CASE STUDY: GAMING
SO HERE SHE IS, our upgraded gaming machine. From the get go, she came packed with a quad-core processor, 8GB of DDR3, a slightly ageing OCZ 256GB SSD, a 1TB hard drive, and the powerhouse that was the GTX 670. Boy, those were the days, huh? Not too old, we know. This machine was pieced together back in 2013, making it, relatively speaking, still fairly new. And it shows—the motherboard at the rig’s heart is still sound. There’s an M.2 slot offering up to 10Gb/s transfers, plenty of PCIe slots for additional cards, support for up to 64GB of DDR3, and even onboard power buttons.
Aim of the Upgrade
So, the story behind this system was fairly simple: We assumed that the gamer in question was on a tight budget, they didn’t have a lot of cash to throw around, and had only managed to save up for the occasional lump of hardware here and there since it had been originally built. The last and biggest bundle being the motherboard, processor, and GPU combo.
The case was old, probably taken from an office PC from years ago, or a tower the grandparents had used for a while. The power supply was also old, and the storage was somewhat wanting. So, ultimately, we kept it simple and just upgraded the memory capacity and the GPU. Upgrading from Nvidia’s Ge Force GTX 670 to the GTX 1060 would not only reduce the power draw overhead from the GPU, but also improve frame rates by well over 100 percent.
The Intel Core i5-4670K is by no means the bottleneck in this system—certainly not yet, anyway— but we decided to throw out the old memory in favor of something a little more impactful. So, we grabbed two sticks of 8GB DDR3 to ensure that we could both game and run programs from the desktop without worry.
Free Upgrades?
There’s a variety of things you can do to eke out extra performance here and there in a gaming build like this. Keeping your drivers up to date is essential if you want to improve performance. An unoptimized game can benefit by as much as 20–30 percent, purely from a driver pass. Couple that with a gentle GPU overclock, and you can easily crank those frames back up when you begin to experience problems.
Another cheap fix is to increase the number of fans in your build. GPU Boost 2.0 automatically increases the core clock of your graphics card, dependent on the overall temperature, so throwing a couple of extra fans in the front of a chassis, or even on a ventilated side panel, should help keep your card cooler, and let it overclock higher.
However, if you’re concerned that your processor may be holding back your GPU, you can throw the multiplier up a fraction to see if that can alleviate the problem. If you’re running a stock cooler, as we are here, we suggest leaving the voltage alone entirely, and adjusting the multiplier by two or three at most.
Cross Fire Conundrum
An alternative to purchasing a new GPU is to opt for a second older card instead, usually within one to two years of purchasing the first, if you can find one. This can be a good solution to save a few dollars, but it’s not without its setbacks. Firstly, SLI and Cross Fire profiles aren’t always perfect. Generally speaking, on game launch, most titles simply don’t have support for any multi-GPU configurations. Which means your second card immediately becomes a paperweight. On top of that, it’s likely that you’ll end up with trouble in the power supply department as well, if you’re not careful, because you can easily add an additional 200W of power draw simply by adding the additional card. On the other hand, getting a more powerful card the first time around, or a newer generation of GPU, will lead you to guaranteed better performance, and better power savings in the long run.
THE RESULT
Well, it was always going to be a sure-fire victory for the GPU. The Intel Core i5-4670K is still an extremely competitive core. In fact, unless you’re running anything pre-Sandy Bridge, you’re unlikely to reach any bottlenecks with regard to gaming and graphical limitations. If this system was going to be sitting in the office for much longer, we would definitely take a look at swapping to a more modern chassis, and potentially go for a newer power supply and better cooling, too—just to reduce noise and for peace of mind. That said, this is a system more than capable of gaming at 1080p and beyond. Not bad for an outlay of just under $400.