A quick look at the Specs of your machine and the minimum requirements for Final Fantasy 14 shows: Your Laptop: Lenovo B570 Cpu: B950 Dual Core @2.10 Ghz Ram:4MB Graphics: Intel Integrated HD 3000 Video Ram: Shared FF14 Minimum: Cpu: Intel® Core™2 Duo 3GHz Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800, ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 Ram:Memory: 2GB (4GB recommended for 64bit OS) I looks like you are just a bit below the minimum, and if you are using a 64bit version of windows then you don't have enough ram. The ram crunch is complicated by the fact your video and cpu share the same ram pool. To be honest I'd recommend a new laptop. The aren't inexpensive, but Newegg has some older Asus models in the $600-$800 range. Look for models with dedicated graphic cards, more and more games are requiring them these days.
If that's the case then it's probably better for me to just upgrade to PS4 (budget is the primary concern in my life). FF14 is the only thing I strongly want to do that really requires an upgrade, and I'm trying to avoid buying a new laptop outright because I'm planning to save for a full upgrade to something more towards the high-end later down the line (specifically a Surface Book once the SB2s are announced/on sale).
Have to decide what kind of gtx 1070 I want. @PrinzVyper opinions? You've been doing this a longer than I have, and i'd value your input.
Right off the bat I have to tell you I have a serious brand preference in video cards. I have used EVGA cards exclusively since 2002 in my builds, for myself and others, and have only ever had one fail. and the failure was house dust accumulation that caused the fan to stop. Now to be perfectly honest any GTX 1070 basic card will give you a base clock speed of 1506Mhz and a boost clock of 1683Mhz, everything else is about overclocking and cooling. Let's take a minute and talk about the "Silicon Lottery." Not all chips are created equal. Due to minute differences in manufacturing no 2 chips are exactly the same. Some don't meet the minimum, and are rejected at the factory. Those that do meet the minimum are passed on to the card manufactures. The card makers then test them again, to see if they can be pushed farther. The card makers then make cards based on the minimum the chips were able to meet. Then the resulting cards are tested to see how high they can be clocked. This and cooling technique are the main differences between cards by the same manufacturer. Mind you, these designs are all based on minimum performance, you may get lucky and get a lower end card that can be clocked very high, or get stuck with one that doesn't clock much above the minimum advertised. With that said let's look at what available from EVGA, prices are the current regular price on Newegg.com. EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition: $449.99 Clocks: 1506/1683. This is the basic model, not much different then the nVidia reference design. I suspect the price is higher on this one because they have to pay a licensing fee to use the nVidia design EVGA GeForce 1070 ACX 3.0: $419.99 Clocks:1506/1683. This is the same as the Founders Edition, but with better cooling. Possibly a different printed circuit board. EVGA GeForce 1070 SC ACX 3.0: $439.99 Clocks:1594/1784: This is the Super Clocked version of the ACX 3.0. The card tested higher at the factory, so they cranked up the default clock speed. EVGA GeForce 1070 FTW ACX 3.0: $459.99 Clocks: 1607/1797: This version has much to recommend it. Higher clocks. Better power delivery. Double Bios, so you don't have to sweat if you upgrade the bios. It even has a variable color LED, if you are in to that. EVGA GeForce 1070 FTW DT ACX 3.0: $429.99 Clocks:1506/1683. This one is an odd duck, I suspect DT stands for De-Tuned. It has all the features of the regular FTW card, but my suspicion is that it tested lower, so they left it at the basic clock speed. EVGA also makes 2 1070 cards with hybrid cooling. the base model at 1594/1683 selling for $459.99 , and a FTW model at 1607/1797 selling for $489.99. You will need a spot in your case to mount the radiator of the liquid portion of the cooling system though. They also make "Black" editions of the 1070 card, the only difference I found between the "Black" and the regular is the "Black" lacks a heat spreader plate on the back of the card. Note also these cards require a beefy power supply. The base models use 150watts, the SC's 170watts, and the FTW's 215watts So, are you going to overclock your card yourself? Do you feel more comfortable with the factory overclocking for you? Does the increased potential of the higher end cards for further then factory clock speed interest you? While I'm thinking about it. A word about overclocking in general. Running a GPU/CPU/RAM, at higher then factory speeds and voltages causes heat. To much heat will degrade the life of the part, there is no getting around that. Even with excellent cooling there will be some degradation. You can conceivably lose 1-3 years of life on an overclocked part. These parts can and do last a long time with regular maintenance, blowing the dust out, changing old thermal grease, etc. I have an old nVidia 5600 (circa 2003) and an 8800 (circa 2006) that both work fine. So the question is: How often do you upgrade? If you upgrade every 5-7 years or so, you probably will never notice the difference in the life of an overclocked part. Personally, I'd probably go for the SC edition. If I was planning on doing some serious overclocking, pushing a card to it limits, then I'd go for the FTW or, even better, the FTW Hybrid. Both offer more power control, and the hybrid has probably the best stock cooling. As a side note here, the water-block to fully water-cool at 1070 card runs about $130 by itself. Edit to Add: I forget about thermal throttling, as the GPU heats up to its limits it will automatically cut its speed down to reduce heat. Better cooling will reduce this effect. To put that in perspective. I currently have a GTX 960 SC from EVGA, I can run "The Witcher 3" at 1920x1080, Ultra Settings at about 60+FPS on one monitor. While watching Netflix, full-screen on the other at 1680x1050. I've seen the FPS drop once in a while in my game but never below about 45FPS. When you consider the workload, that's not bad at all. The PS4 runs between 30FPS and 60FPS for most games at 1920x1080, so I don't feel that I'm missing out on anything. There are some people out there that think anything less then 100FPS is unacceptable so, your mileage may vary. I hope that helped. If'n you have more questions I is happy to try!
I won't be able to see the card, my current case is completely opaque, so looks don't matter. I won't be overclocking it, I was looking at getting This One. My primary constraint on this is budget, i have about $450 in total to spend on this. Also, I only started to build a new computer because i wasn't able to upgrade the old one anymore - which is what happens after 9-ish years. [Edit:] Also, i'm probably going to buy the part on amazon, as my sisters gave me birthday money for amazon.
Hmm, I think it might be a good idea to look at This Card as well, its $10 more but has much better cooling overall. Though you won't have a problem with thermal throttling right away, if you are keeping your PC for a long time, software will catch up.
It looks like I'll be dipping my toes into the world of liquid cooling. Running flat out my CPU is getting a little toasty with stock cooling. Also I'd like to over-clock a bit more aggressively, I'm only running 100mhz over stock on the CPU. I'd really like to squeeze a bit more out of the CPU for things like 3D rendering. I'm going to get a pre-built, closed loop CPU cooler unit. I'm going to do my research on brand/style, and get back to you all. I'm also going to have to tear down my machine do the install. I have to remove the motherboard to access the back of it. I will probably have to do some extensive cleaning as well. I haven't cleaned it since I replaced all the fans 5-6 months ago. Is anyone interested in seeing pics and a description of the teardown/cleaning/install, or temps before/after?
While looking for my cpu cooler today, I kept searching Cpu cooker by accident. Lets hope this isn't an omen. :p
Prinz's Water-Cooling Adventure Part 1: Research For reference: I have an AMD FX8350 8-core 4.0Ghz CPU, an Asus TUF Sabertooth FX990 R2.0 Motherboard, and 24GB of Corsair Vengeance DD3 1600Mhz RAM (2x4, 2x8) Well, 3 days of research and I have learned TONS! My original goal in in finding a water-cooling solution for my machine was the fact that I have been monitoring the temps on my motherboard and CPU for a while, and I didn't like what I saw on my CPU. The specs on my CPU said 62°C was the max core temp, and 72°C was the max temp of the CPU socket. I was running about 55°C in the cores on moderate CPU load. This struck as way too high, so I started to look at options. I also wanted to over-clock my CPU a bit. I need a bit more performance and can't really afford a major upgrade at this point, and if I did get a faster CPU I would have to change motherboard and RAM as well. So I started combing through articles and posts about CPU's and heat. To cut to the chase, I found out a couple of important things. 1. You really should look at the year an article/forum post was posted. 2. An AMD processor is NOT an Intel processor, and newer AMD's are different then older ones. Newer AMD CPU's don't use conventional temperature sensors on the cores. They now use an algorithm that calculates "Threshold Margin," that is the number of °C that the temp can go up before the CPU throttles itself to cool down. Most utilities that attempt to read your AMD core temps are inaccurate. The only utility that gets it right, so far, is AMD Overdrive™, available at their website. For looking at every other sensor I use HWINFO64. When using the right tools I found that I was nowhere near as hot at I thought I was. This also explained the inconsistencies between the socket temp and the core temps. Armed with new confidence I went into BIOS and let it do some basic over-clocking for me. I am now tuning at 4.335Ghz. With margins of 30°c at idle, and 15°C under heavy loads. It's a noticeable difference. I still plan on adding water cooling to the CPU, as I'm sure I can get a bit more aggressive with the speed with better cooling. I also learned that I can't just plop in the water cooler. If I remove my traditional heatsink I'm also removing its fan. That fan blows a bit of air over my VRM, voltage regulator module located left of the CPU, and my North-Bridge located just south of the CPU. Both the VRM and the NB put out extra heat when the CPU is overclocked. So to be on the safe side I'm gonna order a couple of small fans, and mount then on those heat sinks. I'm also going to have change my case fan configuration a bit, to bring in more cool air. The cooler I plan of ordering is the Arctic Liquid Freezer 120 based on the great reviews I found from several sites. I wanted the larger 240 but it won't fit in my case.
Prinz's Water-Cooling Adventure Part 1.5: Future-Proofing Dammit, this is going to cost me more money! I usually do incremental upgrades, so I don't have to spend a lot at any one time to keep my hardware relatively current. I got to thinking that I don't have very many cooling options on my current case. When I do upgrade my CPU I'm gonna need better cooling overall. The water cooler I was going to buy is slightly better then spec for the next highest CPU by AMD. I can't imagine that the next generation of CPU, AMD or Intel, is going to run at lower temps. So if I'm going to spend the money I might as well buy the better cooler, but it won't fit in my case. So, I've looked at new cases, and think I found one that give me a few more options down the road. I think I'm gonna buy this one: Phanteks Enthoo Pro M it has room for 2 big radiators and many other cool features. There is another one by Fractal Design at about the same price, with more features, but it will be off-sale by the time I can afford to order parts.
So, is the backplate on the graphics card worth the extra 20 dollars? I'm probably going to go with This one if it is. I've read that they're mostly for skeletal support, and that most new cards don't really need them/include them anymore, so is it really worth it to spend the extra money? I'm not going to be overclocking it myself, so the heat should be fairly even. [Edit:] Based one some more reading, the primary benefit is looks, which in my case doesn't help with anything, since I can't see the card at all.
The back-plate does help a bit in cooling, but you should know that EVGA is having a temperature issue with it's ACX 3.0 cards. They are running a bit hot when stress tested under extreme conditions. They offer a card BIOS update to fix the problem, they also offer a thermal pad mod to gain better heat distribution. It' s detailed HERE. All of their cards shipped after November first have this issue addressed.
I got all my new parts for my water-cooling adventure today. I am currently running the new cooling unit at full blast outside of the old case, in a safe place to test for leaks. I will do the actual migration to the new case and install of the cooler tomorrow. Description and pic to follow then.
Prinz's Water-Cooling Adventure 2: The install Well that took all day, but it's done. I didn't get as many pics as I wanted because I was kinda busy but I did get a few. The old case, and boy it's a mess in there, lol. you can also see quite a bit of dust :( Here is the new case: I got the one with a full acrylic side panel for the same price as the basic model, so I went for it. The next step was striping everything out and removing the motherboard. Here is the motherboard out of the case: Then I took off the stock heatsink and fan and got a surprise! There was no thermal compound on the CPU, it was all on the heatsink, and it was in bad shape. I will never use stock thermal solutions ever again! Here the the board with the heatsink and the bracket that holds it down off, note the clean CPU, I haven't cleaned it at this point. At this point I replaced the bracket that hold the heatsink on with the standoffs that came with the Arctic 240 cooler, the ones for AMD CPU's of course. I need to note here that this motherboard came with a thick aluminum backplate on the back of the board behind the CPU socket. The cooler does not supply a backplate for AMD based boards, but you can order one if you don't have one, for a few dollars. It does however supply one for Intel CPUs. I also mounted the radiator, and it's fans on the case. There were 4 of them, in a push/pull configuration. Two 120mm fans to push cool air through the radiator from the front of the case, and two 120mm fans to pull air through the radiator inside the case. Then I mounted the cooler and pump on the CPU. it mounts with thumb screws and needs to be tightened in a star pattern to help spread the thermal compound. There was a lot of pressure applied to the socket here, and I didn't dare tighten them more then hand tight. I also had another issue to take care of here, without the CPU fan blowing air down onto the VRMs and the North Bridge I had to get creative for a solution for supplemental cooling on them. I bought to high-speed 50mm laptop fans to place on the North Bridge and VRM heatsinks. They are covered with a ceramic compound, intended to give them more surface area for cooling and I didn't want to mar that surface with screws. So my solution was zipties, it's not pretty but it works remarkably well. The is a closeup of my kludged together solution. With everything tightened down on the North Bridge fan, seen at the bottom here, the fan just clears my video card. Here is a pic of the whole thing so far in the story: Lastly, I flipped the rear case fan around to intake, to blow cool air over the VRMs and North Bridge. I installed my cards, did about 30min of cable routing. On a whim I also installed a PCI slot fan to exhaust the hot air blown down from the video card, with the hope is might lower my video card temps a bit, it's fan is very loud. As an added piece of unnecessary swank I also put in a light kit, 3 multicolor LED strips controlled by an external RF remote. That thing was easy to install. Her we are with the side cover on: Those top exhaust fans are offset to clear the motherboard by quite a bit. Here we are all lit up, I chose green lights for the picture as it took the best pic. With the side panel clean it doesn't have anywhere near as much glare. :) Results so far: At idle I have about 52°C head room on the CPU, and under moderate load I have about 38°C left to play with. Moderate load is CPU overclocked to 4.335GHZ at 1.3v with Diablo III on Ultra settings on the 1920X1080 monitor, and Netflix fullscreen on the 1680x1050 monitor. Ambient temp is 27°C The real surprise was the PCI slot fan and my video card. My card was running hot, on stock settings its fan doesn't turn on until 60°C. I use a more aggressive fan curve and it starts to ramp up at 40°C. Before the upgrade the card was running 45°C at idle in windows 10, and almost 70°C running the test described above. The fan noise was noticeable and kinda irritating. Now at idle it runs 28°C and in that same test it runs at 49-50°C with no fan noise that I can hear. In fact the whole machine is whisper quiet, even though I have a grand total of 12 fans running, counting the video card and power supply! It's been running for 72+ hours at this point, I'm going to let it run about about another week or two and let everything settle in its new home, then I will try a more aggressive overclock on both CPU and video, and we will see what happens then. So, questions? Comments? I'm all ears! :)
Hey computer-building friends! I did not know this thread existed. I'm shopping around for my first dedicated gaming pc & @QuotableRaven suggested I come here. Is this model worth it? I'm looking for a basic budget entry-level pc. I care less about graphics than I do about price, but I would like something that's vaguely future-proof. The ability to customise in the future would be quite cool, but ehhh.
Thats pretty good, Though I am a bit biased against amd in general, intel is just a bit faster. But, the difference isn't really that much, and for a basic entry pc thats a pretty good one. I have an nvidia gtx 1070 in my gaming computer, the gtx 1000 series are the newest nvidia gpus, not sure about the amd card, as I don't really look at them very often. But a 3.8 GHz is actually a little bit faster than what I've got in mine.
