The Mail Came Today

It's better to save some money and future-proof yourself a bit more. First, make sure that your power supply can support a hungrier card. I went with a $150 card about 4 years ago, and it still gets me by. I know it's time for a new one, but I have more important things to save for ... Anyway, if you can stand the wait, do it. I guess it also depends on how long it would take you to amass another $100.

http://www.hwcompare.com/ is a great resource of comparing GPUs. It may also help your decision.

 

Now, i hate my pc.

 

Hm, I use to think my laptop was a decent rig for gaming, looks like i'm going to start saving!

 

I might get a i5-3470 and a HD 7930 (7870 on Tahiti LE instead of pitcairn) instead of a FX-8350 and XFX 7950.

 

I've always believed that an i7 was better for gaming, but an i5 is probably better because i7's have HT. You learn stuff everyday.

 

Yeah, there's no doubt the i7 will be better but the i5 is more affordable, maybe a decent upgrade later on though

 

Wow, I never knew that an i5 was better for gaming than an i7. Or does it depend on the parts you have in your pc?

 

Hyperthreading is only going to make a significant difference if you do a lot of media encoding/transcoding. It won't really help game performance.

 

Oh, so an i7 is still better for gaming than an i5?

 

Yes, the i7 is better but you won't notice much difference unless you play games like BeamNG.

 

What you really want to look for in cpu performance is not hyperthreading support, it's not even clock speed. The biggest performance enhancer is cache size. What good are quicker cycles if you still have to wait to get things from RAM? When I was looking for processors for my latest build (2 years ago?), i7s had a bigger cache than their little brothers. That might make your gaming experience better. Also, as far as I know, you should be able to disable hyperthreading in your BIOS, and see if that helps your framerate.

 

Eh, I seem to get some severe bottlenecking with my i7, i'm not too sure about disabling HT, are there any risks to damaging my hardware?

 

I couldn't tell you about risks. I did a quick web search, and this was the first result. I wouldn't think that it should be damaging, but I have not researched it fully. Could the bottlenecking be cause by a weak GPU? Do you still bottleneck with lower graphics settings?

 

Thanks for that research. No, I dont believe so, I have an NVIDEA GEFORCE GT 640M 2GB graphics card, and a boring internal intel card. I know the card isnt the best, but graphics settings dont change anything for me .