New GPU or whole new Mobo/CPU/GPU combo?

[greggerm]

Helpful advisors of X-Pilot.Com - I am potentially in the market to do some system updating in light of my current systems bottlenecks and hangups with XP10.

As it stands today, I am pleased with how my system runs MS Flight Simulator X and various other games and entertainment titles, but XP10 is bogging down and I have it on decent authority and research that it is probably my GPU causing the bulk of the issue.

I'm running an i7 860 (2.8ghz Lynnfield generation) with 8GB RAM and an nVidia GTX 260, Windows 7 x64 Pro.

My two choices:

Update the current system to a GTX 670 for lots of money...

Update the current system with a new i7 3820 & motherboard AND the GTX 670 for even more money.

Obviously the best bet for pure performance is the whole shebang, but it's just about twice the price. I love me some new computer hardware, but I need to be budget minded for the first time in my life. I can swing the full update, but I guess I'd rather not if I can avoid it right now.

With XP10 being more GPU-centric than CPU-centric, will a video card update in this case improve my XP10 performance, or will I be attaching a fire hose to a household spigot - not being able to take advantage of what the GTX 670 can do because of a weaker CPU?

Thoughts, gurus?

-Greg

[larjeet]

I would personaly go for the Graphics card upgrade first as your video card is getting old and as you are planning on upgrading to the GTX 670 with a new system anyways . And if you dont find it satisfactory you can then upgrade the proccessor and motherboard . If the video card only upgrade works out and That card will definatly blow your 260 away than you have saved yourself the price of the motherboard processor and probably new ram if you are currently running DDR2

As far as a powersupply both cards Draw about the same around 170 watts max . so your current powersupply should handle it

Larry

[chris k]

+1 on larjeet's comment.

Get the Video Card now.

Defer the new system / mobo / cpu till Next Quarter/Financial Year's CapEx where those components will drop drastically due to Moore's Law. =)

- CK.

Edited August 2, 2012 by chris k

[greggerm]

Thanks for the input, gentlemen!

-Greg

[skyflyer]

I'm running a 2006 mac pro, and happy with the performance at the moment, but that is only because I upgraded the GPU to a Radeon 5870.  The point I'm making is that even with a fairly old machine, the GPU has made a HUGE difference, in fact I'm getting as good a performance as a relatively new imac.

I know I'm posting after the fact on this thread, but it might help out someone on the mac side of the fence!

Regards

Dan

[Sigmoid]

I think right now, one should definitely wait for the new, Haswell CPUs.

[cyranosemuse]

I have a system similar to yours.

I upgraded to a 660ti from a 5850, which is no slouch of a card.

I have much improved performance in graphics and fps.

[Flying_pig]

Personally I would go for an i3 instead of an i7 as even when doing a blender render my i3 rarely goes above 25% usage also if you get a new motherboard remember that a $400 board will work about as well as a $60 board only diffrnce being you can overclock one more and can put more stuff on the $400 board also you might want to get a better case as heat could become an issue

[Sigmoid]

Personally I would go for an i3 instead of an i7 as even when doing a blender render my i3 rarely goes above 25% usage also if you get a new motherboard remember that a $400 board will work about as well as a $60 board only diffrnce being you can overclock one more and can put more stuff on the $400 board also you might want to get a better case as heat could become an issue

Apparently you don't know much about multicore performance. The problem space of X-Plane definitely warrants an i7. The actual code is another thing, but I think it must be decently parallelized.

Blender uses the GPU for most tasks, so it's no wonder that the CPU isn't loaded.

i3 is dualcore, I wouldn't really consider it for anything even mildly CPU intensive.

i5 and i7 are set apart by hyperthreading, which allows an i7 CPU to switch between 2 threads on a single core at hardware level, heavily reducing the OS overhead in heavily parallelized applications like servers - or flight simulators.

So you're wrong, X-Plane can squeeze every bit of power out of an i7. The only case when I'd go below that is if I didn't have enough money for one. If you have the money, it's worth it.

[Flying_pig]

actually X-plane is a mainly single core application and is not heavily parallelized in fact the only thing it will ever use you're over cores for is the flight models of AI aircraft also i3's have hyperthreading as well

[Sigmoid]

I remember Austin talking in a video, saying X-Plane won't be too fast on the machine he's demonstrating on, because it's a single-CPU computer with ONLY 6 cores (sic!)...
I don't know how the code looks, but the problem space has plenty of room for parallelization, and when the creator is saying that it's gonna be lousy because he doesn't have 12 (!) cores, I'm inclined to think at least some of that room was capitalized upon.

 

And even if a single flight model isn't parallelized, I find it hard to believe that the autogen would run on the same thread as the flight model. Also what about weather, ATC, and most modern applications have a separate UI thread (or several UI threads), then there is stuff the OS does in the background...

Really, I find it hard to believe that a modern computer wouldn't be better off with 4 cores. (Or 12 for that matter.)

Edited May 6, 2013 by Sigmoid

[Sigmoid]

Btw... i3s have hyperthreading? Good for them. This is like saying that a Smart TDI also has turbo charging... Yes it does... That doesn't put it in the same league of a 4 liter turbocharged Ferrari engine.

[Ntr09]

I believe MJ was speaking of V9, which IS mainly a single core app. But with V10, the more cores the better, as Austin has said. Fast RAM helps too. I upgraded from 6gb 1333Mhz about a year ago to 16gb @ 1800Mhz. BIG difference in texture loading capacity.

Currently my biggest bottleneck is my GPU's lack of processing speed.

 

-NR

[Ntr09]

Sorry for the double post, but this needs to be said though most of you already know.

 

If you ever think about switching to AMD, keep in mind their CPUs don't have hyper threading. Which means it would take a 16-core AMD CPU to match the power of an 8-core Intel CPU.

 

So you really arent saving a whole lot of money when you switch to AMD, in terms of how efficient your money is.

 

 

-NR

[sqrt(-1)]

Sorry for the double post, but this needs to be said though most of you already know.

 

If you ever think about switching to AMD, keep in mind their CPUs don't have hyper threading. Which means it would take a 16-core AMD CPU to match the power of an 8-core Intel CPU.

 

So you really arent saving a whole lot of money when you switch to AMD, in terms of how efficient your money is.

 

 

-NR

 

Having had AMD CPUs for some time now, I will say that their lack of hyperthreading is not the main problem you run into with a program like X-Plane.  It's the single-thread performance and memory bandwidth that is abysmal.

 

AMD CPUs may have their specific application, but IMHO X-Plane is definitely not one of them.

Edited May 7, 2013 by SqrtOfNegOne

[Sigmoid]

Sorry for the double post, but this needs to be said though most of you already know.

 

If you ever think about switching to AMD, keep in mind their CPUs don't have hyper threading. Which means it would take a 16-core AMD CPU to match the power of an 8-core Intel CPU.

 

So you really arent saving a whole lot of money when you switch to AMD, in terms of how efficient your money is.

 

 

-NR

 

That logic is a bit off... A hyperthreaded core does NOT match the power of two non-hyperthreaded cores. What hyperthreading does is make context switching faster, which means you get as far as I know around 20% speed improvement when lots of threads are running concurrently.

That is a lot, but not double. What might be confusing is that to the operating system, a hyperthreaded core "looks like" two cores. That doesn't mean it does the job of two cores, just that the OS won't have to do the scheduling between those two threads, instead the CPU itself will take over that task, which results in less overhead, and of course better performance as a result.

Edited May 7, 2013 by Sigmoid

[Ntr09]

That may be true, but when it all adds up, (memory bandwidth, single-thread performance, etc.) the performance of an AMD CPU is half of an "equivalent" Intel.  I've seen it tested.

 

-NR

[Sigmoid]

That may be true, but when it all adds up, (memory bandwidth, single-thread performance, etc.) the performance of an AMD CPU is half of an "equivalent" Intel.  I've seen it tested.

 

-NR

 

That is just plain sad... XD Thinking of the bleeding edge AMD processors of roughly ten years ago...

[Flying_pig]

I believe MJ was speaking of V9, which IS mainly a single core app. But with V10, the more cores the better, as Austin has said. Fast RAM helps too. I upgraded from 6gb 1333Mhz about a year ago to 16gb @ 1800Mhz. BIG difference in texture loading capacity.

Currently my biggest bottleneck is my GPU's lack of processing speed.

 

-NR

actually i was refering to xp10 as all things graphics can only use 1 core after that the rest of your cores are all used for flight models and even then you only need a dual core i3 to run 20ai planes at 20 fps with 10 flight models per plane per second

[Sigmoid]

actually i was refering to xp10 as all things graphics can only use 1 core after that the rest of your cores are all used for flight models and even then you only need a dual core i3 to run 20ai planes at 20 fps with 10 flight models per plane per second

 

20fps is sorry performance indeed.

 

(Let me guess, you just built a new computer with an i3... XD)

Edited May 9, 2013 by Sigmoid