Another tight budget situation
- Thread starter DyqstARD
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Like Rome Total war 2 Arma has been badly optimized for multicore processors, so its raw clock speed that counts for the game.
A setup like this will maximise your Arma performance
CPU - Intel Core i5 2500K @ 4.5GHz
Motherboard - Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
Memory - 8GB Corsair DDR3 1600Mhz XMS3
Hard Drive - 1TB SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Optical Drive - Samsung 12x Bluray drive
Graphics Card - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1,536MB
Case - Zalman Z9 Plus
PSU - 700W Xigmatek
You can do that comfortably within your budget. There is a downside though, your machine will not be very future proof and your all round performance will suffer. It rather depends on your porties, squeeze everything out for Amra and risk having to upgrade in a few years time or spending more on the cpu but having not so good performance on Arma, say just about hitting 30fps
A setup like this will maximise your Arma performance
CPU - Intel Core i5 2500K @ 4.5GHz
Motherboard - Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
Memory - 8GB Corsair DDR3 1600Mhz XMS3
Hard Drive - 1TB SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Optical Drive - Samsung 12x Bluray drive
Graphics Card - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1,536MB
Case - Zalman Z9 Plus
PSU - 700W Xigmatek
You can do that comfortably within your budget. There is a downside though, your machine will not be very future proof and your all round performance will suffer. It rather depends on your porties, squeeze everything out for Amra and risk having to upgrade in a few years time or spending more on the cpu but having not so good performance on Arma, say just about hitting 30fps
When I upgraded a few months back I went with an i7 on the assumption that I would keep the system for about 5 years or so. Most of the PC game engines are optimized for dual cores currently but with next gen of consoles coming out I suspect (hope!) the next iteration of engines on the PC will have real multi core support. I went with an i7 3770k and GTX 650 for about your budget. It is easier to upgrade a graphics card than a cpu so for about the same price I can be still be running new games on the mid range settings in about 5 years time.
I tend to disagree. CPU is secondary to gaming performance. Even if you get an i5 it still won't hold you back for years, while a mid-low range graphics card will always bottleneck your system. The 3570 already costs a lot of money, getting an i7 for a gaming system with that kind of budget is a bit senseless.
Even if multicore support is more widely implemented in games in the future, theoretically you would be better off with a true octacore AMD.
Even if multicore support is more widely implemented in games in the future, theoretically you would be better off with a true octacore AMD.
Even when you are talking about PC exclusive engines the current generation is ageing. The arma2/3 engine is 5 years old, the total war engine is from 2010 and Valve have announced that there is source 2 engine under development. Intel have 81% of the pc market and AMD have said as far back as 2010 that they are not going to go toe to toe with Intel in the PC market. This means that developers will have to take account of hardware that actually exists when considering how to deal with threads. Most the current engines were written when most machines has 2 cores only, now the quads have become commonplace it is not unreasonable to assume that instead of 2 main threads that 4 main threads will be the rule for the PC and any additional cores will be used for minor things. The current arma2 engine will support up to 32 cores but only uses 2 threads so any additional cores are hardly utilized. Developers will have to support quad cores for the near term because that is what the average PC has currently. In 5 years an octacore could very well be the way to go for a PC but by that time the current AMD FX will be ancient history.AWAR said:
There is also not just of the factor of pure gaming performance, PCs can genuinely multi task. If you have an i7 playing TW Rome II playing on your main screen you could have a secondary screen running a browser with multiple tabs open while checking email and playing a MP3 track. So it depends on what you want out of a PC and how long you want to keep it. You can get an i5 just purely play current generation games and do no multitasking or spend a little more and get i7 better all round performance. Its not my choice to make for someone else but if someone is asking for advice I feel it incumbent to give someone the information to make an informed decision.
It's weak on the graphics front. The gtx 640 isn't going to run ARMA III at a satisfactory frame rate on anything other than low settings. I still think that the i7 is an overkill. Go get a 3570k and a 760/660ti.Dyqstard said:
Here in the advice forum I try to recommend what's best for gaming. Often times people will come here with a tight budget and they would like to build a decent machine for games.albino boo said:
What you are proposing is a top of the line processor with medium to low end graphics card, similar to most pre-builts we love to hate. Again, this is about gaming, not editing or rendering or any other thing. I don't even think most people want to multitask while playing games although I'm fairly sure you can have multiple windows open with any processor. Also you should take a look at this.
You really need a gtx660 or a radeon 7970 to scrape 30fps at 1920x1080 on Amra 3. I would upgrade the psu to at least 500w to deal with the additional power drawn by the graphics card. Its a trade off between graphics now and all round performance in the longer term. Do you want to build a system or buy off the shelf because you can get far better prices for those components and build the system yourself.Dyqstard said:
AWAR said:
I gave him the information to make up his own mind and not impose my view. I clearly pointed out a system using an i5 that would hit his requirements but I also pointed out that that there is downside to that setup. He then came back and asked the question would an i7 give a better all round performance to which the answer is yes. The guy went with an i7 based on what he thinks is important, not what you or I think. At no point during that video was issue of multithreading or future proofing mentioned in that video, so while the benchmarks are perfectly relevant for today that does not mean anything in 3 years time.albino boo said:
I'm not 100% sure here but I think the problem that DayZ has is that is coded by the Chernobyl safety inspector. The complaints that I have heard is that the mod does not maximize system ram use but uses vRam form the hard drive and coupled with crappy server code you end up with low FPS. This will cause bottlenecks almost regardless of CPU and graphics card. I don't know if its going to be fixed at any point because its not one I play.