It's time for me to build a new comp soon and a few other people i have spoke to are thinking of getting a new comp or upgrading parts so thought i would list what i'm getting. The AMD Radeon 9970 is having a launch event thing on the 25th sept (might be on sale the next day or early october) so i wouldn't buy a new gfx card until that is out since it will probably be the fastest single GPU card out and make prices of everything else go down a bit.

Intel Core i7-4770K 3.50GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £ 257
GIGABYTE GA-Z87-HD3 Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) ATX Motherboard £ 93
250GB Samsung 840 EVO Series 2.5" SATA 6GB/s (SATA-III) Solid State Drive SSD £144
16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 2133MHz £107
AMD Radeon 9970 £???
Case £26

I already have 3 monitors for eyefinity, 3TB HD, 2TB HD, blu-ray writer, PSU, keyboard, mouse etc so i think this is gonna cost me nearly a grand.


Intel's Haswel CPU's only came out 3 months ago and although the much cheaper i5 version is not much slower than the i7 for gaming right now the i5 has no hyper-threading and so is limited to 4 threads and not 8 like with the i7. With the next gen consoles out in november having 8 core AMD CPU's, games released for those consoles are going to be optimised for 8 threads. So probably best to keep some things in line with how the xbox one and PS4 are so that the sloppy badly optimised game ports to PC still run ok....probably will be a year until games are optimised for 8 threads instead of 4 though but something to keep in mind if you are choosing between an i5 and i7 in the future.

8GB ram is more than enough and the next gen consoles have 8GB shared between CPU/GPU, games out now don't really use more than 4GB. Yes i am getting 16GB but i will be sometimes be running 2 or 3 games at once with 30 browser windows open and other shit all at the same time ....so it will benefit me.

I'm not 100% sure on what case to get, i wont spend £100 on a metal and plastic box so probably either www.sharkoon.com/?q=en/content/vs3-v (£26) or us.msi.com/product/case/Barricade.html (£35) hmm which do you think?

also you Nvidia card owners should think about making the change to AMD cards since EA and AMD are working together developing games like BF4 on AMD hardware and more importantly with the new consoles having AMD GPU's, all games are going to be made for and optimised more for them.

And make sure you stick with windows 7 64bit....windows 8 is fucking awful!

I can pick you one of these cases up for cheap, they have a few behind Aldi. They look a bit nicer than the two you have listed

>.<

hehe not bad roo, not that bothered about the looks of them as when I use my computer I look at the screen all the time rather than the case under the desk as I find you get more things done that way. Aldi one would be fine but it lacks front USB 3.0 ports so wont do

www.livestream.com/amdlivestream/video?c...17-8caf-ff204913625b

The nearly 3 hour AMD event had a lot of shit in it but also some good stuff.

I will sum it up so you don't have to watch:

The AMD Radeon 9970 is called "AMD Radeon R9 290x" has 4GB ram and should be faster than the Nvidia GTX Titan but nearly half the price. Can pre order it on Oct 3rd and comes with BF4.

AMD says it will have a TrueAudio Technology chip which will allow modern games to do advanced sound techniques that are not able to be used in current games and without hurting CPU performance. They also say it will also allow better virtual positional audio for games than any current virtual audio solution.... Have to see how that turns out.

AMD Mantle....now this sounds very good, it allows game devs to bypass windows OS features such as directX and hit the AMD graphics card hardware directly at a low level which should give big performance boosts. First game to support it will be BF4 in the December patch.

BF4 and the frostbite engine will also take advantage of 8 CPU cores, so as i said above this should be a game that makes full use of an I7 CPU already

All looking good.....for AMD at least

Budget upgrade. If it turns out my PSU is the cause of the problems, I am considering this mini upgrade. CBA spending money on a new rig to play one game. I can then overclock the CPU. Get both these graphics cards running and hopefully play BF with some kind of reasonable FPS. Total cost: £240 Thoughts?


www.scan.co.uk/products/1000w-corsair-rm...-1x135mm-fan-atx-v24


www.scan.co.uk/products/corsair-h100i-hy...-am2-am3-fm1-and-fm2

Spending money on pc to play shitty bf4?
find something better to spend on.

@roo

BF4 should run a lot better after the last patches so I would not expect performance to be bad for you in the final version. I would wait and see before you start buying and if your CPU is still on 100% and the bottleneck then buy better cooling and over clock.

I'm getting the www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Fans+...ler+?productId=56991 ...benchmarks/reviews show it is pretty good for the price compared to the rest, www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Zalman-L...Cooler-Review/1702/6 it is also just a few degrees hotter than the one you listed but a lot cheaper.

That PSU is nice but pretty overkill, a 750W one like the Corsair 750CX for about £60 or £70 ish would do....I would test that it is 100% the cause of your problem before getting a new one though. Have you tried putting any over clocks back to default, checked what CPU and GPU temps go to when stress testing with programs like prime95 and furmark etc?