Hi, I am intending to use my Christmas money to make some upgrades to my old desktop PC so I can use it to play BeamNG among other (less demanding) things. Currently it is running an AMD A8-7670K Radeon R7 processor (I'm told this is a little better than Intel i5) and 16GB RAM (will these be ok?) but I am planning to upgrade to Windows 10 and install a new GPU. I found the Nvidia RTX 3060 is reasonably-priced and far far better than what it already has (some integrated thing I think), but will that be suitable for this game? Thanks
What are specs of your power supply? Also what kind of case/ventilation you have? GPU tends to warm up the case and also requires some extra power and with A8 usually there is less ventilation and PSU capability than might be needed, but not of course necessarily so. Also gtx3080 is 600-800 euros for normal price, current elevated prices makes it to be over 1000 euros, not sure if prices will come down at beginning of next year, but some think so. I have been waiting for GPU price drops for a while, hopefully market normalizes soon. I'm sticking with win8 that is modified to work as close to w98 as possible, 10 I just find too unfriendly to use, too much background stuff and automated things going on, I wouldn't call it upgrade, but then again I'm not with the majority, so best to ignore I guess
I never looked at the 3080, only the 3070 and 3060 (which looked to be in the region of £200-300). I'd probably be upgrading the power supply too, what it has is fairly bog-standard (500-something watts) but I don't know exactly what it is. The case has a good amount of ventilation out of the back and one side, plus a smaller grille on the front- apart from that, all I know is it's called a Goblin. It does get quite hot with extended use in summer so I run 2 fans to it most of the time. There are some bits I could take off the case though if more was needed.
For me 3060 is 700 and 3070 is around 900-1000, 200-300 sounds actually very reasonable price compared to this insanity I'm limited to. I run i7-8086K and gtx1080 with 500W fanless Seasonic Platinum series PSU, I just added slow fan to PSU and it runs really cool and without issues, so 500W might be just fine if it is good enough quality, if it is just basic quality, then make sure to use some PSU calculator and see if there is enough AMPS to provide power with new GPU. In my R9-5900X I have 850W Seasonic gx series PSU and I'm not huge fan of that, fan sounds like diesel engine and it moves very little air, quite hot air that is. Also voltages are not even near as stable as with Platinum series PSUs, older 430W Platinum fanless actually has best voltage stability, there is no any change to +12V rail during 9 hours of gaming use, although that is powering i3 machine that is not drawing much power, I have used it also in i7 with gtx1080 and voltage was rock solid even then, but not sure if those are made anymore. If you decide to get new PSU, this listing might then help to avoid worst of the offerings: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1116640-psu-tier-list/ According to this page, your CPU gets Cinebench R15 score of 66, my 6th gen i3 gets result of 150 or so and DX11 games generally need single core performance to keep GPUs properly fed. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_a8_7670k-550 In BeamNG more cores also help to run more traffic cars or vehicles in general, but I'm not sure how well that CPU is going to keep GPU fed, it can be that GPU is waiting CPU to process data. Anyway dedicated GPU should help game run faster than it is running now with integrated gpu, however going faster than 1060 can have limited gains. Experimental Vulkan mode might help though, but it might take some time (might be year or more even) until it becomes fully stable. Also my i3 gets around 360 for Cinebench R15 multicore benchmark score while your CPU would be around 250. Unless there is something off, like there being different versions of A8 7670k, then I'm not sure if it really is faster than i5 as you were told, it might be faster than some old laptop versions of i5 though, but generally that CPU would hold you back quite bit even with the new GPU. Interesting thing would be if some modern AMD CPU with integrated graphics could actually give you more playable framerates? My i3-6100 that uses integrated GPU gets around 45fps on gridmapv2 default spawn with pickup truck and windowed mode around 1280x720 resolution, not sure how that compares what you get with your system currently. With faster GPU I get more fps of course, but CPU is bit limiting factor, so if I put gtx1080 to that i3, game indeed runs fine, except at Italy towns and with more vehicles CPU is totally on it's knees. Before deciding to go with GPU, I think it might be worth to research of what modern AMD CPUs with integrated graphics can do as I have heard those might actually give you decent gameplay for same/similar amount of money. Although I would need to do research on those myself too, I don't know too much about them or comparable intel offerings and their pricing.
Thanks so much! I would honestly be happy with a steady 35fps without having to turn down to like 800x600 and the lowest settings possible (currently playing on a laptop with even lower specs) and for features like traffic and replays to work without crashing the game (why something not Intel crossed my mind lol) To be fair, when I heard about the AMD vs Intel thing that was in 2015 when I was picking out my specs to get the PC custom-built, they probably have moved on a lot since then. I didn't really intend on upgrading my CPU yet but I'll get looking I mainly want to do this for recording replays and such in-game, because I can't use the replay function without crashing my laptop's cruddy Intel graphics. As long as I can get the resolution to a 16x9 one without hitting the framerate down to about 15 that's also fine. --- Post updated --- Well the 3060 was a bit expensive, more than I was told they were worth! So anyone recommend some cheaper, nearly-as-good alternatives?
I did look a little, get used Ryzen R5 2400G with motherboard and memory, I think that if you can find such used parts, it should be pretty nice, it was not very expensive when new and has pretty nice iGPU. Although with GPU upgrade that becomes even better. However I don't think that you can get that new anymore. New ones seem to be expensive, like R5 5600G is 280 just for CPU here, not sure if it is more sanely priced elsewhere, but 2400G was around 150 new, so price bump is extreme with this latest generation Ryzen. GPU might allow you to do replays and record videos though, so it might be still best route to go, temporarily then later on upgrade CPU to something without integrated graphics to get it with more reasonable cost I guess. However these latest generation AMD chips have gotten quite bit of price bump and it is kinda difficult to find as sweet reasonable costing systems as it used to be or then I suck at searching, but there is like CPUs that cost around 60 which are not much of upgrade and then next option is like 280 or then going with intel there is price point between, but then performance and the thing that intel really works only with Windows 10, especially these latest ones. I run R9-5900X with Windows 8.1, it works better with that than i7-8086K actually, so if one has already Windows 8 retail, there is no need to switch to 10 with AMD which saves money of course, but it is not route for everyone, wifi and bluetooth wont work and driver installation needs bit of creativity, but at least it works unlike with intel where there is no chance of success I'm afraid. Now I did record videos just fine with i3-6100 and gtx1050Ti, because you can use nvidia codec and GPU it is load off from CPU and that really helps, so I think in your situation GPU might make most sense. As CPU upgrade will be rather involved because all the Windows stuff, memory upgrade, motherboard change etc. and you still would need GPU upgrade, that also supports getting GPU first, even though you might not be able to fully use potential of GPU in all situations it is still huge leap in performance and later when you upgrade CPU it still works with new system, so that is why I would think GPU might be what gives you best results right now.
I'm kinda torn on what to do now, cuz to get the specs I want it's coming up cheaper to buy a PC than upgrade the one I've got, plus being quite an old motherboard (something I'm not sure I'd change due to the work involved) it might not have the right connections for a decent card. I do have a spare GPU around somewhere, so I'll do some messing about tomorrow and see what's what and make a decision. Thanks so much for your help though!
I'm not sure that there is nearly as good ones, but 1660 might be lower costing, but slower, however it still should be somewhat okay with 1080p and fine with 720p (if we think high graphics here) as I believe it is faster than 1050Ti. 1660 Super would be then bit faster and again bit more expensive. Even 1050Ti is holding 60fps most of the time with normal graphics and 1660 should be some 20-25% faster. Ultra mode, dynamic reflections and ambient occlusion are then things that require faster GPU and of course if you get into racing stuff where more FPS becomes as crazy thing as it is with first person shooters and anything below 120fps is considered unplayable because input lag is so huge (it is after all several milliseconds at 60fps.... yeah, don't get into that, it gets REALLY expensive!)
Ok, how would a GTX 970 hold up? Also, I'm seeing a lot of new PCs with AMD Ryzen 5 and AMD integrated graphics, would that work at all?
According to this page, it is slower than 1660 but I think around same performance as 1050Ti so it is good upgrade for you I believe, especially if free! https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-970-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1660/2577vs4038 Update: Oh yes, R5 and integrated graphics, that can be good, it really depends a bit from model, but I think that 970 if it works fine might be around same performance as those integrated graphics, but again would need to do research on that. But what I saw from R5 2400G and R5 5600G integrated graphics results, those were about 3-4x faster than integrated intel graphics which puts them close to 1050Ti level which is again gtx 970 level of performance, in theory, there is all the new technology then that complicates things and of course increased CPU performance, but be careful with different model names as some are really really weak, sometimes there is just single letter difference between OK model and weak model, especially with intel that has been case. Anything with U in their name, beware of, that is usually laptop performance level and often useless for anything apart from browsing the web.
Do you still need help with that? I just read the discussion and i can assure you that most of the things that this guy told you are not correct by any means (are a total bullshit tbh) for example:1050ti is nowhere near close to 970 (last one is around 50% faster than the first one) and more so integrated graphics are far far away from 1050ti's performance (100-150% less)
I don't know if it's going to happen now, I'm directing my money to other causes. Thanks for offering though
Reopening this thread in light of new knowledge- the desktop idea is gone, I'm going to be getting a new laptop instead as I need it for university and my current one is a long way from good enough for them. How do these specs sound on the most likely replacement I have lined up? (I'll be using it for the same Beam-related stuff as listed earlier in the thread) Intel Core i7-1165G7 quad-core processor 16GB RAM (maximum 24GB installable) Nvidia Geforce MX450, 2GB GDDR5 (GPU) The GPU is the real unknown quantity for me atm, as I know it's better then what I have but not as good as an RTX 3060 (the benchmark I've been comparing everything to)
This is a bad (for gaming experience at least) laptop. Tell me what budget do u have and i'll try to find something decent for you.
I wanted to keep it under £1k but it doesn't look like that will be possible, so let's say £1500. I couldn't find anything with Nvidia GTX or RTX for less than £2k though. For how much better it is than my current laptop this one I found seemed reasonably priced (20% more for a 160% better CPU and GPU and twice the RAM)
Oh I found something better I think, just gotta choose between 2 now. One is an Asus TUF Dash F15, the other is a MSI Stealth 15M. Both have 16GB RAM, 11th-gen Intel i7 (11370H in the Asus, 11375H in the MSI). The only major difference is the GPU- the Asus has, to quote the listing on Scan UK, "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU", and the MSI has "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU". My first question is is there any difference between an Nvidia laptop GPU and a regular one? My second question is which sounds better, or is it really close?
the laptop ones are significantly less powerful but that’s about it. Two things though: Don’t get a laptop unless you 100% are going to be moving around to different locations (I.e between school and home). And stay away from Lenovo.
I need a laptop because I do move it around and I don't have space for a desktop. Further research showed me that an RTX 3070 laptop GPU performs about the same as a 2060 desktop one which should still do the job. And yea, after my last Lenovo experience I wouldn't buy one even if they did the sort of thing I'm looking for. Thanks
"gaming" laptops have a tendency to overheat and eat up battery life like crazy. They're good if you don't push them too hard, though.
