Friend need Help

[Lycaone]

HI, sorry for my english but I'm italian;

Anyway, I sold to a friend of mine 4 Gigabyte Radeon RX 470 4GB G1 (that I bought on black friday last year for 300$ in total) for 80$ (I know they are worther than 80 bucks, but i know him since we were 5) and now he is looking for a CPU that won't bottleneck this 4 GPUs (Obvioulsy he will CF them). He really doens't have much money, this is why he is happy with those and he wouldn't like to sell them.
He would like to stay under 200-250 bucks and he really doesn't care if the CPU is from AMD or Intel.

Thanks a lot for the help !!!

P.S.: Dollars and Euros have almost the same value

 

[Eximo]

You'll need a motherboard that supports 4-way crossfire, and a hugely expensive full tower case with at least 8 expansion slots, and a very expensive power supply.

If you are limited to 200-250 dollars or euros, I'm not sure you are going to manage.

A single RX470 should be decent to run a 1080p screen. Two would be almost reasonable and not break the bank in terms of case, power supply, and motherboard.

CPU choices, well AMD just had a release, but only the top 3 models, so they aren't exactly cheap. Something like an i5 would run you about your budget.

 

[photonboy]

1) What system does he have now? A new CPU may need a new motherboard, Windows, RAM etc.

2) 4x Crossfire?
Stick with 2x only. Too many issues above 2x. So sell the other two cards.

3) CPU bottleneck varies on the game, settings etc but as it currently stands INTEL is the only choice, but I would recommend WAITING and build around a 4-core AMD RYZEN CPU later when they launch.

Otherwise I'm not sure what to recommend for the price. I wouldn't recommend anything below an i5-4/7xxx CPU but again it also depends on what motherboard you have. Something like an i5-7600 for example. TOO expensive and I don't want to recommend a dual-core CPU even if the i3-6/7xxx desktop CPU's do pretty good for most games. Not very future proof, and will see big losses in some games.

*Again though, I'd:
a) get 2x SLI working on whatever he has
b) sell the current cards
c) TELL Us what CPU/motherboard/DD3? memory he has
d) RYZEN is probably the best upgrade path such as:

R3-1200X ($150USD?)
2x4GB DDR4 2666MHz memory (8GB total)
- compatible AM4 motherboard

Hopefully that comes in under $300 (and you'd have to investigate Windows version/reinstall).

 

[Chugalug_]

One quick question; not to be rude, but why on earth did you sell him 4 RX 470 cards if he's barely going to get any performance benefit out of the second two?

 

[photonboy]

4x Crossfire
- I should be more specific on that. Games are NOT currently made to support multi-GPU very well. In fact, several CURRENT games don't even support more than one due to code that leverages the differences in frames (so need code to be on the same GPU).

In the future we'll see multi-GPU do much, much better but that's not going to change much for a couple years.

*It's not just little to no scaling beyond 2x SLI but added STUTTERING and other issues. It's just a bad situation.

FPS (Frames Per Second) does not necessarily dictate game SMOOTHNESS. In fact, part of the reason you can get stuttering is because you get runts or even completely DROPPED frames so you can get only 30FPS shown to the screen though 60FPS reported. And not even a SMOOTH 30FPS.

If you want to investigate further you can google multi-GPU, or maybe FRAME TIME ANALYSIS but my advice is simply stick to 2x Crossfire and even then figure out how to compare the SAME GAME with 1x and 2x GPU to see if the FPS improvement warrants any SMOOTHNESS differences. (especially if a single RX-470 gives you a solid 60FPS anyway if that's your goal like perhaps CIV5 or whatever)

 

[photonboy]

*Investigate that the motherboard supports 2x Crossfire. They've changed the name to I think CrossfireX with PCIe support (no bridge, so communicates via the main PCIe bridge the cards are plugged into) and I'm not up on whether you need "Crossfire" support or not.

Hopefully someone can answer that.

 

[Lycaone]

1) What system does he have now? A new CPU may need a new motherboard, Windows, RAM etc.

2) 4x Crossfire?
Stick with 2x only. Too many issues above 2x. So sell the other two cards.

3) CPU bottleneck varies on the game, settings etc but as it currently stands INTEL is the only choice, but I would recommend WAITING and build around a 4-core AMD RYZEN CPU later when they launch.

Otherwise I'm not sure what to recommend for the price. I wouldn't recommend anything below an i5-4/7xxx CPU but again it also depends on what motherboard you have. Something like an i5-7600 for example. TOO expensive and I don't want to recommend a dual-core CPU even if the i3-6/7xxx desktop CPU's do pretty good for most games. Not very future proof, and will see big losses in some games.

*Again though, I'd:
a) get 2x SLI working on whatever he has
b) sell the current cards
c) TELL Us what CPU/motherboard/DD3? memory he has
d) RYZEN is probably the best upgrade path such as:

R3-1200X ($150USD?)
2x4GB DDR4 2666MHz memory (8GB total)
- compatible AM4 motherboard

Hopefully that comes in under $300 (and you'd have to investigate Windows version/reinstall).

 

[Lycaone]

https://it.pcpartpicker.com/list/4J8Pcc this is the setup he would like to have

 

[Lycaone]

One quick question; not to be rude, but why on earth did you sell him 4 RX 470 cards if he's barely going to get any performance benefit out of the second two?

 

[Lycaone]

Cause he wanted them just to show off (I don't understand even now why he likes so much the idea of having 4 GPUs in his sistem);
anyway he would like to have a config like this https://it.pcpartpicker.com/list/4J8Pcc

 

[Chugalug_]

Oh my god that's so poorly configured I want to throw myself out the window lol.
What parts does he already have?
What is the budget for the remaining parts?

 

[photonboy]

Cause he wanted them just to show off (I don't understand even now why he likes so much the idea of having 4 GPUs in his sistem);
anyway he would like to have a config like this https://it.pcpartpicker.com/list/4J8Pcc

He has less than $250 (USD I assume) budget so why would you create a system for him that costs a lot more?

(and 2x500GB, 1000W PSU? Not to be rude, but this build implies that you don't have enough computer understanding to make build recommendations.)

You seem to have missed the point that 4xCrossfire is a bad idea, and also that motherboard doesn't even support four graphics cards.

And the FX-8350 is a bad choice. As I said it's really INTEL now, or possibly a 4-core RYZEN later.

 

[Chugalug_]

Congrats, scammed your friend..... T.T

 

[photonboy]

Congrats, scammed your friend..... T.T

He certainly did NOT. He got an RX-470 for $20 each.

He can use two of them and sell the other two. I don't know what they sell where they are from, but they cost $240USD each (unless it's a slightly cheaper model)

Should be able to sell in USA for at least $100 each then put that money towards the other parts.

 

[Chugalug_]

Yeah, the graphics cards were really nice in terms of giving them to your friend, but the rest of the stuff?
That offsets any savings he might have had from the graphics cards anyway, the whole system is barely going to draw 500w, and there's an 8GB kit of dominator platinum, TWO 500GB drives, a 1000w poor quality PSU and a 100 euro case, all of which adds up to 350 Euros which means there could have easily been a saving of at least 150 Euros getting the same stuff in different formats.
Should have run it through the forums first.