Confused old man needs a little Graphic Card advice.

[Gavrushka]

I'd intended to replace my PC this Summer, but since house renovations are gonna continue for some months, I want to upgrade my graphics card to something a little more robust for 1920x1080 gaming.

Thing is, I've chosen a GTX 1660, but now I'm head-battered by the number of variants. I'm not needing an overclocked one, and I don't ever feel the urge to run games in high settings, but there's dozens of such cards available. - My base PC is an 8th Gen I7, and the PSU is 600 watts (I paid for a slightly upgraded one when I bought it, just under 2 years ago) and, as my existing card didn't need one, I've finally discovered where the 8pin power adaptor is located. (PSU is housed in a sectioned off part of the case with its own air tunnel, and Mission Impossible level difficulty to access... (i.e. take the RHS panel off the case... ))

I'll also get a displayport cable and connect a UHD TV up to it too, but that'll mainly be for Sky TV for the occasional 'stormy weather' interference with the satellite signal.

And should I give my old GTX 1050TI card to someone I don't like?

(Note: I'm in the UK, and will be buying from Amazon.)

[red assassin]

The 1660 Super is a different, slightly faster card to the 1660 for about the same price - there's not many plain 1660s about now, but make sure you're getting a Super one. That aside my typical approach is to go to my favourite reputable computer parts supplier and get the cheapest card of the type I'm after (as long as it doesn't have a bunch of negative reviews).

[EGO_Aut]

I would wait until chrismas discount starts......and why not use UHD with some kind of 8 GB card

Cheaper would be a Amd RX 5600 XT but only 6 GB ~300€ or RX 580 8GB ~160€ here.

[BrasatoAlBarolo]

I believe 1660 super is under the 300 € mark... It's a 6Gb card, iIrc.

[Gavrushka]

Thanks, red assassin. I've been checking out cards on techradar, but all the reviews are pretty similar, but on Amazon there's a fair few who complain about overheating and the like. I'll make sure it's a 'Super.'

Ah, thanks for the suggestion, @EGO-Aut, but the card is just a stopgap, and it's likely I will be buying a new PC, complete with better card at Christmas. I'll be gifting my existing PC to a family member. -I've no intention of changing my 1080 monitor for some time, but will make sure to get a high-end card just in case. My PSU is a little marginal for getting the kind of card I'd like to see in a new system, so this will be just an interim solution.

Yeah, I've seen some 1660s close to GBP 200, or around 220 Euros, BrasatoAlBarolo. They seem great value.

Ordering a card within the next 24 hours, so any Amazon links to preferred 1660 supers would be appreciated.

*edit*

Thanks for the input. I've ordered: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08125HQ7D/ ... _lig_dp_it

[Gavrushka]

1660 Super installed, and I am can sure you can just imagine the increase in performance over and above a GTX 1050Ti. - userbenchmark.com rated the old system's gaming performance as an ageing yacht with a barnacled keel, and now it's a battle cruiser. - Still low against the more powerful cards, but plenty good enough for me. - One thing that's confusing is all my components seem to perform well above average, and I've no idea why, with the CPU and memory rated as outstanding. - How can identical components perform differently? As a workstation it rates my PC as a nuclear submarine, but it's a bog standard 8th generation I7.

[pjknibbs]

It's surprising how little the per-core performance of CPUs has increased over the past few years. For example, I upgraded my Athlon 860K (released Q3 2014) to a Ryzen 2600 (Q2 2018, so nearly four years newer) and yet the userbenchmark score per-core is only 64% better. It's only when you get to the 8-core results that you see a huge increase, because the 860K is a quad-core unit while the Ryzen 2600 is a 6-core with AMD's equivalent of hyper-threading. Your old i7 is probably in the same department.

[Gavrushka]

It makes me wonder whether it's worthwhile buying a much better PC, later in the year. I do want a system built around a non-mechanical drive, and I simply don't feel confident enough to slap one of those in my existing PC and make it the boot disk.

Anyhow, I've already agreed to gift this one to a relative, so I'll resurrect this thread when I do look at having a new PC built for me.

*edit* Had to chuckle. -After investing in a this new card, I just teleported to my shipyard, expecting silky smooth gameplay, but the framerate was identical to that with the GTX 1050Ti (22ish.) The only difference was, I could run the game at any resolution from low to ultra without altering the framerate a jot.

Yeah, so I'm hoping an I9 10900 with fast Ram and a decent video card *will* make a difference...

[red assassin]

Yeah, the rate of change in GPUs is way faster than in CPUs. I change my GPU about twice as often as I change my CPU/motherboard. A beefy i7 from a few years ago is still a very capable processor now. Moving from a spinning disk to an SSD is a colossal upgrade though!

[jlehtone]

My base PC is an 8th Gen I7

Those are not "old". Max three years: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... ssors.html
I don't feel old with 6th Gen i7.

One thing that's confusing is all my components seem to perform well above average, and I've no idea why, with the CPU and memory rated as outstanding. - How can identical components perform differently? As a workstation it rates my PC as a nuclear submarine, but it's a bog standard 8th generation I7.

Are you referring to the "benchmark" that is/was in Windows? That is less accurate than ... anything.

Do you mean by "identical", for example your CPU with old GPU vs same CPU with new GPU?

I do want a system built around a non-mechanical drive, and I simply don't feel confident enough to slap one of those in my existing PC and make it the boot disk.

Even with all the "clone disk to disk" tools that are around, I do agree. "Spring cleaning" -- install from scratch is good.

Non-mechanical, i.e. SSD (with SATA connector, with SATA via M.2 connector, with NVMe via M.2 connector, with NVMe via PCIe slot, and some others that never really made it) have been around quite a while now. IMHO, we are clearly past the initial proof of concepts, past the "lets make them great", and now mostly in "how cheap we can make those?" phase.

[Gavrushka]

Yeah, the rate of change in GPUs is way faster than in CPUs. I change my GPU about twice as often as I change my CPU/motherboard. A beefy i7 from a few years ago is still a very capable processor now. Moving from a spinning disk to an SSD is a colossal upgrade though!

As per the edit to the post that preceded yours, I do hope there is *some* benefit to be gained from a brand new processor over my current one.

It takes my PC about 5 minutes to be fully operational from switch on at the minute (I mean to running at full speed.) - I imagine an SSD make a monstrous difference. They're around 20 to 30 times faster, yes?

@jlehtone - Yeah, I can see that there's not been quantum improvements in processor performance, but I'm sure struggling with X4 even with an I7 8700. The processor seems to be my bottleneck, and was even with the 1050Ti (benefit of hindsight.) Is it simply a case that there's no PC available today that can run X4 at sensible framerates in certain scenarios?

[jlehtone]

It takes my PC about 5 minutes to be fully operational from switch on at the minute (I mean to running at full speed.) - I imagine an SSD make a monstrous difference. They're around 20 to 30 times faster, yes?

Depends on operation.

Spinning HDD can transfer about 100-200 MB/sec and can do ~100 IO operations/sec.
SATA-based SSD (2.5" drive or M.2) reads 550MB/sec and almost 100'000 IO ops/sec.
NVMe-based SSD reads over 2000MB/sec and twice the iops than SATA-based.
Brand new NVMe SSD with PCIe 4 x4 via M.2 (new AMD board) claims 7000MB/sec read and 1'000'000 IO ops/sec.

The difference does depend on type of disk access. What does Windows do when it boots? What does X4 do when it loads a save?
5 min / 20 == 15 sec. Perhaps not, but definitely "fast enough".
[EDIT] UEFI POST almost 20 sec. Then 10 sec of Windows loading. [/EDIT]


I have mere 970 with that 6th gen i7. I haven't stumbled on clear struggle with that on-topic game yet.

[red assassin]

As per the edit to the post that preceded yours, I do hope there is *some* benefit to be gained from a brand new processor over my current one.

It takes my PC about 5 minutes to be fully operational from switch on at the minute (I mean to running at full speed.) - I imagine an SSD make a monstrous difference. They're around 20 to 30 times faster, yes?

@jlehtone - Yeah, I can see that there's not been quantum improvements in processor performance, but I'm sure struggling with X4 even with an I7 8700. The processor seems to be my bottleneck, and was even with the 1050Ti (benefit of hindsight.) Is it simply a case that there's no PC available today that can run X4 at sensible framerates in certain scenarios?

I think you'll probably struggle to get a much faster CPU... I think about 10% more performance per-core is achievable if you spend £££, and a bit more with overclocking, but I wouldn't count on much more than that. Multi-threaded, you have 6 cores already. Does anyone know if X4 can use more than that? I'd be surprised, but I haven't actually played an X game in a long time. If it can't, adding more cores won't help either.

Pretty much any SSD should get boot times under a minute with no trouble, and on a new clean system with a reasonable SSD, 30s or less is more than achievable.

[euclid]

I'm "testing" X4 with my new rig which comprises an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X with 16 cores and it's much faster than the "old" setup. However, as it has been posted several times, X4's usage of multiple cores has a diminishing return. So I guess that the benefit of 10 more cores is not very significant.

Cheers Euclid

[Gavrushka]

I feel a little happier with my pauper's rig now. - I think I'd wrongly imagined a better graphic card was an X4 panacea, but the processor intensive situations where performance takes the hardest hit aren't gonna be solved by a new card. I run at Ultra now, and what's surprising is the 1660 uses so little power, and never gets above mid 50s Celsius, and I think that just underlines how heavily the simulation relies on the processor.

Euclid, I'd love to hear what framerate you get on a megafactory, and whether or not it was affected by changing graphic settings. As stated earlier, I tank to 22FPS with my I7 8700 when on my shipyard, but it isn't affected at all by changing graphic settings.

I know nothing of AMD processors other than I blew up an Athlon X4 (yeah, the irony...) when I first used it to run x4 on release. I know it was pure happenstance, but it did kind of sour me towards them.

[burger1]

At 1080p most games will probably rely more on the cpu. At 1440p and 4k the graphics card is usually used more.

Ignore X4 performance.

The mechanical hard drive is likely a factor in your boot up time. Having lots of hard drives seems to increase boot time also. Check your start up programs. One drive syncing seems to cause lag at start up.

There might be a new budget gaming card being released in the next 6 months maybe? I am guessing the 1660 series will eventually be finished soon?

Games might be becoming more multi core.

Watch youtube fps videos and look at the clock speeds, resolution, temperatures, etc... to get an idea of whats what.

[Gavrushka]

That's great advice, burger1, as always. Thank you.

Yes, I think I get it that X4 is a bit of an anomaly, performance-wise.

I do have a additional external drives attached, mainly because this is also the PC I work at, and important information is duplicated across drives and remotely. My upcoming PC will be have non-mechanical for boot and an additional SSD for data, but a single large mechanical too for cost-effectiveness.

I'll be sure to browse through YouTube before finalising my new specs.

[pjknibbs]

My upcoming PC will be have non-mechanical for boot and an additional SSD for data, but a single large mechanical too for cost-effectiveness.

Why are you doing that? Just have one big SSD for boot, documents and rapidly-accessed data, and spinning rust for data that doesn't need to be so rapidly accessed. I do this--my home PC has a 1Tb M.2 SSD and 2x2Tb drives formatted as a single 4Tb partition (did that because I already had the drives lying around, I'd have been happy to go with a single 4Tb drive otherwise). Thing is, the seek time on an SSD is practically zero for all intents and purposes, so you don't have to worry about a larger partition getting slower as it gets fragmented, which is about the only good reason I can think of for having a separate boot and data drive in the first place.

[Gavrushka]

My upcoming PC will be have non-mechanical for boot and an additional SSD for data, but a single large mechanical too for cost-effectiveness.

Why are you doing that? Just have one big SSD for boot, documents and rapidly-accessed data, and spinning rust for data that doesn't need to be so rapidly accessed. I do this--my home PC has a 1Tb M.2 SSD and 2x2Tb drives formatted as a single 4Tb partition (did that because I already had the drives lying around, I'd have been happy to go with a single 4Tb drive otherwise). Thing is, the seek time on an SSD is practically zero for all intents and purposes, so you don't have to worry about a larger partition getting slower as it gets fragmented, which is about the only good reason I can think of for having a separate boot and data drive in the first place.

Ah, I want a separate SSD to network for network access for family (old scanned photos and more recent digital photography) and I'd like that distinct from my own drive. I should've made that clear, sorry!

[pjknibbs]

Ah, I want a separate SSD to network for network access for family (old scanned photos and more recent digital photography) and I'd like that distinct from my own drive. I should've made that clear, sorry!

Well, if this drive is only accessible over the network then I'd argue that having that on an SSD is a complete waste--you're limited by the speed of your network most of the time in that case, not the drive.