Can this rig play the best games on ultra-high settings?

Fosterdid

Heylo all. I am simply wondering whether my gaming rig with the following specifications would be able to play Starcraft 2 on Ultra-High, Modern Warfare 2 on Ultra High, Bad Company 2 on...well, you get the picture. Here she blows:



Specifications

* Processor: Intel Core i5 750 4x 2.8GHz, 8MB Cache
* RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600MHz
* Motherboard: Asus P7P55D-E LX
* Graphics Card: Radeon 5830 1GB GDDR5
* Optical Drive: Dual Layer DVD Burner
* Hard Drive: 500GB
* Power Supply: OCZ StealthXtreme 700w
* Case: Cooler Master HAF 922
* Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

-Loki-

Heh, I just built the exact same system, except I have a nVidia GTX 275 instead of a Radeon HD5830.

So far, the only games to make it choke have been Crysis on ultra high - it runs at about 20fps, though absolutely flawlessly at high, and World in Conflict in dx10 mode - averages about 30fps. Everything else I've thrown at it (recent games include Starcraft 2, Dawn of War, Batman Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1 and 2, Modern Warfare 2, bad Company 2 and others) have run on the highest settings they have, decent levels of AA, at 1440x900 resolution.

Uriel

probably? I'm not familiar with radeons?

AT that gpu price i'd go with an nvidia card, a GTX 460. Not really much more.

Why the 700w psu with only one GPU?

Why not save a little on the PSU and put it toward an I7 930?


Just my thoughts.

Spoit

I'm pretty sure the XX30s are supposed to be the low end AMD cards, but that said, video cards have advanced a lot more than games actually using their power, so it should probably not be too bad. If it's prebuilt, it's probably fine, but look to see if you can't upgrade that at all. The other stuff in the build looks fine.

Actually looking at a random benchmark, it seems about equivalent of a 5770, which should be perfectly fine. But if you're putting it together yourself, it's not that much more for a 460 GTX, which should be a reasonable improvement for the marginal cost

Sarksus

Regarding a possible upgrade of the processor, an i7 isn't worth the money unless you're running software that can take advantage of multi-threading, stuff like video encoding or 3D rendering (and the 930 is an 1366 processor, a more expensive chipset than the 1156). The performance difference in games will be negligible.

The 700W PSU isn't necessary, you could get a 600W and still have room to spare though the difference in price between a 700W and the 600W version of that power supply isn't much so you wouldn't get much towards a processor/GPU upgrade anyhow.

It would be a good idea to look at Anandtech's review of the 5830.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2947/13

They don't think it's priced very well according to how well it performs.

Scrublet

With everything else in that system I can't think of any reason not to put a 5850 in over the 5830.

I have a 5870, i7 920 OC'd at 3GHz, and 6GB of RAM, and so far the only thing that I just can't go balls out with is the second STALKER game. Everything I play is at 1920x1080, 4xAA and 8xAnsio. I will say that the last couple levels of Borderlands before the Vault (mainly the last one) pushed some framerate issues.

Heh reading Sarksus's quote about the i7 he's totally right, fortunately I think I'm about to do something for this school research project that actually will highlight the difference.

AzadIsCool

I thought 5830s are pretty weak? Even my 5870 has trouble with Crysis and Warhead (about 30-40 fps).

Ultra High is overrated anyway. I compared Metro 2033 maxed out on my PC with it on all medium on my friend's PC and, despite the increased demand in power, the difference was pretty small. Unless you stare at walls and textures a lot, you shouldn't really worry about playing on max settings.

krapst78

If you don't have Starcraft 2 yet, might as well get an Nvidia GTX460 instead of the Radeon 5830. The 768MB version of the card is priced similarly at $199, slightly outperforms the 5830 in most benchmarks, and if you purchase it from Newegg, it comes with a free coupon for Starcraft 2.

Mugsley

That is a perfectly fine PSU.

A 5850 may be worth the price difference. And remember that in a year's time, your rig won't be a POS, but it's highly likely game technology will have advanced. It also doesn't mean you have to run out and spend another $300 on a new video card. If you measure the value you receive from a game based on eye candy instead of entertainment, you may want to reevaluate why you play games (i.e. I get as much entertainment out of Plants vs. Zombies as I'd get out of Starcraft 2).

You may want to look into more RAM if you can find it for cheap, but don't go out of your way.

Spoit

Mugsley wrote: »

That is a perfectly fine PSU.

A 5850 may be worth the price difference. And remember that in a year's time, your rig won't be a POS, but it's highly likely game technology will have advanced. It also doesn't mean you have to run out and spend another $300 on a new video card. If you measure the value you receive from a game based on eye candy instead of entertainment, you may want to reevaluate why you play games (i.e. I get as much entertainment out of Plants vs. Zombies as I'd get out of Starcraft 2).

You may want to look into more RAM if you can find it for cheap, but don't go out of your way.

Video card technology may advance, but with the way devs have been treating PC versions, whatever you get will probably be fine for 99% of games until whenever the next console generation comes

Scorched

To eliminate some of the confusion in this thread: the 5830 is not weak. It's just not the ideal card at that price point.

ATI cards don't become "weak" before you drop down to 56xx class, though you probably don't want to go lower than 5770 for gaming purposes.

So to correct, the second number in the series is what marks the target segments.

Brodo Faggins

OP, I also have the same rig you have, except with a HD 5770. Best price/performance ratio I believe. I can run Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the settings right below the best: it looks fantastic and the framerate is baby ass smooth.

AzadIsCool

Scorched wrote: »

To eliminate some of the confusion in this thread: the 5830 is not weak. It's just not the ideal card at that price point.

ATI cards don't become "weak" before you drop down to 56xx class, though you probably don't want to go lower than 5770 for gaming purposes.

So to correct, the second number in the series is what marks the target segments.

But the OP wants to be able to max out everything. I'm not so sure a 5830 coupled with a Ci5 is enough to max out games like BFBC2 and Crysis with all of the bells and whistles. Then again, my monitor is 1920x1080, so if he goes with a smaller resolution it might make up for the difference between our specs.

Spoit

I don't know, the only games that seem to be CPU limited that I can think of are GTA4, which even an i7 would have just as much problems with, and BFBC2, which should be good enough with a reasonably modern processor

-Loki-

Spoit wrote: »

BFBC2, which should be good enough with a reasonably modern processor

BC2 you'll have trouble running on high settings without a quad core. They really optimized it for them.

Dark Shroud

krapst78 wrote: »

If you don't have Starcraft 2 yet, might as well get an Nvidia GTX460 instead of the Radeon 5830. The 768MB version of the card is priced similarly at $199, slightly outperforms the 5830 in most benchmarks, and if you purchase it from Newegg, it comes with a free coupon for Starcraft 2.

If you're going to buy a 460 get the full 1gig version it's more than worth it. Also that's not the full version of Starcraft2, it's a trial only.

krapst78

Oops my mistake, thought it was the full version because the original price of the coupon was set at $59.99. Even without Starcraft, I'd probably go with a GTX460 over the Radeon 5830.

Yeah, and if you're going to spend $200 for a graphic card, it's worth it to spend that extra $30 and bump up to the 1gig version of the GTX460. It has a bigger memory bus which gives it a pretty noticeable boost in most benchmarks.