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BF4 and Total War: Rome II upgrades

ahenkel

ahenkel

Diamond Member
Cousin of mine is asking about upgrades for his computer. Says it is sluggish in BF4 andTotal War: Rome 2. I'm pretty sure his CPU is his bottleneck possibly his Ram too. Lastly I think his Power supply is fine and I'm not looking to add an SSD.

I'D like to move to Intel current gen preferred but we can go ivy bridge too if the price to performance equation is better. He won't be overclocking.

His current computer is
Phenom II x4 840
A biostar am3 board not sure of model but I don't care it's gonna be replaced.
4gb ddr3
1tb drive
7850 2gb
500watt corsair builder PSU

He plays at 1920x1080 and we set a budget for 400-500
I would like to switch to intel current gen and we won't be overclocking
Purchases from Newegg or Amazon or wherever has a deal
 
You're correct the CPU is holding him back. It would make no sense to upgrade the GPU first. But it would also be a good idea to upgrade the graphics card at some point, since a 7850 doesn't even come close to using the full potential of a quad core Haswell, and those games would definitely benefit from some more frames.

Here's a CPU only upgrade suggestion that fits the budget:

CPU - Xeon E3-1230 V3 $254
Mobo - Asrock H87 Performance $103 shipped
RAM - 2x4GB Crucial $64

= $421

However if he bought the i5-4570 for $64 less than the Xeon and sold the 7850 for $100 on ebay, he'd have $243 left in the budget for a new graphics card. That would be easily enough for an MSI 270X Gaming $200 which is about 30% faster than 7850 in Battlefield 4. What I'd probably do though is get the Xeon, start saving for a new card and a get an MSI 280 Gaming when it is released (selling the 7850 to pay for part of it).

Optional for quieter CPU load: Hyper 101i $16 shipped
 
Last edited:
Its most definitely the CPU. I second lehtv's Xeon 1230v3. Totalwar games are very CPU happy, and that 7850 should be sufficient at 1080p.
 
What benefit is there over the xeon 1230v3 to the i5-4570 computer is only used for gaming and internet.
 
mfenn said:
Amazingly, someone has done almost this exact benchmark. Short answer is than an i5 2500K at 4.5 GHz should still be faster than a stock-clocked Haswell.
Click to expand...

The bf3 test in that article doesn't even compare stock i7 vs oc 2500k. And they tested at 1440p which is much less cpu heavy than 1080p. Not really a relevant bench IMO
 
lehtv said:
The bf3 test in that article doesn't even compare stock i7 vs oc 2500k. And they tested at 1440p which is much less cpu heavy than 1080p. Not really a relevant bench IMO
Click to expand...

Yes they did compare the i7 4770K at stock to an overclocked i5 2500K. Columns 4 and 5. Yes, 2560x1440 isn't ideal, but they did test with 7950 CFX, which should shift the bottleneck to the CPU. Obviously the absolute numbers are not applicable to Hogan's case, but the relative trend is.
 
mfenn said:
Yes they did compare the i7 4770K at stock to an overclocked i5 2500K. Columns 4 and 5.
Click to expand...

No that's comparing Crossfire to Crossfire OC, the effect of the CPU overclock alone can't be extracted from that graph
 
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