chaps, cex have a dual fan rx 580 8gb asus oc graphics card for £260.00 ive had a look close up and it looks in great nick. worth buying over a gtx 1060 6gb?

i did ideally want the three fan strix asus rx 580 if i went down that route (amd card).

Crazy Machines 3 and Jalopy if anyone wants 'em?

The new Ryzen CPUs have been released, and it's a decent little uplift over the previous generation. The 2700x in particular seems like a really good deal; £280 for 8 cores / 16 threads, boosts from 3.9 to 4.35GHz across those cores, supports pretty fast memory speeds, comes with a very decent box cooler, and has an IHS that is soldered to the die for optimal heat transfer. Very nice. Improvements in various latencies means game performance is very solid. And it's pretty epic chip for things that can utilise all those threads such as rendering, streaming, etc. Looks to be a really solid upgrade for those on an old quad-core platform looking for more oomph.

Heaven and furmark (for gpu killing)

Furmark is for killing the GPU.  I don't use it.  Might be useful for 5 mins or so to see temps and stability of GPU if it's second hand.

Game wise, Subnautica is a good test as well.  Being a Unity PoS, it requires twice as much power as it should.  Gives me the highest temps and Power Consumption (tdp% in GPU-Z).

Problem is crypto’s going up in value again, so might only be a temporary thing.

I read something about a lack of replay value which put me off.

I'm probably going to buy this tomorrow:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/574200/EARTH_DEFENSE_FORCE_41_WINGDIVER_THE_SHOOTER/

EDF EDF EDF! etc.

Nvidia just cancelled their anti-competitive and anti-consumer Geforce Partner Program.


Huzzah!!

Yeah, I bought it and refunded! I enjoyed it for the 45 minutes it took me to play through and I might have been happy to grind for better weapons, but it crashed twice in the 2 hours I played it, so it had to go.

I’m hanging on for the next gen. Even then I can probably wait a while. Might start putting £10/week away for PC upgrades.

I played on a Vive Pro for the first time a few days ago. 

Absolutely superb. Wish I had a room to dedicate to VR.

Hmm I'm not really sure about VR stuff. Typically those games are optimised to run pretty fast and have pared back visuals than what you might expect from most AAA titles.

It depends heavily on the game, but as you mentioned E:D that helps pin down the kind of performance you'll need.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2871-amd-vs-intel-vr-cpu-benchmarks-with-vive-and-rift/page-2



That's a CPU benchmark, but it's run with a 1080ti. I think you basically need to hold at least 90FPS with a HMD to not throw up, so based on that (it's from last year, so the game may have changed under the hood significantly, I would check around for the latest info) it looks like you probably want at least GTX 1080 level performance, £450-520 atm for that. More cores is definitely a good idea too, I would recommend the 2700x right now, bloody great price for a powerful 8 core with a beefy cooler. The 8700k is a good choice too, but there's a small swarm of little issues that prevent me from properly recommending Intel chips just right now.

@Elmlea

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 7 2700X 3.7GHz 8-Core Processor  (£275.94 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - X470 AORUS ULTRA GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard  (£134.99 @ AWD-IT)
Memory: Patriot - Viper 4 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  (£154.97 @ More Computers)
Storage: Samsung - 960 EVO 250GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive  (£93.54 @ Aria PC)
Storage: Toshiba - X300 5TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (£97.19 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce GTX 1080 8GB WINDFORCE OC 8G Video Card  (£479.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design - Define C ATX Mid Tower Case  (£73.59 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA G3 (EU) 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  (£88.75 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £1398.96
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-05-07 15:37 BST+0100

Seems like the 1080 should be sufficient, you may be able to get away with a 1070ti or perhaps a 1070 with lower settings. This might help - https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/5pl1i0/graphics_card_for_vr_ultra/

But that's the sort of pricing you should look at to build a "future proof" system for now. DDR4 is still about twice the price it should be, and GPUs are still a little over, so keep that in mind.

Elmlea wrote:

I look at that and think I should surely buy an i7-7700K; is the 2700x one of the new Ryzen chips?  Happy with whatever’s required, just want to know for sure so I can think if it’s worth it.

Err well that's from last year, so the 8700k is the Intel CPU to buy for now, quite an improvement as it has 6 cores to 4, and can run at up to around 5GHz with expensive cooling. It's arguably better for gaming than the Ryzen 2700x generally, especially if you only look at average FPS. But only by about 5-10% most of the time, depends on how the game is optimised for multiple cores. Having more cores can be a big boon to frame stability, as the various AI and physics processes of a game can be spread out across the chip. The 2700x has 8 cores and 16 threads compared to the 8700k's 6/12, for the most part the extra cores aren't utilised by games, and having higher frequencies can certainly benefit some games and applications.

It's a bit of a toss up between the two tbh, either should be more than enough for keeping over the 90fps mark for VR, so you can't go too wrong. The 8700k doesn't include a cooler, so you've got to spend £40-£??? on one. Intel are still manufacturing the chips to have thermal paste in between the silicon and IHS, leading to non-optimal thermal transfer and thus more noise, something that pisses me off but most don't seem to care. There is a rumored 8 core Intel consumer chip on the horizon, but it's not clear if that will need new motherboards, or how hot the damn thing will be. AMD's AM4 motherboard platform is supposed to last until 2020 or something, so there's a really nice upgrade path available, definitely something to consider from a 'future proofing' angle. Also it's clear that games and applications generally are starting to utilise higher core counts more and more as time goes on.

There's been a bunch of new security exploits for Intel's CPUs recently too, and it's not super clear how the patches will affect things, or what can and can't be patched out. So I'm hesistant to fully recommend Intel just now until more info gets out.

Hmm well there is the 1070ti that sits in between the 1070 and 1080, and can be overclocked to 1080 levels of performance. The GPU is going to be the main factor in keeping a good framerate, so it's where the bulk of the monies need to be going. ~£300 for the CPU should be fine, and I daresay you could drop down a little there, but if you do get one of those chips you should be good for a quite a while before even considering an upgrade.

You can get away with less horsepower for sure, an RX 580 / GTX 1060 will do the job in terms of just being able to play everything. But if you want all the shinies then more is more better, especially as VR is particularly demanding due to the huge resolutions and fast frametime requirements.