Originally posted by Dihoru Now I finally get where I was misreading what Ride was saying, dGPU when talking about AMD for me translates as dual GPU not discrete, derp... anyway besides the point (sorry Ride about that one).
Originally posted by jdnewell
I have to agree with Ridelynn.
Your better off going with an FX CPU over an APU if your going to use a discrete GPU. Buying an APU and crossfiring it with a dGPU is a bad idea. When the crossfire does actually work it may be a little faster, when your playing games that dont use xfire at all or scale poorly ( which are numerous) then your performance will suffer.
If you buy a CPU and a dedicated GPU the RAM wont matter or make a difference graphics wise. You can get a decent AM3+ motherboard, stick 4 or 8 gigs of 1333 in there and never notice a difference.
The only reason to buy an APU for a gaming PC is on a severe budget where you do not plan on or cant afford a dGPU.
My advice is the same as his, buy an FX cpu, get a budget AM3+ motherboard and take the money you save and apply it to your dGPU. You will be happy you did, and have a better gaming PC for it.
Just my 2 cents, good luck with whatever you choose.
6 gbs of 1333 Mhz RAM bottlenecks my laptop in some applications with my multitasking tendencies and the CPU is much weaker than the A10-7850K (let alone the FX series) thus 1600 Mhz is minimum for me especially considering that the Mobo is something I am not gonna cheap out on a AMD CPU rig as the sockets tend to be cross compatible so in a upgrade process I may keep the Mobo and thus the rams and hdd and just switch out the CPU and GPU.
Couple the older tech with the fact that the FX-6300 actually is 10% worse than the the A10-7850K in terms of single core efficiency tells me that I am better off either get the A10 ( I don't multitask that badly to require 6 cores and not allot of multicore apps in my lineup) and see if the FX series get newer CPUs while waiting at which point it would be derp easy.
Also another plus for the A10-7850K coupled with a R7 250 you get Mantle and while it is still getting up to snuff both the PS4 and Xbone use exclusively AMD parts and will get Mantle support so that means allot of games and game engines will also start supporting mantle. I know the R7 250 isn't a great GPU but I doubt a higher spec Mantle capable GPU isn't coming and considering this isn't a build that will go down yet (waiting to see what summer brings, likely gonna be mid to late winter before I start putting it together) I can afford to wait to see which side I go down (either FX with a higher end GPU or APU with a mantle capable GPU).
All good, just throwing my opinion out there
8gb of 1600 vs 8gb 1333 price wise is pretty much a wash. Any decent mobo should be able to handle 1600 @ 1.35v stock, even if you had to bump to 1.5v then thats easily done, but you can even find 1600 @ 1.25v if you needed. Either way finding RAM to suite your needs wont be an issue.
As far as a cpu goes you wont gimp yourself with an APU and can buy one if thats what you want, it is your money.
Personally I would go with a CPU and a dGPU. And I for sure would not Xfire, money better spent is on a single good GPU.
You do realize that Mantle works on any GCN-based AMD card? That's pretty much everything in the discrete 7000 series on up (including everying in the Rx lineup), it's not just Kaveri-based APUs.
*edit* That and you mentioned something about AMD motherboard socket cross-compatibility.
Right now, they have AM3+ (the FX line) and AM2 (the APU lineup) in the desktop realm. DDR4 is coming sometime, and that will require a new socket. So whatever you were to look at now wouldn't likely accept whatever upgrade comes around in a year or two's time.
And if the purpose of this is a "exercise/practice" - that's a lot different than "I'm planning to buy" -- and that is different again from "I'm planning to buy later this summer"
Originally posted by Dihoru 6 gbs of 1333 Mhz RAM bottlenecks my laptop in some applications with my multitasking tendencies and the CPU is much weaker than the A10-7850K .... I don't multitask that badly to require 6 cores and not allot of multicore apps in my lineup
Just kinda wanted to point this out: If you aren't bottlenecking your CPUs, you probably aren't bottlenecking on the ~speed~ of your RAM either. You may very well be bottlenecking on the ~amount~ of RAM.
I will say the fact that if your existing CPU is weaker than an A10, it's probably not a Socket 1366 triple channel, and with 6G is almost certainly channel mismatched, so that is a strike against you (and does lean toward your claim that your RAM at 1333 is too slow, because it's only running at half speed).
Even if it were running at DDR1 speed, the RAM is still so much faster than any other I/O (save the on-die cache for the CPU) that except for some very specific cases, your sitting around waiting on everything else and not the RAM speed (assuming you have enough RAM in the first place). It's very very hard to bottleneck something on RAM speed... pretty much the only real-world case that does it consistently are servers with fast databases that are cached correctly such that they can stay entirely in RAM, integrated GPUs that use system RAM for video RAM, and aside from that the only time people at home see it are memory benchmarks and ZIPing a file up (which most people don't do for minutes/hours a day).
More than likely it's that you don't have enough RAM, and your being forced to swap out to the page file.. that is definitely noticeable, and very slow. But the fix for that isn't faster RAM, it's more RAM.
Originally posted by Dihoru 6 gbs of 1333 Mhz RAM bottlenecks my laptop in some applications with my multitasking tendencies and the CPU is much weaker than the A10-7850K .... I don't multitask that badly to require 6 cores and not allot of multicore apps in my lineup
Just kinda wanted to point this out: If you aren't bottlenecking your CPUs, you probably aren't bottlenecking on the ~speed~ of your RAM either. You may very well be bottlenecking on the ~amount~ of RAM.
I will say the fact that if your existing CPU is weaker than an A10, it's probably not a Socket 1366 triple channel, and with 6G is almost certainly channel mismatched, so that is a strike against you (and does lean toward your claim that your RAM at 1333 is too slow, because it's only running at half speed).
Even if it were running at DDR1 speed, the RAM is still so much faster than any other I/O (save the on-die cache for the CPU) that except for some very specific cases, your sitting around waiting on everything else and not the RAM speed (assuming you have enough RAM in the first place). It's very very hard to bottleneck something on RAM speed... pretty much the only real-world case that does it consistently are servers with fast databases that are cached correctly such that they can stay entirely in RAM, integrated GPUs that use system RAM for video RAM, and aside from that the only time people at home see it are memory benchmarks and ZIPing a file up (which most people don't do for minutes/hours a day).
More than likely it's that you don't have enough RAM, and your being forced to swap out to the page file.. that is definitely noticeable, and very slow. But the fix for that isn't faster RAM, it's more RAM.
IMO one of the problems is how Windows handles ram and cache. For example in Linux EVERYTHING runs in ram. In Windows there are a ton of writes to cache no matter how much ram you have. The faster the industry switches to OGL and Linux the better. If you follow Phoronix it is clear that Linux is moving at a breakneck pace ATM as compared to the last 10 years.
Yea, 6G mismatched ram would run at 4gb wouldn't it? Windows hates 4 GB of ram.
Originally posted by Dihoru 6 gbs of 1333 Mhz RAM bottlenecks my laptop in some applications with my multitasking tendencies and the CPU is much weaker than the A10-7850K .... I don't multitask that badly to require 6 cores and not allot of multicore apps in my lineup
Just kinda wanted to point this out: If you aren't bottlenecking your CPUs, you probably aren't bottlenecking on the ~speed~ of your RAM either. You may very well be bottlenecking on the ~amount~ of RAM.
I will say the fact that if your existing CPU is weaker than an A10, it's probably not a Socket 1366 triple channel, and with 6G is almost certainly channel mismatched, so that is a strike against you (and does lean toward your claim that your RAM at 1333 is too slow, because it's only running at half speed).
Even if it were running at DDR1 speed, the RAM is still so much faster than any other I/O (save the on-die cache for the CPU) that except for some very specific cases, your sitting around waiting on everything else and not the RAM speed (assuming you have enough RAM in the first place). It's very very hard to bottleneck something on RAM speed... pretty much the only real-world case that does it consistently are servers with fast databases that are cached correctly such that they can stay entirely in RAM, integrated GPUs that use system RAM for video RAM, and aside from that the only time people at home see it are memory benchmarks and ZIPing a file up (which most people don't do for minutes/hours a day).
More than likely it's that you don't have enough RAM, and your being forced to swap out to the page file.. that is definitely noticeable, and very slow. But the fix for that isn't faster RAM, it's more RAM.
IMO one of the problems is how Windows handles ram and cache. For example in Linux EVERYTHING runs in ram. In Windows there are a ton of writes to cache no matter how much ram you have. The faster the industry switches to OGL and Linux the better. If you follow Phoronix it is clear that Linux is moving at a breakneck pace ATM as compared to the last 10 years.
Yea, 6G mismatched ram would run at 4gb wouldn't it? Windows hates 4 GB of ram.
Too bad you can't play 90% of the games on Linux which defeats the purpose of having a gaming pc in the first place.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Originally posted by Dihoru 6 gbs of 1333 Mhz RAM bottlenecks my laptop in some applications with my multitasking tendencies and the CPU is much weaker than the A10-7850K .... I don't multitask that badly to require 6 cores and not allot of multicore apps in my lineup
Just kinda wanted to point this out: If you aren't bottlenecking your CPUs, you probably aren't bottlenecking on the ~speed~ of your RAM either. You may very well be bottlenecking on the ~amount~ of RAM.
I will say the fact that if your existing CPU is weaker than an A10, it's probably not a Socket 1366 triple channel, and with 6G is almost certainly channel mismatched, so that is a strike against you (and does lean toward your claim that your RAM at 1333 is too slow, because it's only running at half speed).
Even if it were running at DDR1 speed, the RAM is still so much faster than any other I/O (save the on-die cache for the CPU) that except for some very specific cases, your sitting around waiting on everything else and not the RAM speed (assuming you have enough RAM in the first place). It's very very hard to bottleneck something on RAM speed... pretty much the only real-world case that does it consistently are servers with fast databases that are cached correctly such that they can stay entirely in RAM, integrated GPUs that use system RAM for video RAM, and aside from that the only time people at home see it are memory benchmarks and ZIPing a file up (which most people don't do for minutes/hours a day).
More than likely it's that you don't have enough RAM, and your being forced to swap out to the page file.. that is definitely noticeable, and very slow. But the fix for that isn't faster RAM, it's more RAM.
IMO one of the problems is how Windows handles ram and cache. For example in Linux EVERYTHING runs in ram. In Windows there are a ton of writes to cache no matter how much ram you have. The faster the industry switches to OGL and Linux the better. If you follow Phoronix it is clear that Linux is moving at a breakneck pace ATM as compared to the last 10 years.
Yea, 6G mismatched ram would run at 4gb wouldn't it? Windows hates 4 GB of ram.
Too bad you can't play 90% of the games on Linux which defeats the purpose of having a gaming pc in the first place.
Steam OS I believe is Linux based but I haven't really dicked around with that at all to know what it does and does not bring to the table compared to Windows 7 (for example).
Originally posted by Ridelynn
Originally posted by Dihoru 6 gbs of 1333 Mhz RAM bottlenecks my laptop in some applications with my multitasking tendencies and the CPU is much weaker than the A10-7850K .... I don't multitask that badly to require 6 cores and not allot of multicore apps in my lineup
Just kinda wanted to point this out: If you aren't bottlenecking your CPUs, you probably aren't bottlenecking on the ~speed~ of your RAM either. You may very well be bottlenecking on the ~amount~ of RAM.
I will say the fact that if your existing CPU is weaker than an A10, it's probably not a Socket 1366 triple channel, and with 6G is almost certainly channel mismatched, so that is a strike against you (and does lean toward your claim that your RAM at 1333 is too slow, because it's only running at half speed).
Even if it were running at DDR1 speed, the RAM is still so much faster than any other I/O (save the on-die cache for the CPU) that except for some very specific cases, your sitting around waiting on everything else and not the RAM speed (assuming you have enough RAM in the first place). It's very very hard to bottleneck something on RAM speed... pretty much the only real-world case that does it consistently are servers with fast databases that are cached correctly such that they can stay entirely in RAM, integrated GPUs that use system RAM for video RAM, and aside from that the only time people at home see it are memory benchmarks and ZIPing a file up (which most people don't do for minutes/hours a day).
More than likely it's that you don't have enough RAM, and your being forced to swap out to the page file.. that is definitely noticeable, and very slow. But the fix for that isn't faster RAM, it's more RAM.
The fact I am buying all the peripherals for the PC (monitor, speakers, etc) should tell you that I am on a mobile solution so the strike against me would only work if I chose willingly the mobile solution, I didn't (not much chance of taking your home desktop with you when moving to another country as a student on a shoestring budget, the shipping prices get ridiculous once you also factor in weight, size and the fragile label to say nothing that other people need that PC) so currently I have to deal with a i5-2410M with a Radeon 6650M (1Gb DDR3 variant) and 6 gbs of DDR3 1333Mhz RAM and to put it bluntly I am not gonna consider anything underneath 1600 Mhz after 7 months on 1333 Mhz with current games let alone newer generation video editors (for comparison AVS media 9 and Power Director 9 worked like a dream on this rig but I've recently upgraded to Power Director 11 and it has slowed down noticeably without taxing the CPU or GPU more than version 9, I checked this by running a mock project through both and the temperature for both the CPU and GPU were pretty much the same in either case and the browser was running in both normal conditions testing and ideal, only it and background programs such as AV, firewall and extremely light on load programs like IM clients, and the only thing I can credibly blame for that slow down is the RAM).
Originally posted by Ridelynn
You do realize that Mantle works on any GCN-based AMD card? That's pretty much everything in the discrete 7000 series on up (including everying in the Rx lineup), it's not just Kaveri-based APUs.
*edit* That and you mentioned something about AMD motherboard socket cross-compatibility.
Right now, they have AM3+ (the FX line) and AM2 (the APU lineup) in the desktop realm. DDR4 is coming sometime, and that will require a new socket. So whatever you were to look at now wouldn't likely accept whatever upgrade comes around in a year or two's time.
And if the purpose of this is a "exercise/practice" - that's a lot different than "I'm planning to buy" -- and that is different again from "I'm planning to buy later this summer"
Also I did mentioned in the op something:
Originally posted by Dihoru
Purpose of the exercise: Build an idea of the kind of budget required for a near future PC (current laptop is getting more and more knackered by newer gen games) and get new perspectives/opinions in regards to part price/power ratios ( have a strong bias towards Sapphire tweaked AMD GPUs and general disregard AMD CPUs as valid options so yeah could use some opposing opinions backed up by benchmarks if possible ).
Though I did forget to mention I also do video editing in there so mae culpa.
Also Mantle works only on the R7 250 with a Kaveri APU (if you want hybrid crossfire) so I think you do not realize.
DDR4 is at least another 2-3 years down the line and will be allot more expensive when first introduced so for practical budget builds it is around 4-5 years away.... I change/upgrade my Rig around that timeframe anyway so the issue is moot and I would go with FM2+ rather than AM3+ because again FM2+ is newer and may have more viability should a mid timeframe upgrade be required whereas the AM3+ you may just wake up in a year has been rendered obslote by AM4 (or however they will call it) which may or may not be cross compatible with AM3+.
What Ridelynn was saying is that in your laptop the RAM is mismatched. Unless you have a triple channel setup ( which you dont) 6gb would mean mismatched channels. Which means your RAM is not running up to snuff or the speeds its rated at.
The problems you are experiencing are not from the RAM speed but from having mismatched memory channels ( I.E. the 6gb ).
You need something like 2, 4, 8,16gb in a dual channel board. with 2 sticks of 4gb, 2 stick of 8gb, ect. You most likely have 1x 4g stick and 1x 2gb stick in the laptop.
So in essence you could remove the 2gb stick, add a 4gb stick to the laptop and probably would not be having the issues as then you will have matching pairs ( 8gb) ( 2 x 4gb )
Nothing wrong with buying 1600 speed over 1333. But the issues you are describing on the laptop are not related to RAM speed.
Just so the people helping me out understand what I want the rig for:
I am not planning on playing games at a larger resolution than 720p (window mode, multitasking) and certainly not highly graphics intensive games (ex: Archeage, World of Tanks, War Thunder, GW2, Tera, Repopulation, Gloria Victis, Mass Effect Trilogy and Space Engineers would be the most graphically demanding of the ones I will be playing, or planning to, for the foreseeable future and so my desire would be to run these on medium to high settings at 720p) and do some video editing (no 3D stuff, no elaborate special effects though).
That coupled with University stuff (nothing CPU demanding as I am in the experimental branch not the simulation one) is all this rig will be with.
Yes ideally I want the rig to be better than the consoles will ever be from the get go but if that is not possible at the 500-550 euro budget a rig that is easily upgradeable is just as good to keep up over the years.
Originally posted by jdnewell
What Ridelynn was saying is that in your laptop the RAM is mismatched. Unless you have a triple channel setup ( which you dont) 6gb would mean mismatched channels. Which means your RAM is not running up to snuff or the speeds its rated at.
The problems you are experiencing are not from the RAM speed but from having mismatched memory channels ( I.E. the 6gb ).
You need something like 2, 4, 8,16gb in a dual channel board. with 2 sticks of 4gb, 2 stick of 8gb, ect. You most likely have 1x 4g stick and 1x 2gb stick in the laptop.
So in essence you could remove the 2gb stick, add a 4gb stick to the laptop and probably would not be having the issues as then you will have matching pairs ( 8gb) ( 2 x 4gb )
Nothing wrong with buying 1600 speed over 1333. But the issues you are describing on the laptop are not related to RAM speed.
Ahhh now I understand... still sticking to 1600s or higher though.
Too bad you can't play 90% of the games on Linux which defeats the purpose of having a gaming pc in the first place.
Wait a year. There will be a lot of new games that run on linux.
AMD and NV are both getting their drivers sorted.
Game engines are all working on Linux/OGL 4.4 support, 2 of the biggest just came out with it.
2 of the biggest upcoming games right now are going to have Linux support.
Don't comment on Linux without knowing what is happening.
2 (TWO?) of the biggest upcoming games are coming to Linux? Are you serious? But you are correct, I never used Linux and never will. There are 0 benefits to using Linux for me. And running games on Linux is still a no no. Why would anyone who choose Linux over Windows if you are playing games is beyond me. It's easier to list the games that actually run on Linux than the ones that don't. Vast majority of game developers don't pay attention to this OS.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Too bad you can't play 90% of the games on Linux which defeats the purpose of having a gaming pc in the first place.
Wait a year. There will be a lot of new games that run on linux.
AMD and NV are both getting their drivers sorted.
Game engines are all working on Linux/OGL 4.4 support, 2 of the biggest just came out with it.
2 of the biggest upcoming games right now are going to have Linux support.
Don't comment on Linux without knowing what is happening.
2 (TWO?) of the biggest upcoming games are coming to Linux? Are you serious? But you are correct, I never used Linux and never will. There are 0 benefits to using Linux for me. And running games on Linux is still a no no. Why would anyone who choose Linux over Windows if you are playing games is beyond me. It's easier to list the games that actually run on Linux than the ones that don't. Vast majority of game developers don't pay attention to this OS.
OS isn't the problem in this thread so if you gents wanna debate the viability of different OSes then please do so in another thread.
DDR4 is at least another 2-3 years down the line and will be allot more expensive when first introduced so for practical budget builds it is around 4-5 years away.... I change/upgrade my Rig around that timeframe anyway so the issue is moot and I would go with FM2+ rather than AM3+ because again FM2+ is newer and may have more viability should a mid timeframe upgrade be required whereas the AM3+ you may just wake up in a year has been rendered obslote by AM4 (or however they will call it) which may or may not be cross compatible with AM3+.
Haswell-E should launch later this year and uses DDR4. After that, it should become nearly universal for new desktop and laptop chips to use DDR4 rather than DDR3 pretty quickly. As memory manufacturers shift to DDR4 for new process nodes that are cheaper per GB, prices per GB of DDR4 will probably drop below those of DDR3 pretty quickly. DDR3 was cheaper per GB than DDR2 within a year of the first DDR3 CPU launching.
I would not be surprised to see DDR4 used in variants of Kaveri or whatever AMD is calling the Vishera refresh due to launch later this year, though it's likely that those won't happen. I would be surprised to see new CPU architectures launch in 2015 using DDR3 apart from things scheduled for 2014 but delayed.
Game engines are all working on Linux/OGL 4.4 support, 2 of the biggest just came out with it.
To the best of my knowledge, AMD doesn't yet support OpenGL 4.4, even on Windows. Nvidia does, but that only arrived recently. AMD should get there soon, and they do support 4.3 already. 4.4 doesn't matter much, though.
Game engines are all working on Linux/OGL 4.4 support, 2 of the biggest just came out with it.
To the best of my knowledge, AMD doesn't yet support OpenGL 4.4, even on Windows. Nvidia does, but that only arrived recently. AMD should get there soon, and they do support 4.3 already. 4.4 doesn't matter much, though.
You missed some news. AMD is taking drivers very seriously right now and it's about time.
Originally posted by grndzro And OGL 4.4 is huge. It puts AMD and NV on the same page with the new optimizations.
Easier true cross platform compatibility since the console optimizations transfer to OGL 4.4 quite well. or vice versa.
If OGL 4.4 becomes the defacto standard this year DX12 is going to arrive DOA. This means MS is dead in the water with no reason to upgrade from W7.
That's making a lot of assumptions. especially since one of the two major consoles doesn't directly support OpenGL and is DirectX-based, and the other uses a modified version of it via some proprietary APIs. And it also assumes that the only thing people do with Windows is game, which is very far from the truth. And it assumes that just because you have implemented a standard that two drivers may be equally optimized, which is not a safe assumption at all. And your also making the assumption that if DX were to be passed over, that it would be passed over in favor of OpenGL - which may be a safe bet, but it's hardly a given -- DX10's "failure" didn't lead us to OpenGL either. And why would 4.4 become the standard, when most of the mobile world (which is really the driver behind OpenGL use right now) is using OpenGL ES 2.0, with only recent support for 3.0.
I'm excited about Linux/SteamOS gaming as well, but you need to take it with a grain of realism. DX12 may arrive DOA, it wouldn't be the first (DX10 was pretty well DOA, after all), but if Xbone gets full DX12 support, I wouldn't make that bet. The consoles have had a powerful impact on gaming development in general, and their influence won't disappear overnight, or even inside a single console generation.
As for this part: Yes, AMD is ~vastly~ improved on it's driver support.
However, improved doesn't mean "the best".
It's still well behind in Linux drivers, it's still struggling with Crossfire/microstudder. It's last official WHQL-qualified driver is from December. We don't have an official Mantle-supported driver, only Beta. The only area I can think of where AMD's driver really excels compared to the competition is in multiple-monitor support.
A couple of years ago I was willing to call AMD and nVidia at parity with regard to driver quality and release update frequency for Windows. Just lately AMD has started to slip again - as witnessed by the 4+ month time between official releases. It's not to the point that I would recommend against an AMD card, but I hope it doesn't continue to slide further.
Comments
All good, just throwing my opinion out there
8gb of 1600 vs 8gb 1333 price wise is pretty much a wash. Any decent mobo should be able to handle 1600 @ 1.35v stock, even if you had to bump to 1.5v then thats easily done, but you can even find 1600 @ 1.25v if you needed. Either way finding RAM to suite your needs wont be an issue.
As far as a cpu goes you wont gimp yourself with an APU and can buy one if thats what you want, it is your money.
Personally I would go with a CPU and a dGPU. And I for sure would not Xfire, money better spent is on a single good GPU.
But thats just my opinion.
Be well
You do realize that Mantle works on any GCN-based AMD card? That's pretty much everything in the discrete 7000 series on up (including everying in the Rx lineup), it's not just Kaveri-based APUs.
*edit*
That and you mentioned something about AMD motherboard socket cross-compatibility.
Right now, they have AM3+ (the FX line) and AM2 (the APU lineup) in the desktop realm. DDR4 is coming sometime, and that will require a new socket. So whatever you were to look at now wouldn't likely accept whatever upgrade comes around in a year or two's time.
And if the purpose of this is a "exercise/practice" - that's a lot different than "I'm planning to buy" -- and that is different again from "I'm planning to buy later this summer"
New build from both Novatech and Newegg europe.
Novatech
Samsung 224DB 24x DVD Re-Writer - SATA £12.98
Novatech Cougar ATX Case with PWM Fan £24.98
Seagate Barracuda 1TB 64MB Cache Hard Drive SATA 6GB/s 8.5ms 7200rpm - OEM £42.98
MSI GeForce GTX 760 TWIN FROZR GAMING OC 2GB GDDR5 £169.99
Coolermaster Hyper TX3 EVO CPU Cooler £18.98
Gelid GC-3 Extreme Performance Thermal Compound 3.5g £6.98
Newegg
Microlab M100 10 Watts 2.1 Multimedia Speakers £10.13
Should upgrade speakers if possible. these are bottom of the line.
G.SKILL Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 £41.73
LITE-ON SK-2035/B Black USB Wired Slim Keyboard £5.36
MSI A88X-G41 PC Mate FM2+ / FM2 AMD A88X £40.54
RAIDMAX RX-635AP 635W ATX BRONZE Certified Modular Power Supply £35.77
AMD 760K Richland 3.8GHz Socket FM2 100W Desktop Processor £53.65
Total before shipping 464.07 Pounds
CPU should OC 4.5 or higher. Performance should be comparable to 7850K
You could upgrade to excavator when it comes out for a nice upgrade.
Just kinda wanted to point this out:
If you aren't bottlenecking your CPUs, you probably aren't bottlenecking on the ~speed~ of your RAM either. You may very well be bottlenecking on the ~amount~ of RAM.
I will say the fact that if your existing CPU is weaker than an A10, it's probably not a Socket 1366 triple channel, and with 6G is almost certainly channel mismatched, so that is a strike against you (and does lean toward your claim that your RAM at 1333 is too slow, because it's only running at half speed).
Even if it were running at DDR1 speed, the RAM is still so much faster than any other I/O (save the on-die cache for the CPU) that except for some very specific cases, your sitting around waiting on everything else and not the RAM speed (assuming you have enough RAM in the first place). It's very very hard to bottleneck something on RAM speed... pretty much the only real-world case that does it consistently are servers with fast databases that are cached correctly such that they can stay entirely in RAM, integrated GPUs that use system RAM for video RAM, and aside from that the only time people at home see it are memory benchmarks and ZIPing a file up (which most people don't do for minutes/hours a day).
More than likely it's that you don't have enough RAM, and your being forced to swap out to the page file.. that is definitely noticeable, and very slow. But the fix for that isn't faster RAM, it's more RAM.
IMO one of the problems is how Windows handles ram and cache. For example in Linux EVERYTHING runs in ram. In Windows there are a ton of writes to cache no matter how much ram you have. The faster the industry switches to OGL and Linux the better. If you follow Phoronix it is clear that Linux is moving at a breakneck pace ATM as compared to the last 10 years.
Yea, 6G mismatched ram would run at 4gb wouldn't it? Windows hates 4 GB of ram.
Too bad you can't play 90% of the games on Linux which defeats the purpose of having a gaming pc in the first place.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Steam OS I believe is Linux based but I haven't really dicked around with that at all to know what it does and does not bring to the table compared to Windows 7 (for example).
The fact I am buying all the peripherals for the PC (monitor, speakers, etc) should tell you that I am on a mobile solution so the strike against me would only work if I chose willingly the mobile solution, I didn't (not much chance of taking your home desktop with you when moving to another country as a student on a shoestring budget, the shipping prices get ridiculous once you also factor in weight, size and the fragile label to say nothing that other people need that PC) so currently I have to deal with a i5-2410M with a Radeon 6650M (1Gb DDR3 variant) and 6 gbs of DDR3 1333Mhz RAM and to put it bluntly I am not gonna consider anything underneath 1600 Mhz after 7 months on 1333 Mhz with current games let alone newer generation video editors (for comparison AVS media 9 and Power Director 9 worked like a dream on this rig but I've recently upgraded to Power Director 11 and it has slowed down noticeably without taxing the CPU or GPU more than version 9, I checked this by running a mock project through both and the temperature for both the CPU and GPU were pretty much the same in either case and the browser was running in both normal conditions testing and ideal, only it and background programs such as AV, firewall and extremely light on load programs like IM clients, and the only thing I can credibly blame for that slow down is the RAM).
Also I did mentioned in the op something:
Though I did forget to mention I also do video editing in there so mae culpa.
Also Mantle works only on the R7 250 with a Kaveri APU (if you want hybrid crossfire) so I think you do not realize.
DDR4 is at least another 2-3 years down the line and will be allot more expensive when first introduced so for practical budget builds it is around 4-5 years away.... I change/upgrade my Rig around that timeframe anyway so the issue is moot and I would go with FM2+ rather than AM3+ because again FM2+ is newer and may have more viability should a mid timeframe upgrade be required whereas the AM3+ you may just wake up in a year has been rendered obslote by AM4 (or however they will call it) which may or may not be cross compatible with AM3+.
Wait a year. There will be a lot of new games that run on linux.
AMD and NV are both getting their drivers sorted.
Game engines are all working on Linux/OGL 4.4 support, 2 of the biggest just came out with it.
2 of the biggest upcoming games right now are going to have Linux support.
Don't comment on Linux without knowing what is happening.
What Ridelynn was saying is that in your laptop the RAM is mismatched. Unless you have a triple channel setup ( which you dont) 6gb would mean mismatched channels. Which means your RAM is not running up to snuff or the speeds its rated at.
The problems you are experiencing are not from the RAM speed but from having mismatched memory channels ( I.E. the 6gb ).
You need something like 2, 4, 8,16gb in a dual channel board. with 2 sticks of 4gb, 2 stick of 8gb, ect. You most likely have 1x 4g stick and 1x 2gb stick in the laptop.
So in essence you could remove the 2gb stick, add a 4gb stick to the laptop and probably would not be having the issues as then you will have matching pairs ( 8gb) ( 2 x 4gb )
Nothing wrong with buying 1600 speed over 1333. But the issues you are describing on the laptop are not related to RAM speed.
Just so the people helping me out understand what I want the rig for:
I am not planning on playing games at a larger resolution than 720p (window mode, multitasking) and certainly not highly graphics intensive games (ex: Archeage, World of Tanks, War Thunder, GW2, Tera, Repopulation, Gloria Victis, Mass Effect Trilogy and Space Engineers would be the most graphically demanding of the ones I will be playing, or planning to, for the foreseeable future and so my desire would be to run these on medium to high settings at 720p) and do some video editing (no 3D stuff, no elaborate special effects though).
That coupled with University stuff (nothing CPU demanding as I am in the experimental branch not the simulation one) is all this rig will be with.
Yes ideally I want the rig to be better than the consoles will ever be from the get go but if that is not possible at the 500-550 euro budget a rig that is easily upgradeable is just as good to keep up over the years.
Ahhh now I understand... still sticking to 1600s or higher though.
2 (TWO?) of the biggest upcoming games are coming to Linux? Are you serious? But you are correct, I never used Linux and never will. There are 0 benefits to using Linux for me. And running games on Linux is still a no no. Why would anyone who choose Linux over Windows if you are playing games is beyond me. It's easier to list the games that actually run on Linux than the ones that don't. Vast majority of game developers don't pay attention to this OS.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
OS isn't the problem in this thread so if you gents wanna debate the viability of different OSes then please do so in another thread.
Haswell-E should launch later this year and uses DDR4. After that, it should become nearly universal for new desktop and laptop chips to use DDR4 rather than DDR3 pretty quickly. As memory manufacturers shift to DDR4 for new process nodes that are cheaper per GB, prices per GB of DDR4 will probably drop below those of DDR3 pretty quickly. DDR3 was cheaper per GB than DDR2 within a year of the first DDR3 CPU launching.
I would not be surprised to see DDR4 used in variants of Kaveri or whatever AMD is calling the Vishera refresh due to launch later this year, though it's likely that those won't happen. I would be surprised to see new CPU architectures launch in 2015 using DDR3 apart from things scheduled for 2014 but delayed.
To the best of my knowledge, AMD doesn't yet support OpenGL 4.4, even on Windows. Nvidia does, but that only arrived recently. AMD should get there soon, and they do support 4.3 already. 4.4 doesn't matter much, though.
You missed some news. AMD is taking drivers very seriously right now and it's about time.
http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/68913-amd-catalyst-144-rc-now-available-windows-linux/
And OGL 4.4 is huge. It puts AMD and NV on the same page with the new optimizations.
Easier true cross platform compatibility since the console optimizations transfer to OGL 4.4 quite well. or vice versa.
If OGL 4.4 becomes the defacto standard this year DX12 is going to arrive DOA. This means MS is dead in the water with no reason to upgrade from W7.
That's making a lot of assumptions. especially since one of the two major consoles doesn't directly support OpenGL and is DirectX-based, and the other uses a modified version of it via some proprietary APIs. And it also assumes that the only thing people do with Windows is game, which is very far from the truth. And it assumes that just because you have implemented a standard that two drivers may be equally optimized, which is not a safe assumption at all. And your also making the assumption that if DX were to be passed over, that it would be passed over in favor of OpenGL - which may be a safe bet, but it's hardly a given -- DX10's "failure" didn't lead us to OpenGL either. And why would 4.4 become the standard, when most of the mobile world (which is really the driver behind OpenGL use right now) is using OpenGL ES 2.0, with only recent support for 3.0.
I'm excited about Linux/SteamOS gaming as well, but you need to take it with a grain of realism. DX12 may arrive DOA, it wouldn't be the first (DX10 was pretty well DOA, after all), but if Xbone gets full DX12 support, I wouldn't make that bet. The consoles have had a powerful impact on gaming development in general, and their influence won't disappear overnight, or even inside a single console generation.
As for this part: Yes, AMD is ~vastly~ improved on it's driver support.
However, improved doesn't mean "the best".
It's still well behind in Linux drivers, it's still struggling with Crossfire/microstudder. It's last official WHQL-qualified driver is from December. We don't have an official Mantle-supported driver, only Beta. The only area I can think of where AMD's driver really excels compared to the competition is in multiple-monitor support.
A couple of years ago I was willing to call AMD and nVidia at parity with regard to driver quality and release update frequency for Windows. Just lately AMD has started to slip again - as witnessed by the 4+ month time between official releases. It's not to the point that I would recommend against an AMD card, but I hope it doesn't continue to slide further.