Graphics card and motherboard are pretty much all you need I guess. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
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It's possible that your HDD's are not fast enough, too; you could try defragmenting first.
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i5, Phenom II, or higher.
AMD 6850, Nvidia 560, or higher.
8GB RAM or higher.
64-bit OS.
These would be my suggestion. You will be able to play almost all AAA games at 1080p at acceptable FPS on very high settings.
Certainly get better if you can. Be careful about sticking purely with the 600 or 7000 series cards, as late-issue cards from previous architecture often perform much better than median-numbered current architecture cards. Check with benchmarks found on benchmark sites. I suggest Tom's Hardware.
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First generation i7 and HD 6800 series still qualifies as gaming PC, it's just not the latest and greatest.
My brother runs most games just fine on Phenom II X6 and HD 6850.
As for your problem, you'll have to be more specific than "lags a little". What game, what resolution, what settings, in what situations, etc.
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It depends what HD 6800 series card it is. It could be HD 6850 or HD 6870, which are beast and should run pretty much anything maxed out at 720-1080p. However, there's a chance of it being some integrated garbage card, like HD 6810D (if I'm correct that's one of the 6800 series integrated cards).
TL;DR - find specifically which card you have, not just the series.
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Graphics card, change to Nvidia GTX 670 or GTX 680... max the resolution, ultra settings, with smooth gameplay and zero lag :D
However, probably overkill for the rest of the system.
Consider replacing CPU and Motherboard for an 3rd Generation (Ivy Bridge).
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As crap as it sounds, I think looking at Nvidia is always the better option. I'm constantly seeing warnings about this or that game that for whatever will not run properly on Radeon cards. Bad threading, optimizing, whatever. Our systems are rather similar (I built a mid-range 1k~ish gaming focused desk about a year ago) so I'm personally kind of surprised that you're having issues. I run everything high/ultra at 1920x1080, windowed if possible. I don't see any issues other than switching down to mid-high settings for most games over the next year+ on my system, and as I said, my hardware isn't much newer than yours.
Dumbest advice, you might be mindful of what you're running in the background. Keeping a fairly minimal boot is always a good idea.
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Which games have been advertising that they play poorly on AMD devices?
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None ADVERTISE it, I just see at least a warning or two a week over on various game deal sites from multiple people with firsthand knowledge. It usually comes down to weeks of tech support and said company admitting that their architecture (for whatever reason) is not optimized for such and such.
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I've had AMD cards for the past 7 yrs, and play A LOT of the most popular games. Only had an issue with Resident evil 5. The cut scenes would go black. It was fixed with new drivers. Other than that, no real issues that have prevented me from playing a game properly. Some players love to be dramatic and exaggerate.
I'm currently using a 6950 (Unlocks to perform as a 6970) 0 issues with any games.
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What do you mean by 'lags a little'?
Are you trying to play it on max settings? Consider lowering the rez to 1080p.
Are you running max AA? Lower it to 2x or 4x.
Is the FPS dropping suddenly to 5fps for a few seconds before recovering? Your VRAM may be filling up. Make sure a video card upgrade includes more VRAM.
Is the FPS suffering from microstutter? Consider VSYNC, or lower some settings to the point where your FPS is high enough that you don't notice the FPS drops as much.
To further diagnose what's going on, play with GPU-Z running and see how much VRAM you're using. Watch your GPU Load to see if your GPU is even being fully utilised.
If your GPU is fine, your CPU may be the issue. Run CPU-Z and watch your CPU load across all cores. Is the game taxing one core, leaving the rest untouched? If it is, make sure any CPU upgrades run at higher clock speeds instead of just adding additional cores. 2.93GHz isn't exactly a fast clock speed these days, but is fast enough if the game makes good use of more than two cores.
Watch your RAM usage. Is your RAM filling up? Get another 8 gigabytes, your motherboard can hold 16.
What exact 6800 series is your card? 6850, or 6870? Either way, if your GPU is maxed out already, consider bumping up to a GTX 670 or a Radeon HD 7950.
Without knowing what settings you're running Tomb Raider 2013 at, we can only make inaccurate guesses.
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For RAM: 8GB of 1600Mhz CL9 or CL7 DDR3 is actually optimal levels for gaming. No more or less. You don't need more as a game wouldn't use it, only multitasking / high resolution graphic applications would. A game uses 4GB, Operating System around 2GB, so you actually have more than enough with 8GB.
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Given that the vast majority games are 32bit therefore there's only a max of 2gb of ram that the application has access to, I don't see how it could take 4.
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32bit has a max of 4GB - most games are developed as 32bit due to costs and also games use the graphic card memory rather than system memory (with the exception of Vista where they memory hogged bugged the OS into duplicating the same content into both system and graphic card memory wasting space). 64bit OS which is standard today should be 6GB (if tri-lane channel memory) or 8GB (if dual or quad channel) optimal for game performance. If 32bit you should have 4GB.
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He mentions Tomb Raider 2013. That game is optimized for AMD's latest cards. If he cares for that game primarily, he should go with AMD. TressFX is used here, and only AMD uses it so far. I would instead suggest that you lower settings and go with an Nvidia for reliability, if you can afford it.
I assume he had a 64-bit processor because he has a 64-bit OS, has 8 GB installed RAM, and his motherboard supports 16GB of RAM.
I ased him to test his RAM usage. Regardless of how much RAM Tomb Raider 2013 says it requires, if he's using more than 8GB, he needs more than 8GB. He needs to give us some more info. This is why I ask for CPU-Z and GPU-Z analysis. Since he hasn't given enough detail, I can only speculate based on possible problems.
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I'm aware of the OS restrictions, as far as games go, what 32-bit game has addressed more than 2gb of ram, as observed by task manager or some other way? I'm curious, as I personally have never seen such an occurrence.
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Playing a game on a PC means RAM is being used by more than just the game. We still don't know if this is a concern, since he hasn't said anything about this yet. For all we know, he's running eight different antivirus programs and three firewalls, and ripping a dvd, while defragging the drive he installed the game on.
Regardless of what is using his ram (if this is even an issue here), running out is running out. The OS switches to using the swap file for virtual RAM. This would certainly slow things to a crawl. This is one kind of lag that gamers talk about.
There are many 2gb games that have memory leaks. As I have not played Tomb Raider 2013, I don't know if this is the case.
I still think it's an issue of having game settings too high. Turn off TressFX. His card was released before AMD created that technique.
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I'm aware, but was more directly responding to the "A game uses 4gb" claim. Even if the game could address 4gb, I doubt it would fill or even get close to that envelope. Now that I think about it, I do recall having a memory leak of MW3, but that only put me a hair, a very very small hair above 2gb.
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Ah, I see now. Azzaboi's claim. I agree there.
If you enable LBA-Aware mode in Fallout 3 or New Vegas, it'll use more than 2gb when it needs it. If you're running mods, you'll often need it. Both games have crashed on me without it, giving me a message about insufficient resources. These were really long play sessions though, so may not apply to most people. But hey, there are very few bugs that apply to most people in any game.
All this being said, get 16GB if you can. It's not going to get cheaper before the PS4 gets a slim edition. As a bonus, all that extra RAM will let you have many more programs running without slowing down the use of Alt-Tab. Very speedy process switching when nothing is in the swap file.
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That 6800 is not too bad, but depends on the version.
That said, I'm still using a factory overclocked GTX 275 and I can run most things.
I've been delaying an upgrade for a long time.
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Delaying upgrades for 5 years now, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 paired with a nVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. nVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Edition for 150 USD is going to be this years nVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT for best bang for the buck. Not, when will nVIDIA or AMD release their top of the line graphics card for under 200 USD again
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While you're at it you can get yourself a real soundcard. Even a >10 years old SB Live is worlds better than anything that's integrated on a mobo (I mean stuff that's not interpretable as numbers, like a real hardware mixer). In the past I remember I had slowdowns because the integrated sound chip couldn't keep up - maybe that's your problem too.
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+1
My mom's old system sucked. Standing near a campfire in WoW on an integrated sound device, her FPS tanked. Her CPU stopped being able to keep up with the video card's power. Even a cheap 20 USD sound card will be better.
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Well, as some pointed out, basically you should look at your video card and the motherboard.
The point with the motherboard is that it's a platform for every single component. If you get a better motherboard, the chances of overheating ar low so you will get a performance plus. Best motherboard are those designed to be overcloacked since they support higher voltages and implicitly temperature and also they give you more upgrade options.
When it comes to lagging and low game performance, the situation is a little bit different.
Update your drivers. Usually, video & chipset drivers can be easily updated by installing the new version. Don't know about AMD but nVidia also has an clean install option.
But this could be cause be almost every single component and piece of software you have.
For example, a mechanical HDD will (1) get hot and (2) allow fragmentation (actually SSD also do this but it doesn't matter there).
So make sure you degrag your system periodically.
When it comes to memory, frequency matters. In some cases, it matters more than the total amount of memory you have.
A 800MHz memory module is less efficient than a 1033 module. Also, memory is used to store data so that the system be able to run it faster. Since the data comes from the HDD, the higher the fragmentation is, the lower the process is, especially since the system also needs to handle the virtual memory.
When it comes to software, keep in mind that the software also runs in RAM and RAM allows fragmentation. Make sure you don't have unnecessary programs in startup and close programs such as web browser when playing (from my own experience, a browser with 20 tabs opened will seriously decease performance).
The CPU is fine, doesn't need an upgrade soon :))
As for your system, I can bet it's a software problem. The video card might use an upgrade I guess.
My system (ASUS Striker II Formula, Intel Core2Quad Q9300 2.55Ghz, ASUS GeForce 295GTX 1Gb DDR3, 8Gb DDR2 800Mhz) is 4 & 1/2 years old and I never had problems playing anything on 30+ FPS on less than max settings (i get 45 in FC3 on Ultra).
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So a while ago i bought a gamer computer. The thing is, in some games it lags a little. I know that the graphic cards needs a change. but is there anything else i should worry about, or is it fairly good if i change the graphic card ? (was thinking about changing it to HD 7950, but i would like to know if there is anything better for the same price, or maybe something just as good, for a lower price)
My specs:
Windows: Windows 7 Home Premium Edition (64-bit) (Build 7600)
Memory (RAM): 8152 MB
CPU Info: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 870 @ 2.93GHz
CPU Speed: 2931,9 MHz
Sound Card: ATI HDMI Output (ATI High Defin |
Display Adapters: Radeon HD 6800 Series | Radeon HD 6800 Series | Radeon HD 6800 Series | Radeon HD 6800 Series | RDPDD Chained DD | RDP Encoder Mirror Driver | RDP Reflector Display Driver
Screen Resolution: 1920 X 1080 - 32 bit
CD / DVD Drives: 2x (E: | F: | ) E: Optiarc DVD RW AD-5260S | F: MagicISOVirtual DVD-ROM
Ports: COM Ports NOT Present. LPT Port NOT Present.
Hard Disks: C: 238,4GB | D: 931,5GB
USB Controllers: 8 host controllers.
Firewire (1394): Not Detected
Product Make *: H55M-UD2H
AC Power Status: OnLine
Motherboard *: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. H55M-UD2H
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