Huge Struggle Choosings Graphics Card!

[apaydinabdul]

Hello there,

So I want to build my first gaming computer ever. Because I am a competitive gamer, I really don't care about graphics. I'm happy with a balance between low and medium settings (NOT FULLY LOW!). I wan't to get a cheap build with a great CPU! My struggle is the graphics card! The problem is that I don't know how much my GPU will affect my FPS. I'm thinking of getting a GTX 1050 (NOT TI) but I really don't know if this card will affect my FPS in a bad way with those low to medium settings. Here is my build:

- Intel core i5-6600 @ 3.5 gHz
- Gigabyte GA-H110M-A
- 2x8 GB of Kingston RAM
- 500W EVGA
- GTX 1050 2GB (NOT SURE)
- WD 1TB HDD
- Case doesn't matter really

PS: I am aware of the 2GB of vram with the GTX 1050, but you really have to understand that I won't use ultra or even high graphics what so ever!

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and help!

 

[getochkn]

You want a decent GPU. GPU's are THE factor in your FPS for the most part. Playing in low resolution with blocky graphics and no shadows doesn't allow for a competitive experience. You want a stable FPS, usually something that will put out 60fps all the time for a vsync or preferably something freesync or gsync to avoid any frame drops. Do you think pro players play on a $500 system?

 

[Chas_1]

benchmarks show this card as doing about 40 ish fps (witch is "okay") in GTA5 crank down settings and i am sure it become a lot better.... if you are not doing 4K then 1050 should be a okay card for now.

 

[ikaz]

Well need to know what game (or games) you going to play and at what resolution you want to play them at.

 

[Chas_1]

You want a decent GPU. GPU's are THE factor in your FPS for the most part. Playing in low resolution with blocky graphics and no shadows doesn't allow for a competitive experience. You want a stable FPS, usually something that will put out 60fps all the time for a vsync or preferably something freesync or gsync to avoid any frame drops. Do you think pro players play on a $500 system?

I bet they do when they start out. and lowering the settings to get a better fps. (in this case lowering it to mid) is not the worst thing. if your $$$ allows for better go for it but the 1050 with a little less graphic settings would be fine.

no pro in anything has ever started out with "the best"

 

[apaydinabdul]

You want a decent GPU. GPU's are THE factor in your FPS for the most part. Playing in low resolution with blocky graphics and no shadows doesn't allow for a competitive experience. You want a stable FPS, usually something that will put out 60fps all the time for a vsync or preferably something freesync or gsync to avoid any frame drops. Do you think pro players play on a $500 system?

Well, I've been gaming on my old build (which my cousin made for me a very long time ago) which has a gtx 550 TI and one of the first versions of the i7 processor at 3.2 gHz. For the competitive part, I play a game called WarRock, don't know if you know it but it has got pretty bad graphics, worse than CS:GO. The game is capped at 140 FPS, and I'm on an unstable 140 FPS right now. The goal I'm going for here is to at least get a stable FPS on that game and ON THE SIDE I would love to play GTA5 (at low/medium) and maaaaybe BATTLEFIELD 1 (at low/medium). I am able to play GTA5 on my old build with low graphics at 55/60 FPS. Please keep in mind I'm using a fraking GTX 550 TI! It has only 1 GB of vram. I also play CS:GO with nice FPS. The goal I'm going for here is to make a new, more modern build which can run (for example) GTA5 slightly better than it does right now. I play at 1080p and really I know how to keep my PC fast and clean to get the most performance out of it. Keep that in mind 😉.

 

[ledhead11]

You'll probably be alright with that if you truly plan to only be at low/med settings but its still getting close. This will also need to be at 1080p or less. Many games will go over 1gb vram even at 1080 and some do hit the 2gb mark. The ones that go that far might cost you a few frames or some stutters but that should be about it. That's only true if you stay, as you say, in the 1080p or less and low/med settings. You might be able to tweak a little more performance out of it, but its pretty close.

I'd personally go with the TI. It'll cost a little more but should be a nicer ride for the money. You'd be happier-longer. It's not necessarily about using ultra/high settings and vram, you also have to look at the clock speeds/cores-processors too. The TI is slightly slower but has more of almost everything else.

Don't let yourself be trapped and tricked by game DEV's either. PC ports of late have been notorious for poor optimizations. Even if you plan low/med a game engine might perform even less than that in some situations. The TI would give you a little cushion for that.

 

[ledhead11]

Check out this review/comparison. There's a lot of others out there too and they all pretty much say something similar. I've no doubt Tom's does also.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3134528/components-graphics/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-and-gtx-1050-ti-review-the-new-budget-gaming-champions.html?page=10

 

[apaydinabdul]

Chas_1, if you say so.. that's kind of the answer I was hoping to see!

 

[rhysiam]

A few questions

1) What game(s) will you be playing?
2) Will you be doing any streaming/recording/editing for Twitch or Youtube channels?
3) What's your current monitor and do you have an upgrade planned?

If you're aiming for high end/competitive play in any sort of reflex based gaming, 1st/3rd person, Moba or RTS, you really should be working towards a 120-144hz display. Even if you can't afford it right away, it should be near the top of your wish list.

PCPartpicker tells me that the 6500 is ~$25 cheaper than the 6600. So that's an easy way to save a bit (they're so close in performance, it's not worth the extra money). Then, if you're not streaming or editing (or even if you are), you can save $35-40 straight away just by getting a single 8GB RAM DIMM. 8GB is enough, and you can put that money into a better GPU. Adding a second stick of RAM down the track is easy. That extra $60 gets you to an RX 470 or 1060 3GB, either of which are proper gaming cards which will drive a future 144hz display and last a lot longer for you.

It depends what you prioritise, but I'm just demonstrating what you can do with your current budget.

 

[apaydinabdul]

Guys thanks for the comments but I will have to wait till tomorrow to answer them! It's 1 AM over here and I have to get some sleep! Got to get up early tomorrow! I will answer the comments as soon as possible!

 

[ledhead11]

Something else to consider. If you plan on using this machine a lot over the next 2-3 years. . . .is going $50-60 more on a card really setting you back? I haven't priced all you parts but it looks close to $500-600 so a little jump on the card is only about 10% increase to gain around 20+% performance boost and a touch of future proofing.

 

[rhysiam]

You've already answered some of my questions while I was typing my response...

GTA5, Battlefield 1. As you're aware, they're demanding games.

I hear you're on a budget. The thing that doesn't make sense is that you're going with an i5 and 16GB RAM, which are the building blocks for a mid-high end gaming PC, but then neutering them with an entry level GPU. You're cheaping out on the single most important component for a gaming PC. So let's say your budget is maybe $700, by adding 10-15% to your budget you could get a PC that is nearly twice as fast for gaming.

Assuming US pricing here...
GTX 1050s start at $110
But the much, much more capable RX470s start at $170: http://pcpartpicker.com/product/3ygPxr/xfx-radeon-rx-470-4gb-hs-triple-x-video-card-rx-470p4ldlr
With the faster still RX 480s starting from $192: http://pcpartpicker.com/product/nxVBD3/powercolor-radeon-rx-480-4gb-red-dragon-video-card-axrx-480-4gbd5-3dhdv2

Those cards will let you dial up your detail settings significantly, enjoy faster and more consistent frame rates, and give you a much better balancing gaming build. Plus, you can add a relatively cheap Freesync gaming display later for a much better gaming experience.

If your budget really is fixed and you just don't have the extra money right now (which is fine, we all have a budget), you can and absolutely should pair back on your current build as my first post suggested.

TLDR, you don't necessarily need to spend lots of dollars, just spend what you have the right way... and a top tier i5 + entry level gaming card is almost never the best way to spend your money.

 

[apaydinabdul]

benchmarks show this card as doing about 40 ish fps (witch is "okay") in GTA5 crank down settings and i am sure it become a lot better.... if you are not doing 4K then 1050 should be a okay card for now.

Ye, benchmarks are (almost) always done with ultra settings. The problem is I can't visualise how better my FPS will be when going from ultra to low-medium basically. I am gaming on a 1080p monitor. Thanks for your reply, I will first look through the other replies before I make my decision 😉

 

[apaydinabdul]

Well need to know what game (or games) you going to play and at what resolution you want to play them at.

For the competitive part:

- CS:GO
- WarRock (not populair)

For the rest:

- GTA5 (just to get rid of some stress while chatting with friends on teamspeak/skype)
- BATTLEFIELD 1 (same reason as gta5)
- Dirty Bomb (been playing this game since short and I'm loving it, graphics aren't so extreme)
- Minecraft, but no worries, I know I can run this even with a pentium cpu and intel hd graphics lol

I will play on a 1080p monitor.

 

[apaydinabdul]

You'll probably be alright with that if you truly plan to only be at low/med settings but its still getting close. This will also need to be at 1080p or less. Many games will go over 1gb vram even at 1080 and some do hit the 2gb mark. The ones that go that far might cost you a few frames or some stutters but that should be about it. That's only true if you stay, as you say, in the 1080p or less and low/med settings. You might be able to tweak a little more performance out of it, but its pretty close.

I'd personally go with the TI. It'll cost a little more but should be a nicer ride for the money. You'd be happier-longer. It's not necessarily about using ultra/high settings and vram, you also have to look at the clock speeds/cores-processors too. The TI is slightly slower but has more of almost everything else.

Don't let yourself be trapped and tricked by game DEV's either. PC ports of late have been notorious for poor optimizations. Even if you plan low/med a game engine might perform even less than that in some situations. The TI would give you a little cushion for that.

Well, I'm not actually worried about the trapped and tricket developers part. See, I know what I'm downloading, installing and using on my computer. I know what makes my pc lag, what makes it better in performance and stuff. I've played Minecraft (yes, the blocky low graphics game) on a crappy slow laptop which originally had windows xp installed while new laptops with windows 8 just came out. Since I've always been gaming on such a slow laptop, I've learned litteraly EVERYTHING about computers. I've downloaded so many programs and done so many tweaks to my pc settings and the advanced stuff, that I did hit the border of what my laptop could perform. So knowing that, I am a very organised and clean person (when it comes to computers at least).

 

[apaydinabdul]

Check out this review/comparison. There's a lot of others out there too and they all pretty much say something similar. I've no doubt Tom's does also.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3134528/components-graphics/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1050-and-gtx-1050-ti-review-the-new-budget-gaming-champions.html?page=10

Thanks for your reply. Reading through the replies, I might get neither of the 2. Might go for the 1060 3gigs ;/.

 

[apaydinabdul]

A few questions

1) What game(s) will you be playing?
2) Will you be doing any streaming/recording/editing for Twitch or Youtube channels?
3) What's your current monitor and do you have an upgrade planned?

If you're aiming for high end/competitive play in any sort of reflex based gaming, 1st/3rd person, Moba or RTS, you really should be working towards a 120-144hz display. Even if you can't afford it right away, it should be near the top of your wish list.

PCPartpicker tells me that the 6500 is ~$25 cheaper than the 6600. So that's an easy way to save a bit (they're so close in performance, it's not worth the extra money). Then, if you're not streaming or editing (or even if you are), you can save $35-40 straight away just by getting a single 8GB RAM DIMM. 8GB is enough, and you can put that money into a better GPU. Adding a second stick of RAM down the track is easy. That extra $60 gets you to an RX 470 or 1060 3GB, either of which are proper gaming cards which will drive a future 144hz display and last a lot longer for you.

It depends what you prioritise, but I'm just demonstrating what you can do with your current budget.

1) WarRock (not populair, awful graphics), CS:GO, GTA5 (low-med settings), BF1 (low-med settings), Dirty Bomb (low-med settings) Minecraft (I can play that on a potatoe).
2) I could be recording a game every now and then.
3) I'm not going to tell you my current monitor cuz I will be ashamed if I told you I was a comptetitive gamer. I'm aware of the fact that a 140hz will make a huge difference in aiming (I am a first person shooter gamer) so even when it hurts my bank account, I will for sure go for one of asus'es 1080p 140hz 1ms response time monitors!

Ye so I was wondering for a long time if a 140hz monitor would affect my gaming performance, cuz I wasn't sure if a monitor uses GPU power. I always thought the monitor was just built that way to be showing 140 frames per second instead of 60, like a 60hz monitor does and only taking more power from the PSU. Are you telling me a monitor uses GPU power? Because then I would have no choice but to pick a gtx 1060 (3gb).

The fun thing is, I actually made a part list with the 1060 3gb, with an i5-6600 (you recommend the i5-6500, will come back to that later) and 8gigs of ram before, but then I wondered how much I would need that graphics card. The 1050 has got 2 gigs of vram and the 1060 3gb version has 3. I thought, with one less gig of vram and a bit lower clockspeeds, I would be OK with a 1050, you get me? That's why I started this topic. Also, when I got some money back from the GPU downgrade, I felt like adding that money to more ram, so I would avoid framedrops and stutters. You really make me struggle now .

If it is really true that the 144hz will use power from the GPU, as I said, I will have no choice to get a 1060 3gb. I just think that graphics card is really too expensive for what I need right now. I'm currently using a very old build, which my cousin made for me. I uses a GTX 550 TI, it uses only 1gig of vram and I'm playing modern games on low settings with a 1360x768p60 monitor and I get a (kind of) stable 60FPS. I even managed to record some gameplay with my intel core i7-2600 @3.4 gHz. I got 12 gigs of ram right now (I'm not going for 12 again, either 8gb or 16gb no doubt) and I believe I get this stable fps from my ram which is trying it's best to keep up the computer.

Another question is, do you really believe the i5-6500 and 6600 won't make a noticable difference? We are talking about 3.6 max turbo and 3.9 max turbo, that's almost 4.0 ghz! If I record a game, I will go for high bitrates because I love quality. If the i5-6500 won't handle a high bitrate with 50 fps, it would cost performance from my game. While I really don't care about losing performance from modern games like gta5 and bf1, I will be concerned if the i5-6500 would take some frames from my most favourite game: WarRock. This is game is so badly programmed, that when you get a lower FPS, you will walk, shoot slower and jump lower (yes I know, ridiculous game, but I just love the gameplay).

Thanks for reply 😀, I'm waiting for a response.

 

[apaydinabdul]

Something else to consider. If you plan on using this machine a lot over the next 2-3 years. . . .is going $50-60 more on a card really setting you back? I haven't priced all you parts but it looks close to $500-600 so a little jump on the card is only about 10% increase to gain around 20+% performance boost and a touch of future proofing.

Ye well I live in the Netherlands, the prices of each part goes up from 20$ to 100$ depending on the price of the part (without chaning dollars to euro's). I have to be picky about parts if I wan't a gaming pc in the next 6 months. However, I'm looking for a pc to game on for like about a year, of course I will at some point upgrade the game when my wallet is getting full again. It's just that I'm on a budget right now, and I gotta say, I don't have the richest family if you get me :/. Gotta pay for everything I want to buy for myself, don't want no brothers and sisters playing on my build every day. Oh and btw, I have to buy a 140 hz monitor as well so I need to think about my budget. That's the whole point of me starting this topic, my main question was if a good GPU is really important if I'm going to be gaming on med settings!

 

[apaydinabdul]

You've already answered some of my questions while I was typing my response...

GTA5, Battlefield 1. As you're aware, they're demanding games.

I hear you're on a budget. The thing that doesn't make sense is that you're going with an i5 and 16GB RAM, which are the building blocks for a mid-high end gaming PC, but then neutering them with an entry level GPU. You're cheaping out on the single most important component for a gaming PC. So let's say your budget is maybe $700, by adding 10-15% to your budget you could get a PC that is nearly twice as fast for gaming.

Assuming US pricing here...
GTX 1050s start at $110
But the much, much more capable RX470s start at $170: http://pcpartpicker.com/product/3ygPxr/xfx-radeon-rx-470-4gb-hs-triple-x-video-card-rx-470p4ldlr
With the faster still RX 480s starting from $192: http://pcpartpicker.com/product/nxVBD3/powercolor-radeon-rx-480-4gb-red-dragon-video-card-axrx-480-4gbd5-3dhdv2

Those cards will let you dial up your detail settings significantly, enjoy faster and more consistent frame rates, and give you a much better balancing gaming build. Plus, you can add a relatively cheap Freesync gaming display later for a much better gaming experience.

If your budget really is fixed and you just don't have the extra money right now (which is fine, we all have a budget), you can and absolutely should pair back on your current build as my first post suggested.

TLDR, you don't necessarily need to spend lots of dollars, just spend what you have the right way... and a top tier i5 + entry level gaming card is almost never the best way to spend your money.

I see. The reason I was going with an i5 right away, is because the games I really play to be skillful at (not gta5 or bf1) do need a much better cpu than a good graphics card. I didn't know how much a gpu would affect my framerate if I'm going with low-med settings. I'm also not sure about the 16 gigs now that you and another person are saying I should go with 8 gigs as I'm on a budget. About the "10-15% extra money" I've got a slight problem. I live in the Netherlands. Shipping takes a great bite from my budget so something that would cost 700$ in the US is already about 950 to 1100 euro's here in the netherlands. Acutally I'm going to search up the individual parts on the internet right now, and I'm going to post them here, so everybody get's a better vision of what my "real" budget is.

 

[apaydinabdul]

Okay nevermind, I was way overestimating the prices in the Netherlands. This build only costs 830 EUROS:

- Intel core i5-6600
- 1TB WD HDD
- MSI Geforce GTX 1060 3GB OC
- Kingston HyperX Fury 1x8GB
- Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2H
- Random case to have an average pricing
- Corsair CX500M

Might go with an i5-6500, still not sure though. What I AM sure for is the graphics card. I'm just going to work harder at the local supermarket, and I'm going to try to waste less money. Should be possible to get this 3GB graphics card then. Thanks for your help all and I'm still open for suggestions.

Couldn't find any shops over here which sell a Gigabyte GA-H110M-A 🙂()
Could find a cheaper PSU, just don't have the time for it right now.

 

[ledhead11]

Okay nevermind, I was way overestimating the prices in the Netherlands. This build only costs 830 EUROS:

- Intel core i5-6600
- 1TB WD HDD
- MSI Geforce GTX 1060 3GB OC
- Kingston HyperX Fury 1x8GB
- Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2H
- Random case to have an average pricing
- Corsair CX500M

Might go with an i5-6500, still not sure though. What I AM sure for is the graphics card. I'm just going to work harder at the local supermarket, and I'm going to try to waste less money. Should be possible to get this 3GB graphics card then. Thanks for your help all and I'm still open for suggestions.

Couldn't find any shops over here which sell a Gigabyte GA-H110M-A 🙂()
Could find a cheaper PSU, just don't have the time for it right now.

I think you've pretty much dialed in a good build for your needs. Good luck!