Upgrade PC in 2022 - or try to keep my old system afloat?

[1Sascha]

Hi all!

 

I guess I'm a little (actually quite a lot) overdue in upgrading my PC. However: Due to RL concerns I haven't been able to play regularly these past couple of years, so I put it off.

 

Getting re-acquainted with the hardware-market, I was shocked to see the current prices - not just for GPUs, but it seems that Alder Lake caused a serious price hike for all sorts of components.

 

Thought I'd shop around for suggestions here, since I'm not planning on playing any super up-to-date stuff, but my most demanding titles would be IL-2 and DCS, so those titles are what I want to be able to play fluidly. I'd prefer 1440, naturally, but I would make do with 1080 for the time being.

 

Anyway... here's what I currently have in my rig (and yes... a lot of the stuff is quite old, since I first put it together back in 2013 or 2014):

 

Mobo: Asus Z87 Pro

CPU: Intel i5 4670K

RAM: 2x4GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600

Storage: Samsung 500GB SSD as system-drive and around 2TB in HDDs

GFX-card: There's a GF GTX 660 still in the system but I did snag a GTX 1060 a couple of years back that's still sitting in its box, so that would naturally replace the 660.

PSU: Pretty ancient (pre 2010 prolly) bequiet! 1000 W PSU, to be replaced by a Seasonic Focus 550 Gold Plus that I also bought a couple of years back (since the bequiet is really getting on and lacks Haswell support.

 

Now, the cheap way I see it: I could get two more 4GB sticks of DDR 3 RAM (I can still find the exact model in stores today), to get me up to 16 GB. Cost for that is just under €50. Then I could swap out the PSU and GFX card (no cost, since I already bought both) and should probably replace my Corsair H60 AiO cooler (€60 - €100). The tubes on it still look fine to me, but that thing is at least 6 years old and I wouldn't want to take chances with an ageing device holding liquid inside my PC... :).

 

Which would put the cost at under €200 - unless I also upgrade my case and would need to get a Win 11 key. But overall way less than, say, an RTX 3060 Ti on its own.

 

 

The more appealing (and more expensive) way:

Z690, DDR4 Mobo (~€250 at the minimum)

Intel i5 12600 KF (~€270)

2x8 GB of decent DDR4 RAM (€80 to €100) <-no need to go DDR5 right now IMO, plus DDR4 is more readily available and way cheaper.

1 TB Samsung M.2 drive as new system drive (~€100)

Windows 11 license (~€100) ... not sure if I can upgrade my Win 8 license for free... ?

CPU AiO cooler: (~€80 to €100)

Probably also a new case because my old Ostrog GT supports a 240mm radiator in theory, but I would have to mount either the fans or the radiator on top of the case, externally (not enough space between the case roof and the top of the MoBo). Don't want to do that and I don't think a 120mm rad would be sufficient for the 12600. (~€100).

 

The RTX 3060 Ti would be my choice of GPU here but with the current prices (and the fact I have an unused 1060 sitting around), I'd rather spend that money at VKB or Virpil for the time being.

 

All in all, that's between €900 and €1000, depending on options. My question is: Is it even worth to put more money into a system as old as mine, even if it's "just" €200 or less I'd have to put in? Would I be able to play IL-2/DCS at a decent framerate with the old, updated system or should I keep saving and go for an all new build?

 

Sorry about the lengthy post and thanks for your input!

 

Cheers

 

Sascha

 

 

 

 

 

 

[cardboard_killer]

Since it's your money, I'd go new

[AndyJWest]

DCS is a lot more demanding hardware-wise than IL-2 GB, and if you want to upgrade, you really need to look at the system requirements for that, which would probably make trying to upgrade uneconomic. You'd probably want to consider getting 32 GB of RAM for it, too.

[jollyjack]

I would start with an i7 and a new MB and a proper watercooler and power supply, 1000 watts. then you can exchange the rest later..

[Crocogator]

Put that 1060 into your rig right this moment and you will have passable 1440 medium performance (minimal AA). You are talking about spending upwards of 1000 euro for the difference between 1440p medium to 1440p ultra.

[Irishratticus72]

Windows 11 is seriously not worth putting money down for. 

[chiliwili69]

On 2/20/2022 at 1:49 PM, 1Sascha said:

CPU: Intel i5 4670K

RAM: 2x4GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600

 

Hey, since you only need to play in monitor at 60Hz your needs for IL-2 (I have no idea about DCS) are not really high.

 

You only need to do 3 changes:

 

CPU:

Looking into this page and filtering by your LGA1150 and ordering by SingleThread you will find that the i7-4790K is the top performer for that socket (it can go with Turbo to 4.4GHz) and it is a very good chip to go further if needed (with proper cooling). 

The 4790K was my previous CPU, and if you don´t do VR, then it is more than enough for any IL-2 scenario. Easily keep above 60fps in heavy loaded maps.

You can find easily a 4790K second hand in ebay. There are also new 4790K on amazon.

 

RAM:

Here try to go to the faster 2x8Gb DDR3 RAM. 2400 or 2600 or 2800 or 2933 MHz and lowest latency ( second hand or new, as you prefer)

 

GPU:

For 1440p at 60Hz you can pick from this list any GPU with a G3D mark higher than 10000. Second hand or new. So your 1060 is valid.

Edited March 1, 2022 by chiliwili69

[fatmidget]

I can concur with chiliwili69 to go from a 4670k to a 4790k is a decent improvement even though it’s overpriced for an old cpu but this is 2022 hype. With an Asus z97 AR, G Skill 1833 ram and a 1070 I have no problem playing IL2, DCS, X-plane, MS Flight or just about anything else in non-vr 1080 and even 1440. Now I did have to put a lot of time into tuning to get results out of “old hardware” such as de lid-ding, tweaking ram to run @ 1100, and Windows 10 fine-tuned ect and game settings.

Not enough time to go into great details but In Brief I found that the 1070 is the bottleneck, and memory timing made a great difference for smooth FPS. Overclocking the cpu up to 4.9 didn’t make much of a difference. Even though cpu is old seems it has enough power at default. Even for DCS liberation w/server script. In Aida64 cpu queen @ 4.7 easy stable OC it scores 60,000 which isn’t too bad vs cost of cpus that score little higher. OC’D it dose use a lot of watts.

I think the 4670k scores in the 40,000s.

The new I3 4 core reported to be the fastest 4 core cpu is going for around 100 bucks and paired with the right MB goes up to 5 by BCLK and you could upgrade to higher core count cpu in the future if needed. The cost of DDR4, the right MB for BCLK OC, and CPU vs getting a used lower cost 4790k. Turning up BCLK can be tricky. Maybe depends upon what GPU you would get to match it and get the most out of its performance for 1440. I doubt the 4790k is any good for VR and can't handle having sim maxed out but paired with a much better GPU than a 1070 I am sure it still would perform good enough much to surprise.

People spend a lot of money to have the latest and greatest and still yet have a miss-configured stuttering mess. Never be one of those.

Good Luck and happy flying.

Edited March 2, 2022 by fatmidget

[1Sascha]

Well ....

 

 

 

 

... at least I got to finally use that GTX 1060 and the Seasonic PSU I had lying around since 2018... ?

 

If it hadn't been for that GPU, I probably wouldn't even have considered a new PC, seeing how a decent mid-range card (RTX 3060 Ti) is still over €600 ?

 

 

On 3/1/2022 at 12:55 PM, Irishratticus72 said:

Windows 11 is seriously not worth putting money down for. 

 

I paid €8.40 for a legit Win11 Pro key. I could've gone cheaper than that, but chose a retailer with perfect customer feedback and a good Trustpilot rating.

Still was probably the biggest savings on a single component in this new build. All it took was 10 minutes of snooping around on ordinary price comparison sites.

 

So far everything seems to work fine. Some annoying aesthetic changes that bug me, but I'm pretty sure I can find community fixes for (most of) those.

 

 

S.

Edited March 13, 2022 by 1Sascha

[=FEW=fernando11]

So how is the i5 12600k and msi z690 tomahawk ddr4 working out for you in il2?

Specialy in heavy loaded SP missions and campaigns?

 

Yours is the same upgrade path I'm currently looking at...

[1Sascha]

On 4/1/2022 at 9:26 PM, =FEW=fernando11 said:

So how is the i5 12600k and msi z690 tomahawk ddr4 working out for you in il2?

Specialy in heavy loaded SP missions and campaigns?

I'm on my second career now (BoM, Bf 110 E-2, normal difficulty, medium frontline activity, realistic campaign speed and runway start). In a typical 110-mission (I always seem to get the "destroy bridge"-ones), there is quite a lot of stuff going on around me. Usually four 110s, but I've also seen eight, at least four 109s as escort plus anywhere from four to twelve VVS fighters and a ton of German and Soviet ground units (both around the primary target and pretty much everywhere else on the map).

 

 

I've played around with the settings quite a bit but I seem to have found a pretty good compromise now between FPS and eye-candy. Here's what my current settings look like:

 

 

 

The game looks rather pretty with those and I'm getting FPS in the high 60s to low 70s in the cockpit with quite a bit of consistency. No perceivable lag to speak of as far as I can tell after about 15 missions spread over two careers. GeForce-overlay reports 99% FPS at around 50.

 

A day or two ago I was still flying on 1080 with 4K enabled, which gave me 90 to low 100s. Then I switched it up to 1440 to match my monitor's native resolution and initially disabled 4K textures. Which resulted in FPS in the high 70s to low 80s. Switched 4K textures back on just to see what would happen and while the FPS-hit was noticeable in the overlay, it didn't affect my flying experience. The one instance where some sort of minor slow-down can occur (occasionally) is when I quickly zoom in (I have sped up my camera movements), which I blame on my card's lack of VRAM. If I had to rate the performance, I'd say this is totally playable and still rather pretty with the settings I chose. Flying eastward through an early morning sky with the rising sun lighting up those puffy clouds is a rather impressive sight.

 

I did OC both my CPU and my GPU. For the CPU I'm using the lame-o auto OC feature of the BIOS, which uses a turbo offset (+2 in my case). With that, the CPU will reach 5.1 GHz under stress-tests (Aida64, Passmark CPU-mark, etc). Plus IL-2 is installed on my fastest drive which, according to Samsung Magician, hits 3,600 MB/s read and 2,400 write.

 

For the GPU I used Afterburner's automatic OC-analyzer function to find a stable overclock without having to put a lot of effort into it. The card now runs  at 1,911 MHz in boost-mode (base frequency is unchanged), VRAM runs at 4,007 MHz. It's an MSI GTX 1060 3GB Aero ITX (single-fan, small form-factor card) whose stock clockspeeds are 1,544 base, 1,759 boost.

 

The CPU however is hardly breaking a sweat with IL-2 running:

 

 

 

 

 

^ This was taken with IL-2 in the main-menu, but it looks pretty much like what I get when I'm actually flying career missions. CPU and individual CPU core temps never exceed low to mid 60s°C

 

It's probably worth mentioning that I don't have the best airflow in my case (although I'm happy with my temps). It's a bequiet! Pure Base 600 which doesn't have a fully open mesh front. Plus I had to install my 240mm AiO in the front (mobo's top heatspreader prevented a top-mount by about .5 to 1 centimeter). So it's blowing warm air into the case and towards the GPU. I have three exhausts (2x140 top, 1x120 rear) to compensate and thus far temps are good, but I suppose it's not an ideal setup. Silly me for wanting a case that would allow me to mount an ODD...

 

EDIT:

 

After one career mission/~60 mins of constant flying, this is what I got... I had to collapse some of the info to get everything important on there.

I guess the 54 Watt maximum draw for the CPU shows how unstressed this i5 is by the game. For the 12600K, Intel states a TDP of 125/150 Watt in normal/turbo modes. With my overclock I've seen 131 or 132 Watt when all cores were maxed out and at 5.1 GHz (on the P-cores, haven't OCed the E-cores).

Even the GPU didn't hit its TDP (120 W) in this session. Plus with its current OC, I've seen this card hit 127 Watt in benchmarks. The main limiting factor with the 1060 3GB is, I guess, the VRAM ... or lack thereof.

 

 

 

 

S.

 

Edited April 4, 2022 by 1Sascha