Trade a Friend some parts.

[steve10765]

OK so my friend has a new(less than 2 weeks of use) computer. Here is the hardware I was thinking of trading.

He Has
MSI LGA1155/Intel B75 ($70new)
Intel Core i5-3470 Ivy Bridge 3.2GHz (3.6GHz Turbo Boost) ($200new)
Total new value $270

I want to give him
My CPU( and the stock cooler, not my CM evo) ($100 new)
My mobo ($110 new)
and my SSD 128gb ($125) 100% health-crystal mark
Total new value $335

and I was going to ask for some money with it, $50 or so. (then use it to help me buy another ssd)
ALSO he has a corsair CX 430, but I think that will be enough to handle my CPU, he has a EVGA 650 TI

What do you guys think? I don't want to give him a bad deal because hes my good friend and is new to comps.

What do you say? should i try to make a deal with him?

 

[bpm55]

Why would you purpose the trade? He would be spending money when he has brand new parts on old parts. It would make more sense for him to just save money and by a SSD.

 

[PP Mguire]

It's not logical either way. If you want more performance in games, get a new GPU. Your CPU is 100% fine for anything now stock, and you're sitting at 4GHz. It makes no sense for him to trade down for an SSD, or you get marginal CPU increases for a lack of SSD.

He would definitely need a new PSU too.

 

[steve10765]

It's not logical either way. If you want more performance in games, get a new GPU. Your CPU is 100% fine for anything now stock, and you're sitting at 4GHz. It makes no sense for him to trade down for an SSD, or you get marginal CPU increases for a lack of SSD.

He would definitely need a new PSU too.

Ok thanks guys, I thought the better CPU would be worth it.

And I know my CPU is fine for games, its just arma 3 loves CPu's, well its just badly optimised and uses 60% max on CPU's.

My main reason for OC my cpu was for arma 2, which also only uses %60 max.


Anyway I know thats not my cpu's fault, its arma's. I'll stick with my current set up.

 

[PP Mguire]

It's not that it's badly optimized, it's designed to offload. 60% isn't 100%, so you still have room. Farcry 3 I've seen use up to 91% on 6 cores but when disabling two it made no difference due to scalability. If you're getting low FPS, it's because of your GPU.

Edit: I just played some Arma 3 and it mainly stuck to two cores. FPS was decent and it auto set me to very high.

 

[steve10765]

It's not that it's badly optimized, it's designed to offload. 60% isn't 100%, so you still have room.

room for what? They should limit it to 80%, thats enough room left over to run the OS, Steam, and teamspeak even on low end hardware.

It should be designed to use more than 60% of my cpu, I want it to take advantage!

Anyway I am on high settings with SMAA standard instead of FXAA.
I lowered view distance 100, and object distance to 1200, instead of 1500 it set me to.

I get 40+ FPS on good servers, the 82AB server is good.
When Nvidia optimizes for Arma 3 things will be even better! (they have not optimized for arma 3 yet)

 

[PP Mguire]

Having room is a good thing. When you're maxing out is when you need to upgrade, and I don't think any game for a while yet will take full advantage of 4 cores, so it utilizing 60% by itself is actually very good.

When in game, priority from the OS is set to the open program enlarged, so really the background tasks only need about 5%. 25% of full CPU usage is 1 full core so if it's capped at 80 then you're only using 3 out of 4 cores. If the game was designed to fully utilize the whole CPU then people would be complaining about that too so it's a lose/lose no matter what way you go. To me, the more usage the better, but if you're not bottlenecked by CPU that's cool too.

Edit: Figured I would do this. Fully maxed out this is how my CPU looks like with only 4 cores and no HT. Not very CPU demanding at all for what it is.

 

[steve10765]

What GPU are you using now?

 

[PP Mguire]

GTX 580, that run was on stock clocks.