or course most of those things are actually better handled by a GPU. Intel's integrated GPU is really quite good at encoding. Here's a pretty quick read on HT http://www.overclock.net/a/hyperthreading-explained
So you're saying that while the hyperthreading would be useless, the GPU (that I thought to be a useless add-on) could actually be used for video encoding? As for manually dividing my cores, as an example: I was playing a game that I was sure couldn't use more then 2 cores. Running it normally, I had 120 FPS, but with FRAPS on it dropped to 10-20 FPS. I manually assigned the cores and got up to 90 FPS on the game and a perfectly smooth recording. In fact, I also had success with that in Planetside 2, however the FPS increase from assigning the cores isn't pronounced enough for me to actually be able to use it in normal play.