Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
by state of crimson drivers.. i can only assume you mean working amazingly and playing all games with little to no faults.
That hasn't been my experience. The first iteration of Crimson driver led to a loss of FPS in every game I play by around 15-20 FPS. Some games wouldn't run at all unless I turned off things like anti aliasing. Older games were hit worst. SR3 wouldn't run until at all I edited the ini file to drop the settings to medium and every attempt to bring them back up led to a crash.
Subsequent revisions have done little to fix those problems.
I'm glad you didn't have the same problems but for me they were a disaster.
Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
by state of crimson drivers.. i can only assume you mean working amazingly and playing all games with little to no faults.
That hasn't been my experience. The first iteration of Crimson driver led to a loss of FPS in every game I play by around 15-20 FPS. Some games wouldn't run at all unless I turned off things like anti aliasing. Older games were hit worst. SR3 wouldn't run until at all I edited the ini file to drop the settings to medium and every attempt to bring them back up led to a crash.
Subsequent revisions have done little to fix those problems.
I'm glad you didn't have the same problems but for me they were a disaster.
it might have something to do with an older generation card as i've mentioned about 47347982478932 before everyone would probably know by now i have 290x...
if that is the case that is really unfortunate, but could also be a result of the card showing it's age and in general starting to deteriorate after a good life cycle, but it could infact be crimson which would honestly be a true shame considering they are meant to have good older generation compatibility.
i've basically read through all the posts on this thread now and everyone has their opinions but at the end of the day you gotta do whats economically viable for you, that you will be HAPPY with and thats the biggest thing here, you need to feel that your investment was worth while.. i've seen so many motherboards / cpus etc.. thrown around.. but at the end of the day it's what you want that suits you needs.
for me personally i'd never go back to an i5.. i've had both i5's and i7's and people can link me benchmarks all day showing the in game performance between both is negligible but my experience with i7's is more fluid and handles multitasking a lot better, which i have 3 screens running and generally plenty of stuff going on in the background while i'm gaming.. so it feels like a better buffer to me..
i had GTX 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 700 generations, all the 80 models 200 was good, 400 i got rid of as soon as 500 came out, 500 i bought a gainward and still to this day my buddy is using it in his rig... although fermi was a distaster, that gainward card... the 580 Phantom II was just a beast of a card, 680 was amazing, 780 i had 2 of both died within 3 weeks of each other 8 months after buying them and i made the move to AMD and at this stage i wouldn't look back... when vega releases even if it is slightly less powerful than whatever nvidia brings to the table.. AMD will probably have my business because nvidia after 1 good generation of cards (600) series out of 5 that i owned... that's not good enough for me.
tldr; buy what you feel comfortable with, that is going to make you happy and feel like you invested your money in something you're proud to own
R3d.Gallows said:
While this is true for single player gaming, a lot of MMOs are heavily CPU bound.
I will be more than happy to see the data you base your claim on...
Have to agree, while its important to have a reasonably good CPU, i can't think of any MMO i have played that didn't also rely on having a fairly beefy GPU, particularly if you wanted a decent quality of resolution and framerate. If anything i would say MMO's are less CPU bound, with most of the 'heavy' workload carried out by the GPU.
R3d.Gallows said:
While this is true for single player gaming, a lot of MMOs are heavily CPU bound.
I will be more than happy to see the data you base your claim on...
Have to agree, while its important to have a reasonably good CPU, i can't think of any MMO i have played that didn't also rely on having a fairly beefy GPU, particularly if you wanted a decent quality of resolution and framerate. If anything i would say MMO's are less CPU bound, with most of the 'heavy' workload carried out by the GPU.
WoW used to be heavily CPU bound... over expansions blizzard has slowly moved away from it.. i believe with legion they have made vast improvements to the graphics engine and how the cpu and gpu handle things...
but i guess seeing as WoW was heavily CPU bound, all MMOs are heavily CPU bound :P
Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
by state of crimson drivers.. i can only assume you mean working amazingly and playing all games with little to no faults.
That hasn't been my experience. The first iteration of Crimson driver led to a loss of FPS in every game I play by around 15-20 FPS. Some games wouldn't run at all unless I turned off things like anti aliasing. Older games were hit worst. SR3 wouldn't run until at all I edited the ini file to drop the settings to medium and every attempt to bring them back up led to a crash.
Subsequent revisions have done little to fix those problems.
I'm glad you didn't have the same problems but for me they were a disaster.
Youre flat out lying. Why do you do that is for you to figure out. Because guess what? I tried first few Crimson editions and there were no problems.
I can tell you that lot of older games have problems on NVidia (For instance NFS is conpletely unplayable due to texture.....tearing), as well as new ones and especially DX12. Nvidia drivers are just bad. Ive never had problems while i was on AMD before that.
Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
by state of crimson drivers.. i can only assume you mean working amazingly and playing all games with little to no faults.
That hasn't been my experience. The first iteration of Crimson driver led to a loss of FPS in every game I play by around 15-20 FPS. Some games wouldn't run at all unless I turned off things like anti aliasing. Older games were hit worst. SR3 wouldn't run until at all I edited the ini file to drop the settings to medium and every attempt to bring them back up led to a crash.
Subsequent revisions have done little to fix those problems.
I'm glad you didn't have the same problems but for me they were a disaster.
Youre flat out lying. Why do you do that is for you to figure out. Because guess what? I tried first few Crimson editions and there were no problems.
I can tell you that lot of older games have problems on NVidia (For instance NFS is conpletely unplayable due to texture.....tearing), as well as new ones and especially DX12. Nvidia drivers are just bad. Ive never had problems while i was on AMD before that.
Just because you don't have a problem, or have had a problem with certain things in the past, doesn't mean others haven't had a different experience, it certainly does not make them liars.
Yeah, please "15-20 FPS reduction"? Net would be full of it. Somehow HE is the only one that had it and spreading that crap around here. I bet he has never even owned ATI/AMD card in his life.
Its funny how teh ludest ones are ones who have never owned ATI/AMD card in their life or have owned it 10 years ago and flat out lie, while just ignoring on huge problems NVidia has had with drivers.
Yeah, please "15-20 FPS reduction"? Net would be full of it. Somehow HE is the only one that had it and spreading that crap around here. I bet he has never even owned ATI/AMD card in his life.
Its funny how teh ludest ones are ones who have never owned ATI/AMD card in their life or have owned it 10 years ago and flat out lie, while just ignoring on huge problems NVidia has had with drivers.
Both vendors have had issues over the years, there is no point accusing anyone of lying though.. his problems could be completely hardware related and not driver.. but there is no way we would know one way or another.
many people experienced the overheating issue when the first crimson edition came out, i installed it the day it came out i didn't.. just because i didn't experience it doesn't mean it's a lie.
Yeah, please "15-20 FPS reduction"? Net would be full of it. Somehow HE is the only one that had it and spreading that crap around here. I bet he has never even owned ATI/AMD card in his life.
Its funny how teh ludest ones are ones who have never owned ATI/AMD card in their life or have owned it 10 years ago and flat out lie, while just ignoring on huge problems NVidia has had with drivers.
There are all kinds of reasons why that might happen, just one of them would be that the card was not a good fit for the system he had at the time, it happens.
Yeah, please "15-20 FPS reduction"? Net would be full of it. Somehow HE is the only one that had it and spreading that crap around here. I bet he has never even owned ATI/AMD card in his life.
Its funny how teh ludest ones are ones who have never owned ATI/AMD card in their life or have owned it 10 years ago and flat out lie, while just ignoring on huge problems NVidia has had with drivers.
Both vendors have had issues over the years, there is no point accusing anyone of lying though.. his problems could be completely hardware related and not driver.. but there is no way we would know one way or another.
many people experienced the overheating issue when the first crimson edition came out, i installed it the day it came out i didn't.. just because i didn't experience it doesn't mean it's a lie.
That doesnt stop him of accusing "drivers" though (although he is the first one that claims such thing) now does it.
And cry when Intel patches the quirk out. Or just pay the extra money, $60 in a rig where you are already dropping $400 on just a motherboard + CPU is going to be a single-digit percentage of the cost, and enjoy higher stock clocks as well as no threat to your overclock and continued warranty support.
Now, if you are buying this yourself, and perfectly understand the risks of doing so - then I have no problem with it. Have fun, that's what computer builds are all about (for me anyway).
But if your building it for someone else, or making recommendations - you need to make sure that the end user understands all of that. Otherwise, when they go and blindly apply software updates and all of a sudden their 4.0Ghz overclock drops to a locked 2.7Ghz stock, they are likely to get a bit upset, and maybe even more so if they realize the warranty coverage was gone the moment it was overclocked.
If you want absolutely security that no sneaky bios microcode update via windows update happens, you just need to get an AsRock motherboard with an external clock generator. For which i'll make a guide when the decently price ones arrive on newegg.
Or don't use Windows 10 with Z170, that way it can never happen xD
My guide is not aimed at anyone who is not comfortable changing stuff in bios anyway.
Hm i should probably make a new post for both so more people can see it.
Also for some reason the MSI Z170-g43 model is missing from newegg, it should be priced $90 to $100 and is better than the $118 one i linked.
And cry when Intel patches the quirk out. Or just pay the extra money, $60 in a rig where you are already dropping $400 on just a motherboard + CPU is going to be a single-digit percentage of the cost, and enjoy higher stock clocks as well as no threat to your overclock and continued warranty support.
Now, if you are buying this yourself, and perfectly understand the risks of doing so - then I have no problem with it. Have fun, that's what computer builds are all about (for me anyway).
But if your building it for someone else, or making recommendations - you need to make sure that the end user understands all of that. Otherwise, when they go and blindly apply software updates and all of a sudden their 4.0Ghz overclock drops to a locked 2.7Ghz stock, they are likely to get a bit upset, and maybe even more so if they realize the warranty coverage was gone the moment it was overclocked.
And you don't see any risk in relying heavily on a feature that Intel is actively trying to break? Intel does have considerable sway with motherboard vendors, as if one defies Intel too much, Intel can refuse to sell them any more chipsets. Have fun producing exclusively AMD motherboards.
So Intel is boosting BCLK overclocking and fixing AVX bug when doing non-k overclocking for Kaby Lake.
Care to explain to me how this correlates to Intel actively trying to break non-k overclocking ?
Why did Intel even seperate clocks in skylake in the first place if it didn't want BCLK overclocking ?
Also why isn't intel shutting down MSI which left NOC overclocking capability in 4 new driver iterations since everyone else shut it down, and why isn't Intel shutting down AsRock for releasing external clock generator motherboards ?? (granted the AsRock ones have gone up in price, and the low-to-mid models haven't arrived yet, is Intel bullying AsRock ?)
Comments
Subsequent revisions have done little to fix those problems.
I'm glad you didn't have the same problems but for me they were a disaster.
if that is the case that is really unfortunate, but could also be a result of the card showing it's age and in general starting to deteriorate after a good life cycle, but it could infact be crimson which would honestly be a true shame considering they are meant to have good older generation compatibility.
i've basically read through all the posts on this thread now and everyone has their opinions but at the end of the day you gotta do whats economically viable for you, that you will be HAPPY with and thats the biggest thing here, you need to feel that your investment was worth while.. i've seen so many motherboards / cpus etc.. thrown around.. but at the end of the day it's what you want that suits you needs.
for me personally i'd never go back to an i5.. i've had both i5's and i7's and people can link me benchmarks all day showing the in game performance between both is negligible but my experience with i7's is more fluid and handles multitasking a lot better, which i have 3 screens running and generally plenty of stuff going on in the background while i'm gaming.. so it feels like a better buffer to me..
i had GTX 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 700 generations, all the 80 models 200 was good, 400 i got rid of as soon as 500 came out, 500 i bought a gainward and still to this day my buddy is using it in his rig... although fermi was a distaster, that gainward card... the 580 Phantom II was just a beast of a card, 680 was amazing, 780 i had 2 of both died within 3 weeks of each other 8 months after buying them and i made the move to AMD and at this stage i wouldn't look back... when vega releases even if it is slightly less powerful than whatever nvidia brings to the table.. AMD will probably have my business because nvidia after 1 good generation of cards (600) series out of 5 that i owned... that's not good enough for me.
tldr; buy what you feel comfortable with, that is going to make you happy and feel like you invested your money in something you're proud to own
but i guess seeing as WoW was heavily CPU bound, all MMOs are heavily CPU bound :P
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9811/amd-crimson-driver-overview/5
I can tell you that lot of older games have problems on NVidia (For instance NFS is conpletely unplayable due to texture.....tearing), as well as new ones and especially DX12. Nvidia drivers are just bad. Ive never had problems while i was on AMD before that.
Its funny how teh ludest ones are ones who have never owned ATI/AMD card in their life or have owned it 10 years ago and flat out lie, while just ignoring on huge problems NVidia has had with drivers.
many people experienced the overheating issue when the first crimson edition came out, i installed it the day it came out i didn't.. just because i didn't experience it doesn't mean it's a lie.
Step 1. for $190 buy i5-6400 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117564
Step 2. for $118 buy MSI Z170-A PRO http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130892
Step 3. add whatever RAM you want (except only get ones with lowest possible heatsinks)
Step 4. Get 1 of these 3 cpu coolers depending on room in your case/looks etc, ...
LEPA LPALV12-BK http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835494014
ARCTIC COOLING Freezer i32 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16835186140
Gelid Solutions Antarctica http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835426050
Lepa - $43, Arctic Cooling - $35, Gelid - $42
Step 5. Go to this page :http://overclocking.guide/updated-msi-z170-non-k-overclocking-guide-new-bios/
Download the april 13th 2nd newest bios for the Z170-A PRO, and read the guide, and overclock following the instructions. 4 GHz is plenty for this cpu, but you can go to 4.4-4.5 easily.
Step 6. Go to this youtube video (in german atm, english version incoming) for a more detailed guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFpH75U3JUc
Step 7. Don't forget to check your temps with hwinfo 32 while running prime 95 as explained above.
And there you have it : $190+$118+$40 = $350 versus $250+$118+$40 = $410 (for i5-6600k+same motherboard)
I would however recommend the Gigabyte Z170X-UD3 @ $158 for 24/7 4.5GHz overclocking.
The difference has diminished since launch and is only the cpu price thus $60, which is not an extraordinary difference.
As soon as the new AsRock Hyper series b150 and h170 arrive i'll do a price guide for them as well.
Now, if you are buying this yourself, and perfectly understand the risks of doing so - then I have no problem with it. Have fun, that's what computer builds are all about (for me anyway).
But if your building it for someone else, or making recommendations - you need to make sure that the end user understands all of that. Otherwise, when they go and blindly apply software updates and all of a sudden their 4.0Ghz overclock drops to a locked 2.7Ghz stock, they are likely to get a bit upset, and maybe even more so if they realize the warranty coverage was gone the moment it was overclocked.
For which i'll make a guide when the decently price ones arrive on newegg.
Or don't use Windows 10 with Z170, that way it can never happen xD
My guide is not aimed at anyone who is not comfortable changing stuff in bios anyway.
Hm i should probably make a new post for both so more people can see it.
Also for some reason the MSI Z170-g43 model is missing from newegg, it should be priced $90 to $100 and is better than the $118 one i linked.
http://fudzilla.com/news/processors/41048-kaby-lake-has-learned-two-overclocking-tricks
Care to explain to me how this correlates to Intel actively trying to break non-k overclocking ?
Why did Intel even seperate clocks in skylake in the first place if it didn't want BCLK overclocking ?
Also why isn't intel shutting down MSI which left NOC overclocking capability in 4 new driver iterations since everyone else shut it down, and why isn't Intel shutting down AsRock for releasing external clock generator motherboards ?? (granted the AsRock ones have gone up in price, and the low-to-mid models haven't arrived yet, is Intel bullying AsRock ?)