Giving my PC a major upgrade

[mehguy]

OK so back in 2014 I built a "gaming" pc with an AMD A6 6400k with an R7 240 and 4GB of ram and well, it sucked. It could play TF2 at 30FPS at medium settings. But I want to get back into pc building and I'm willing to spend more money this time lol. The goal of this PC is to be able to get games like DOOM, Unreal Tournament and Quake Champions running at medium-high settings at a decent frame rate. However I'm still on a budget and I'm going to be using some parts from my 2014 pc in this new build. This is what I had in mind.

AMD FX 8320
Nvidia GTX 960
8GB of RAM (4GB of 8 was used in the 2014 build)
1TB HDD (used from 2014 build)
EVGA 600w PSU (used from 2014 build)

Any suggestions for the MOBO or other components?

 

[Dauntae]

You should actually take a look at the 1060 for much better performance or perhaps find a used 970 for a good price,and any reason for going AMD, Seems you actually get more bang for the buck with Intel now, As you may have noticed 2 yrs isn't very long for a build to already need replacing.

 

[mehguy]

You should actually take a look at the 1060 for much better performance or perhaps find a used 970 for a good price,and any reason for going AMD, Seems you actually get more bang for the buck with Intel now, As you may have noticed 2 yrs isn't very long for a build to already need replacing.

What would be a good intel cpu around the same price point of the FX 8320?

 

[PP Mguire]

i3 6310 or i5 6400 with an H110 board. The RX480 new or a used 970/980 would be a better idea than a new 960.

 

[mehguy]

Shouldnt the FX 8320 be better in the long run because of its 8 cores whereas the i3 has only 2 cores?

 

[carnageX]

Shouldnt the FX 8320 be better in the long run because of its 8 cores whereas the i3 has only 2 cores?

This topic by PP explains it pretty well:
http://www.techist.com/forums/f76/your-cpu-modern-games-guide-those-building-261626/

 

[mehguy]

Arent there games out there that will not run on a dual core and will need a quad core to run?

 

[carnageX]

Arent there games out there that will not run on a dual core and will need a quad core to run?

There's only a few that actually require a quadcore (Far Cry 4 being one of them) - in that case, spring for the i5 over the i3.

 

[PP Mguire]

The games that "require" a quad only look for 4 logical processors which means 4 threads. An i3 has HT which gives it 4 threads. I put up this video showing a Sandy Bridge (2nd gen) i3 (I disable 4 cores to showcase an "i3") paired with a 970 gaming just fine on the supposed required 4 core titles. A Skylake i3 is as fast and mostly faster than an overclocked 8350 at all games and even a lot of multithreaded tasks so there's no reason to go with an AMD processor until maybe Zen.

My article is a bit outdated and I need to sometime soon update it for DX12, but a lot of people have been asking. The deal with that is it's not guaranteed to utilize more cores, it only has the better capability of properly utilizing them. The proper advantage of DX12 and Vulkan (or other low level APIs like Mantle that's now defunct) is the reduction of CPU bottleneck due to requiring less CPU overhead. Basically, developers can now properly program to directly translate to "bare metal" or straight to GPU requiring less data flow and bottleneck by the CPU. These APIs have the ability to utilize more cores for an enhancement in AI, CPU physics, and other technologies BUT the issue with that is the average person has 4 or less threads. With Intel sticking to a 4 core design as their mainstream we will not see thread utilization increase until they change this. With the FX line being 4 years old now we are seeing a huge influx in transition to Intel as people "see the light" so to speak and with that popularity being on the rise we won't see any increase in thread usage until the industry moves on from this "standard". Not to mention, the mass majority of people are either not DX12 capable or have the bare feature requirement meaning most games coming out in the next 2-3 years will still be heavily DX12_0 feature capable and will only utilize that low CPU overhead byproduct of DX12. Maybe with Canonlake we might see an increase to 6 core mainstream for the i7, but don't hold your breath. So you're good with 4 threads now, and can upgrade yourself later an i5 or i7 if need be but probably won't be necessary unless you go with a much stronger GPU.

 

[mehguy]

I think I should still go with a 960. In Canada, prices are quite different and our dollar isn't in the best condition at the moment... a used gtx 970 is around 300CAD, which is more then I'm willing to pay and the RX 480 is 275 CAD new but that 75 dollars could easily be used for a MOBO. Anyways, I won't be building for awhile, I'll see where the prices are at then and maybe I'll go with a gtx 970 used if its cheaper.