Mid-range gaming PC graphics cards, CPU and Mobo advice

mrkb

My 11 year old son wants (me) to build a PC that will last him until he leaves senior school - for homework and games.

He isn't playing FPS at high res at the moment (mainly minecraft and scrap mechanic/steam games), and I could upgrade the GFX card in a few years when prices come down. So I'd rather spend the money on CPU and memory at the moment, so whats a good mid-range card to purchase? I haven't built a  PC for 8 years or so - do they all use PCIe slots - is a format change likely in the next few years?

Any recommendations for Mobos, and CPUs?

crunchman

Get one of the recent Intel CPUs and just use the onboard graphics processing.

Last time I looked you would have had to spend around £50 on a dedicated card to match the performance of the onboard GPU on a 6th Gen Skylake i3/i5/i7 processor.  To get anything that's a significant improvement on it you would probably have to spend £70 plus.  The onboard graphics are better still on the new Kaby Lake Processors.

digitalscream

I'd say that PCI Express is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon in terms of mainstream machines; we might start to see a replacement appear in four or five years' time, but it'll be quite a while before it extends outside the high-end.

As things stand, nothing's really constrained by PCI Express bandwidth, particularly since it was designed to be expandable and can easily be expanded with more lanes; PCIe 4.0 doubles the data rate, and most graphics cards these days only use 16 lanes where the standard allows up to 32 lanes (albeit with a different physical slot). That's an awful lot of headroom, and graphics cards aren't even close to maxing it out yet.

Your best bet for mid-range stuff is the Nvidia 1060, but that's still going to set you back £150-odd.

In terms of CPUs, you'd probably want to go for a quad core i5. The i7 wouldn't really give you much of an advantage relative to the performance it gives you in comparison.

Axe_meister

Wait till after next week. The new AMD Ryzen processor is being released and so far from leaked benchmarks it looks bloody good and will cause intel to drop their prices.

Bidley

Have a look at mobo/CPU/RAM bundles. There are some good deals to be had out there. A quad-core i5 isn't a bad shout.

As far as GPU goes, if you want to go for the mid-range, I'd get a GTX 750Ti. They're cheap as anything used and you'll get great performance out of them, certainly compared to a 1060 (in a performance-to-price-point sense).

digitalscream

Axe_meister said:

Wait till after next week. The new AMD Ryzen processor is being released and so far from leaked benchmarks it looks bloody good and will cause intel to drop their prices.

I'd completely forgotten about that. Looking through the motherboard leak...even the mid-range ones have two x16 slots and M.2 PCIe slots. This could be very interesting.

Bidley

http://i.imgur.com/iM6SZxG.png

digitalscream

Heh...that's true at the moment, but if the real-world demos are to be believed then Intel are in for a bit of a rough ride. At any given price point, the Ryzen CPUs seem to have twice the cores and equivalent single-core performance (with lower power consumption). I'm looking at it with rose-tinted glasses, but I'm really hoping this could be a repeat of when the Athlon 64 kicked the P4 into the long grass.

Bidley

Yeah Intel need some competition that's for sure. I'm interested to see how the Ryzen compares.

Myranda

digitalscream said:

I'd say that PCI Express is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon in terms of mainstream machines; we might start to see a replacement appear in four or five years' time, but it'll be quite a while before it extends outside the high-end.

As things stand, nothing's really constrained by PCI Express bandwidth, particularly since it was designed to be expandable and can easily be expanded with more lanes; PCIe 4.0 doubles the data rate, and most graphics cards these days only use 16 lanes where the standard allows up to 32 lanes (albeit with a different physical slot). That's an awful lot of headroom, and graphics cards aren't even close to maxing it out yet.

Your best bet for mid-range stuff is the Nvidia 1060, but that's still going to set you back £150-odd.

In terms of CPUs, you'd probably want to go for a quad core i5. The i7 wouldn't really give you much of an advantage relative to the performance it gives you in comparison.

PCIe 4.0 was signed off a couple of years ago, and was at the time pencilled in for Cannon Lake (which was delayed by Kaby Lake) ... presumably because we're miles off saturating the 15.75 GB/s of a 16x 3.0 there's literally no reason to have a 31.51GB/s slot - let alone more than 1!

More importantly the PCIe standards have always required a backward compatibility - so a 2.0 card will plug into a 3.0 slot and will just function as a 2.0 card... and a 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot will just operate at 2.0 speeds... So even when PCIe 4.0 comes out it *should* not present any upgrade issues in the future.

The difference between the i5 and i7 is now possible to notice in highly multi-threaded games, so perhaps in years to come it might actually be enough of a difference to care about (rather than just enough to say "oh, there's a slight difference") - but current i5 to current i7 four to five years from now probably wont matter as it will be on the slow side for both anyway...

digitalscream said:

Axe_meister said:

Wait till after next week. The new AMD Ryzen processor is being released and so far from leaked benchmarks it looks bloody good and will cause intel to drop their prices.

I'd completely forgotten about that. Looking through the motherboard leak...even the mid-range ones have two x16 slots and M.2 PCIe slots. This could be very interesting.

The M.2 slots make more difference than the lanes on the PCIe slots... two x8 slots perform the same as two x16 as the bandwidth is so far from being used. You can tape off the pins on a GPU till it only functions as a x4 card and wont notice a performance difference (at least could... not sure if anyone has done the same tests with a 1080 or similar)

But most 170, and up boards have them too ... what interest me is that AMD have suggested higher Instructions Per Clock rates so the lower clock speeds have the same or better performance, with lower energy consumption (which would hopefully allow for a good level of thermal headroom for overclocking) than the current Intel offerings, while adding more cores AND being lower priced will force Intel to ACTUALLY DEVELOP SOMETHING for a change... The last 3 or 4 Intel generations have been such mediocre incremental increases in speed it's made the CPU market very boring and stagnant, as well as address their pricing strategy  

To the OP

Aim for a mid-to-high tier processor, an i5 7600K for instance will still be a relevant processor for a few years to come and can be over-clocked to keep it relevant for a little longer. 

Something like a GTX1060 will be very good now, and OK for a couple of years of gaming... though 5 years from now will be very slow... so don't spend too much on it now as you'll want to top it up with something like a 1360 or a 1460 when it's out... 

crunchman

Myranda said:

But most 170, and up boards have them too ... what interest me is that AMD have suggested higher Instructions Per Clock rates so the lower clock speeds have the same or better performance, with lower energy consumption (which would hopefully allow for a good level of thermal headroom for overclocking) than the current Intel offerings, while adding more cores AND being lower priced will force Intel to ACTUALLY DEVELOP SOMETHING for a change... The last 3 or 4 Intel generations have been such mediocre incremental increases in speed it's made the CPU market very boring and stagnant, as well as address their pricing strategy  

I just read up on these.  Apparently if it's running cool enough it will automatically overclock itself if needed.

digitalscream

Myranda said:

But most 170, and up boards have them too ... what interest me is that AMD have suggested higher Instructions Per Clock rates so the lower clock speeds have the same or better performance, with lower energy consumption (which would hopefully allow for a good level of thermal headroom for overclocking) than the current Intel offerings, while adding more cores AND being lower priced will force Intel to ACTUALLY DEVELOP SOMETHING for a change... The last 3 or 4 Intel generations have been such mediocre incremental increases in speed it's made the CPU market very boring and stagnant, as well as address their pricing strategy  

That's the odd thing - AMD have actually been responsible for more innovation in the CPU space than Intel in the last 20 years or so. The Athlon was a massive two-fold step in terms of CPU architectures (both the 64-bit-ness and integrating the memory controller into the CPU), and Intel's answer to that was to effectively abandon the P4 and go back a generation. The Core and Core 2 series were effectively just Pentium III cores with extra bits tacked on. Intel didn't actually build anything truly new until the Core iX series, and even that was just building on what AMD had done previously.

The problem AMD had was that their Bulldozer CPUs were really just a half-assed attempt - they wrote off the chances of competing on single-core performance and went for many-cores, which was a serious misstep. Now we have Ryzen - so that's three entirely new architectures in two decades, to Intel's one.

Myranda

crunchman said:

Myranda said:

But most 170, and up boards have them too ... what interest me is that AMD have suggested higher Instructions Per Clock rates so the lower clock speeds have the same or better performance, with lower energy consumption (which would hopefully allow for a good level of thermal headroom for overclocking) than the current Intel offerings, while adding more cores AND being lower priced will force Intel to ACTUALLY DEVELOP SOMETHING for a change... The last 3 or 4 Intel generations have been such mediocre incremental increases in speed it's made the CPU market very boring and stagnant, as well as address their pricing strategy  

I just read up on these.  Apparently if it's running cool enough it will automatically overclock itself if needed.

Intel does this in both directions already... they list the CPUs as say 3.5 Ghz with "turbo" or "boost" up to 4.2 GHz. They will also thermally throttle down if they get too hot. I have a feeling AMD's Bulldozer did it too... but could be wrong digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

But most 170, and up boards have them too ... what interest me is that AMD have suggested higher Instructions Per Clock rates so the lower clock speeds have the same or better performance, with lower energy consumption (which would hopefully allow for a good level of thermal headroom for overclocking) than the current Intel offerings, while adding more cores AND being lower priced will force Intel to ACTUALLY DEVELOP SOMETHING for a change... The last 3 or 4 Intel generations have been such mediocre incremental increases in speed it's made the CPU market very boring and stagnant, as well as address their pricing strategy  

That's the odd thing - AMD have actually been responsible for more innovation in the CPU space than Intel in the last 20 years or so. The Athlon was a massive two-fold step in terms of CPU architectures (both the 64-bit-ness and integrating the memory controller into the CPU), and Intel's answer to that was to effectively abandon the P4 and go back a generation. The Core and Core 2 series were effectively just Pentium III cores with extra bits tacked on. Intel didn't actually build anything truly new until the Core iX series, and even that was just building on what AMD had done previously.

The problem AMD had was that their Bulldozer CPUs were really just a half-assed attempt - they wrote off the chances of competing on single-core performance and went for many-cores, which was a serious misstep. Now we have Ryzen - so that's three entirely new architectures in two decades, to Intel's one.

Intel HAS done more than nothing in that time... but yes...

But, due to complete lack of competition in the last x years I can understand why they've not done anything spectacular... so it's been a smidge here and bit there... all while investing more in R&D every single year than the entire value of AMD*... so I suspect Intel has a big bag of tricks lying around to look amazing that they've not bothered with... my hope is that either Intel will slash its prices creating a competitive market, or release something exciting... (or both)

Because, while Ryzen looks to be faster than the current Intels, the speed difference is marginal per core - the big difference being in price... so it's really only catching up to Intel... does a 1700X being 5% faster than a 6800K matter that much? No... does it being half the price matter? Oh Yes.

so the blue camp has to do something interesting - we've been stuck at clock speeds of 3-5 GHz for too long, where's Moore's law in all this (and yes the complexity has increased, as have per clock performances... but bleh!)? More cores only helps when people make things scalably multi-threaded... I want to see significant speed increases - if they did a 10Ghz chip (or even 6 Ghz) then we have an exciting market... OR intel can cut prices - they have the market share that they can slash prices drastically and still make great profits... Ideally big innovation and price cuts... but who am I kidding - they'll do something spectacular (as production schedules permit) but at higher prices

*Quick search suggests Intels R&D budget is $13 billion, AMD have $1.1 Billion in revenue and $3.3 Billion in assets ... Intel could afford to develop a discrete GPU to compete with AMD/NVidia while simultaneously developing a new CPU architecture and still have money left over... so WTF have they been doing in the last 10-20 years?!

speshul91

I game on an amd bulldozer bundle, its a gigabyte mobo wih an amd fx 4130 cpu overclocked to 4.4ghz with a gtx 770, i manage most games at high or above. 

I agree with whats been said about ryzen though, saying that im a massive amd fanboy. 

It is worth looking at used parts for better value for money though. 

Myranda

speshul91 said:

I game on an amd bulldozer bundle, its a gigabyte mobo wih an amd fx 4130 cpu overclocked to 4.4ghz with a gtx 770, i manage most games at high or above. 

I agree with whats been said about ryzen though, saying that im a massive amd fanboy. 

It is worth looking at used parts for better value for money though. 

I built the first part of my current PC mostly from second hand parts (and the motherboard is still that same second hand part - over time everything else was replaced)... great way to save a few pennies. I'm currently trawling through ebay for computer parts myself (after a couple of generations old Xeon 8 cores and a 2 CPU server board... on a tiny budget for a project I have in mind)

digitalscream

Myranda said:

Because, while Ryzen looks to be faster than the current Intels, the speed difference is marginal per core - the big difference being in price... so it's really only catching up to Intel... does a 1700X being 5% faster than a 6800K matter that much? No... does it being half the price matter? Oh Yes.

Actually, catching up on per-core performance while having way more cores at a given price point really does matter. Not so much for low-thread-count loads like gaming, but gamers no longer have the crown in terms of performance requirements. The bulk of mainstream high-performance computing loads these days are high-quality video encoding jobs, which do scale very well with lots of cores. Given that GPU encoding generally doesn't present much of a benefit over CPU processing for low-quality jobs and gets further behind the higher the bitrate and quality required (a CPU's better branching and heuristic capability beats GPU's brute-force approach every time), bringing that kind of performance scaling down to mid-range budgets and potentially beating the best Intel has to offer at the top end is a massive win.

crunchman

Myranda said:

I want to see significant speed increases - if they did a 10Ghz chip (or even 6 Ghz) then we have an exciting market...

At what point do speed of light limitations come in?  At 10Ghz a signal could travel 3cm in a vacuum per clock cycle.  It might well be less in a solid medium.  I'm not sure of the answer but we might be reaching the limits of what we can do with current technology.

There may be other limitations as well.  I think I remember reading that the next generation of Intel Chips with 10nm technology will be last on silicon.  The 7nm process that's on the roadmap after that will have to use a different material.

Myranda

digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

Because, while Ryzen looks to be faster than the current Intels, the speed difference is marginal per core - the big difference being in price... so it's really only catching up to Intel... does a 1700X being 5% faster than a 6800K matter that much? No... does it being half the price matter? Oh Yes.

Actually, catching up on per-core performance while having way more cores at a given price point really does matter. Not so much for low-thread-count loads like gaming, but gamers no longer have the crown in terms of performance requirements. The bulk of mainstream high-performance computing loads these days are high-quality video encoding jobs, which do scale very well with lots of cores. Given that GPU encoding generally doesn't present much of a benefit over CPU processing for low-quality jobs and gets further behind the higher the bitrate and quality required (a CPU's better branching and heuristic capability beats GPU's brute-force approach every time), bringing that kind of performance scaling down to mid-range budgets and potentially beating the best Intel has to offer at the top end is a massive win.

Yes, but that catching up isn't a lead... It's important that they've caught up... but haven't over taken dramatically (and for some tasks they're still behind).

The budget element is colossal on this though... the expected prices are about half for similar performance

digitalscream

Myranda said:

digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

Because, while Ryzen looks to be faster than the current Intels, the speed difference is marginal per core - the big difference being in price... so it's really only catching up to Intel... does a 1700X being 5% faster than a 6800K matter that much? No... does it being half the price matter? Oh Yes.

Actually, catching up on per-core performance while having way more cores at a given price point really does matter. Not so much for low-thread-count loads like gaming, but gamers no longer have the crown in terms of performance requirements. The bulk of mainstream high-performance computing loads these days are high-quality video encoding jobs, which do scale very well with lots of cores. Given that GPU encoding generally doesn't present much of a benefit over CPU processing for low-quality jobs and gets further behind the higher the bitrate and quality required (a CPU's better branching and heuristic capability beats GPU's brute-force approach every time), bringing that kind of performance scaling down to mid-range budgets and potentially beating the best Intel has to offer at the top end is a massive win.

Yes, but that catching up isn't a lead... It's important that they've caught up... but haven't over taken dramatically (and for some tasks they're still behind).

The budget element is colossal on this though... the expected prices are about half for similar performance

I think we can safely ignore the $1000+ Intel CPUs, on the grounds that nobody really bothers with them. If the demos are to be believed, Ryzen CPUs will bring that performance to real computers instead of the ones that exist only in 14yr old gamers' dreams. To all intents and purposes, that is beating the best Intel has to offer.

I actually can't think of a time when AMD have deliberately set out to skin Intel in the speed stakes; I think that was only accidental even in the Athlon/P4 days. They mainly seem to have aimed to provide performance at half of Intel's prices - and that's going all the way back to the 486 days.

You do have a point...the budget element essentially comes down to core count; at any price point, the Ryzen appears to have twice as many cores and at least equivalent performance. I'm a little gutted that it's only a few months ago that I splurged on an i7 6700...if I could've waited a few months, I'd have been able to get the top-end 4GHz 8 core Ryzen for the same money

Myranda

digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

digitalscream said:

Myranda said:

Because, while Ryzen looks to be faster than the current Intels, the speed difference is marginal per core - the big difference being in price... so it's really only catching up to Intel... does a 1700X being 5% faster than a 6800K matter that much? No... does it being half the price matter? Oh Yes.

Actually, catching up on per-core performance while having way more cores at a given price point really does matter. Not so much for low-thread-count loads like gaming, but gamers no longer have the crown in terms of performance requirements. The bulk of mainstream high-performance computing loads these days are high-quality video encoding jobs, which do scale very well with lots of cores. Given that GPU encoding generally doesn't present much of a benefit over CPU processing for low-quality jobs and gets further behind the higher the bitrate and quality required (a CPU's better branching and heuristic capability beats GPU's brute-force approach every time), bringing that kind of performance scaling down to mid-range budgets and potentially beating the best Intel has to offer at the top end is a massive win.

Yes, but that catching up isn't a lead... It's important that they've caught up... but haven't over taken dramatically (and for some tasks they're still behind).

The budget element is colossal on this though... the expected prices are about half for similar performance

I think we can safely ignore the $1000+ Intel CPUs, on the grounds that nobody really bothers with them. If the demos are to be believed, Ryzen CPUs will bring that performance to real computers instead of the ones that exist only in 14yr old gamers' dreams. To all intents and purposes, that is beating the best Intel has to offer.

I actually can't think of a time when AMD have deliberately set out to skin Intel in the speed stakes; I think that was only accidental even in the Athlon/P4 days. They mainly seem to have aimed to provide performance at half of Intel's prices - and that's going all the way back to the 486 days.

You do have a point...the budget element essentially comes down to core count; at any price point, the Ryzen appears to have twice as many cores and at least equivalent performance. I'm a little gutted that it's only a few months ago that I splurged on an i7 6700...if I could've waited a few months, I'd have been able to get the top-end 4GHz 8 core Ryzen for the same money

I want to update my gaming PC ... almost did it about a month ago... was going to get a 6700K

Also fancy having a UHD Blu-ray drive... 

Glad I didn't on two fronts - first that Kaby Lake has an instruction set that is a requirement for viewing 4K Blu-rays... then Ryzen came around... 

So at best I'd have a chip that didn't do what I wanted AND would have cost more per clock than is ideal... not normally one for the whole "wait for a few months for the next CPU" arguments as you'd always be adding a few months... now I'm not so sure...

digitalscream

@Myranda - thats right, just rub it in...

On the other hand, I use Linux almost exclusively; I don't trust anything from AMD on the Linux front that hasn't had a few months of shakedown from the rest of the world. Not because of AMD of old, but rather because a lot of their motherboard tech has come from their ATI purchase, and ATI's stuff sucks ass when it comes to Linux compatibility.