Upgrade my rig (or fun with performance monitor)

[Xiahou]

So my main gaming desktop is just a couple months shy of its 4th birthday. I think it's held up pretty well considering it only cost me about $900 new and that was including the cost of Win7. It still runs any game I try to play on high, or at least medium-high settings.

For as well as it runs, I'm unwilling to spring for a brand new rig- I don't think I need it. So, I set out to determine whether it made sense for me to do a cheap upgrade....

First off, here is my current build:

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** Note: I have 8GB of RAM, not 4 as that suggests

The PC game that I've been playing almost exclusively of late is State of Decay. Therefore, I used that for my testing. on "Ultra" settings, it runs fairly well but will visibly chug if I do a sudden camera spin- so I ran my tests with the Ultra settings enabled (I usually play on "high" not "ultra").

First, is the CPU maxxing out? I fired up performance monitor, set it to monitor CPU usage on all 4 cores individually and had it gather data while I gamed for a couple minutes...

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The answer seems to be no.

What about the GPU? I launched GPU-Z and looked at the GPU load while gaming....

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Aha! It looks like it's being pegged.

So, what do you think the best bang for my buck is in replacing my video card? I'm sure there's no shortage of cards out there that exceed my HD5770, but I don't want to buy more card than makes sense for my current build and more importantly, I wanna do it cheaply.

Thoughts?

[Husar]

I have a very similar experience, got the same CPU (945 Black Edition at standard 3GHz) and a GTX 660 (upgraded from a 460 which replaced the original 260) and it still seems like a lot of games I play are limited only/mostly by the GPU. I don't play any Battlefields though so my experience is also limited to what I play and not what the newest badly-coded shooters (e.g. CoD) demand.

[Lemur]

So, what do you think the best bang for my buck is in replacing my video card?

Doing a little light Googling, sounds like SoD hammers GPUs pretty hard. For example, in this thread, folks with relatively beefy cards such as 690s and 680s are reporting high heat and GPU stress. Could be an optimization thing—probably is. I don't think SoD is the sort of graphically intense game that ought to be maxing out GPUs like that.

FWIW, the threads where people are reporting SoD overheating their cards all involve Nvidia, so you might be well-off sticking with AMD for your GPU upgrade. (Yeah, I know, this is not exactly a scientific sample, but still.)

If you can find a discounted AMD 270, you might be a happy camper. I was hoping the Bitcoin and Litecoin crash would make them cheaper, but no such luck.

[Xiahou]

FWIW, the threads where people are reporting SoD overheating their cards all involve Nvidia, so you might be well-off sticking with AMD for your GPU upgrade. (Yeah, I know, this is not exactly a scientific sample, but still.)

Yeah, my HD5770 gets noisy- but it's never overheated.

If you can find a discounted AMD 270, you might be a happy camper. I was hoping the Bitcoin and Litecoin crash would make them cheaper, but no such luck.

270? Now that's a thought. My un-researched knee jerk was for the HD7790. It was a definite performance upgrade, used less wattage and cost somewhere in the $130-160 range.

But, a quick comparison suggests that the 270 slaughters the 7790 in terms of specs and performance in return for a $50ish increase in cost. That's definitely on the upper limit of what I'm looking to spend- but it may be worthwhile. Hmmm.....

I have a very similar experience, got the same CPU (945 Black Edition at standard 3GHz) and a GTX 660 (upgraded from a 460 which replaced the original 260) and it still seems like a lot of games I play are limited only/mostly by the GPU. I don't play any Battlefields though so my experience is also limited to what I play and not what the newest badly-coded shooters (e.g. CoD) demand.

My limited experience seems that most games are GPU bound nowadays.

I think as multi-threaded games become the norm, they'll spread the load around the various CPU cores better, leaving the heavy-lifting for the GPUs. That's my theory anyway....

[Xiahou]

Well, I'm finally ready to make a move on a new video card, but it looks like the coin-miners have continued to drive up prices and keep supplies scarce.

Edit: Anyone have any thoughts on Gigabyte's offering?