Motherboard/RAM Upgrades

[Cozarkian]

It's time to upgrade my Desktop PC, and I could use a little advice. This upgrade will be CPU + Motherboard + RAM + GPU, I already have a sufficient PSU, Dark Knight II heatsink, case, HDD, and SDD. I will likely do a small overclock without pushing voltages much.

My goal is to build a gaming PC that will be able to handle near-max settings at 1920 x 1080p for the next 2-3 years of games in the strategy and RPG genres, such as Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dark Souls II, Witcher 3, Civ VI, MMORPGs and MOBAs.

My thought is to purchase an i5 4670K and GTX 780, and then look for a good performance/value from the motherboard and RAM. One option is to pick up the combo in the mid-range build, which basically costs about $180 for the motherboard and 2 x 4GB RAM.

Option #2 is to throw an extra $50 at the build to pick up 2 x 8GB of RAM, such as the Team Vulcan or Kingston HyperX and pair it with the ASRock Z87 Pro 3.

The next question is whether the ALC1150 codec provides a noticeable upgrade over the ALC892 codec? The terribly named and ugly L337 Z87H3-A3X has this codec for the same cost as the ASRock Pro 3. Alternatively, I could spend an extra $30 for the ASRock Fatal1ty Z87.

Finally, if I stick with the comb option, I could wait a few weeks and use the $50-$80 to get a 6GB version of the GTX 780.

Thanks for your input.

 

[lehtv]

What's your current CPU and graphics card?

Having 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB won't help for gaming. And on your resolution, 6GB of VRAM instead of 3GB is equally pointless.

Your Dark Knight II cooler is powerful enough that I'd rather have a board a bit more potent than the Pro3. I would stay away from L337 Gaming, they are ECS's gaming oriented brand, and ECS isn't a particularly well regarded motherboard brand... usually very value oriented. Stick to Asus/MSI/Gigabyte/Asrock.

 

[Cozarkian]

Current: Phenom II X4 970 Black @ 3.5 Ghz (overclocked to 3.75 Ghz) with OCZ Reaper 2 x 2GB RAM and an AMD Radeon HD 6770 1GB.

Do you think I should hold onto the CPU for now? According to system requirements lab, my current CPU can handle anything at recommended settings except Battlefield 4, which I don't plan on playing.

I know I need a better GPU, because Skyrim's auto-detect recommends less than max settings and I get stuttering in a heavily modded version because my high res textures are surpassing the 1 GB of VRAM.

Of course, there are also some games I might play that recommend more than 4 GB of RAM, and I don't want to spend $150+ to get 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and then have to buy more in a year when I upgrade my CPU/motherboard.

 

[Cerb]

If your current RAM is DDR2, definitely upgrade it all. You just don't need so much as a 780. With a 4-RAM-slot board, 2x4GB can be upgraded to 4x4GB later. 1x8GB is fine, too, with a video card. Also, there are 4GB variants of the GTX 770, if you want to hedge your bets against high textures and/or MSAA.

As to the audio, nothing is much better than anything else. Every modern audio chip is quite good. It's the surrounding circuitry that matters, including nearby devices. One mobo might have better onboard audio than another, but the chip used isn't what makes that happen.

 

[lehtv]

Go with an i5-4670K, a midrange board with decent overclocking, and a graphics card that falls in the category of best performance for the money while being significantly faster than what you have. Then you can later upgrade the card to another card in that same category, when technology has improved. No need to spend over $500 on a GTX 780 now, it won't be more than 50% faster than a card less than half the price, and such card will already be a huge upgrade over what you have.

Found a nice combo:

i5-4670K
+ MSI Z87-G55
+ MSI GTX 760 Gaming $552 AR
Team Zeus 2x4GB DDR3-2133 CL11 $70
= $622

This is practically the same as the combo from mfenn's thread plus a GTX 760, but the combo discount here is better, and the RAM is cheaper.

 

[mfenn]

Go with an i5-4670K, a midrange board with decent overclocking, and a graphics card that falls in the category of best performance for the money while being significantly faster than what you have. Then you can later upgrade the card to another card in that same category, when technology has improved. No need to spend over $500 on a GTX 780 now, it won't be more than 50% faster than a card less than half the price, and such card will already be a huge upgrade over what you have.

Found a nice combo:

i5-4670K
+ MSI Z87-G55
+ MSI GTX 760 Gaming $552 AR
Team Zeus 2x4GB DDR3-2133 CL11 $70
= $622

This is practically the same as the combo from mfenn's thread plus a GTX 760, but the combo discount here is better, and the RAM is cheaper.

Nice. The GTX 760 is definitely a huge upgrade from a 6770.

One note on the RAM, it needs 1.65V to hit DDR3 2133. That's too high a voltage for the i5 4670K, but it should do DDR3 1866 CAS 9 or 10 at 1.5V.

 

[lehtv]

One note on the RAM, it needs 1.65V to hit DDR3 2133. That's too high a voltage for the i5 4670K, but it should do DDR3 1866 CAS 9 or 10 at 1.5V.

No it's not, it works fine with 1.65V RAM. Haswell requiring 1.5V RAM is a myth. It may have applied to Sandy Bridge once.

 

[mfenn]

No it's not, it works fine with 1.65V RAM. Haswell requiring 1.5V RAM is a myth. It may have applied to Sandy Bridge once.

It's documented that 1.65V is out of spec for V_DDQ. Refer to Table 48 of the Haswell datasheet.

Sure, it'll work in the sense that the PC won't instantly blow up, but the IMC was not validated for those voltages.

 

[lehtv]

That's interesting. So 1.65V is not officially validated for V_DDQ, yet multiple 1.65V modules are listed among officially compatible memory for Haswell.

I have never seen any real world evidence pointing to 1.65V being in any way unsafe. I've seen no reports from users that 1.65V RAM killed their Haswell CPU, literally none.

The only remotely reasonable rationale for not running 1.65V is if, even for some reason unrelated to memory controller failure, you need to RMA your processor with Intel, then they might deny your RMA claim on the basis of it being "out of spec", but even that sounds a bit far fetched to me.

That said, memory speed hardly matters, and running it at 1866 1.5V or even 1600 1.5V would be completely fine.

 

[Cozarkian]

Okay, you've convinced me a GTX 780 is overkill, but I do want to make sure I buy a nice enough card now that I won't feel the urge to upgrade for at least two years, and probably three. With that in mind, is the GTX 760 going to be sufficient, or should I pick up a 770 just to be safe?

Also, Battlefield 4 recommends 3 GB VRAM and DA: Inquisition will use the same Frostbite 3 engine, so I'm concerned about only having 2 GB of VRAM, especially if I want to use mods. So, do I stick with 2 GB, pay for the upgrade to 4GB on a Nvidia card, or watch and wait for a good deal on a 280x?

 

[Cerb]

If you're worried about it, get the 4GB. 2GB will be fine, until you start combining high-res textures with MSAA, on games that have, or will likely have, such mods.

 

[lehtv]

If you're worried about VRAM, don't get the 4GB version of a card that isn't fast enough to properly utilize more than 2GB without SLI. Instead, get a 3GB AMD card that's also faster. mfenn's latest midrange guide has the Powercolor 280X for $330, that'd be a pretty nice pick.

FWIW, it makes absolutely no sense to me to restrict yourself to a GPU upgrade cycle of 2-3 years. The earlier you upgrade, the more you can get for selling your current card. That's to say that a shorter upgrade cycle is more incremental and costs less net $ per each upgrade, while a longer cycle costs more per each upgrade, but also increases performance in larger chunks. Over a longer period of time, the performance improvement as well as the money you spend will be roughly the same. Personally I prefer the tighter upgrade cycle because it's more consistent, and I never have to deal with forcing a lower image quality to maintain a good framerate. Plus I get to pick up a new parcel more often 😛

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

It's documented that 1.65V is out of spec for V_DDQ. Refer to Table 48 of the Haswell datasheet.

Sure, it'll work in the sense that the PC won't instantly blow up, but the IMC was not validated for those voltages.

Try reading the data you referenced. That voltage is for the controller, not the DIMMS.

"1. The current supplied to the SO-DIMM modules is not included in this specification"

 

[mfenn]

Try reading the data you referenced. That voltage is for the controller, not the DIMMS.

"1. The current supplied to the SO-DIMM modules is not included in this specification"

Current != voltage. Note (1) is for ICC_MAX_V_DDQ, not V_DDQ. What they're saying is that the IMC can draw 2.5A max, not counting what the DIMM's themselves draw.

 

[mfenn]

That's interesting. So 1.65V is not officially validated for V_DDQ, yet multiple 1.65V modules are listed among officially compatible memory for Haswell.

I have never seen any real world evidence pointing to 1.65V being in any way unsafe. I've seen no reports from users that 1.65V RAM killed their Haswell CPU, literally none.

The only remotely reasonable rationale for not running 1.65V is if, even for some reason unrelated to memory controller failure, you need to RMA your processor with Intel, then they might deny your RMA claim on the basis of it being "out of spec", but even that sounds a bit far fetched to me.

That said, memory speed hardly matters, and running it at 1866 1.5V or even 1600 1.5V would be completely fine.

I agree that running the memory at 1.65V is not likely to cause catastrophic failure, but we don't know the long term characteristics of Haswell at this point. I also agree that extremely unlikely that Intel would do the in-depth analysis necessary to determine that you were running out of spec, unless you were a serial RMA'er or something.

However, with the abundance of good 1.5V memory, I don't see any reason not to grab a 1.5V kit, or to run a higher voltage kit at 1.5V. You'll stay in spec and never notice a difference outside of SuperPi runs. (So yeah, I agree with your last point as well. 😉)