What have you bought today?

[Superfly Guy]

sell half the RAM and buy a dedicated graphics card.

[moranphotography]

Bought 2 of these gaming pc packages today as Christmas presents. One for my 15 yr old and one for my 13 yr old. Reduced down to £504.98 each.

Jesus, lucky kids!

[Clean Your Ride]

sell half the RAM and buy a dedicated graphics card.

Is this a better spec for them to use for gaming SFG?

[Clean Your Ride]

Jesus, lucky kids!

Anything for a quiet life. Mrs and I don't buy each other Christmas so we can treat the children

[Superfly Guy]

Yes,but even though the AMD APUs are a great chip they are best suited to general use and media centres. I have two of them, one in my HTPC and one in my daughters gaming rig although she also has a discreet graphics card as she likes a bit of first person shooting. It will also depend on the resolution of the monitor, if it's 1920x1080 then the latest games won't run smoothly with all the eye candy turned on. They will still play well and stuff like Sims and many RPGs and RTS will be mega.

[Clean Your Ride]

Yes,but even though the AMD APUs are a great chip they are best suited to general use and media centres. I have two of them, one in my HTPC and one in my daughters gaming rig although she also has a discreet graphics card as she likes a bit of first person shooting. It will also depend on the resolution of the monitor, if it's 1920x1080 then the latest games won't run smoothly with all the eye candy turned on. They will still play well and stuff like Sims and many RPGs and RTS will be mega.

Appreciate your time, thank you pal👍

[pmk]

With an integrated GPU (graphics) part of the systems main memory is used for the graphics. This memory runs slower than memory on a dedicated graphics card, and uses the systems main bus to link the two. The whole architecture of integrated graphics is slower. Like SFG says having a dedicated graphics card adds loads of performance to the rig. It doesn't have to be the latest graphics card released either as these are usually expensive, get one a series or two behind the current ones.

[Clean Your Ride]

Thanks Pete.

I am now decided that I am amending my order in the morning for 2 of these instead.
Do you guys approve of my improved choice? Especially for £585.65 each.

[XanderCage13]

Brought these today .!!
out of a written off
64 plate dsport car had done 685 miles so like new

Still spending money on the car XD

[Superfly Guy]

With an integrated GPU (graphics) part of the systems main memory is used for the graphics. This memory runs slower than memory on a dedicated graphics card, and uses the systems main bus to link the two. The whole architecture of integrated graphics is slower. Like SFG says having a dedicated graphics card adds loads of performance to the rig. It doesn't have to be the latest graphics card released either as these are usually expensive, get one a series or two behind the current ones.

Yes they do share system RAM but that won't become an issue as the IGP is not powerful enough to run a program that requires significant amounts of memory. I game at 1440p and some games may use well over 2gb of VRAM at that resolution and with the eye candy at full. However a APU would run the game at slideshow speed so it wouldn't be a factor. Also VRAM speed has a minuscule impact on performance, I've used 1600, 1866 and 2133 in my APU systems and benchmarks remain within tolerances. It's only when overclocking the IGP that faster memory makes a noticeable difference.


Yes buying a previous generation of gfx card can work out cheaper but invariably the latest mid range card will run a game as well as a previous generation of top end card. My lads NV 580gtx has been superceeded 3 times but will run the latest games at 1920x1200 and very high settings, however so will latest gen midrange card cost considerably less.

My advice is to but the most powerful card you can afford, and in this case I would drop to 8gb of RAM and look for an NVidia 7 series card instead.

have a look to see if they use Intel chips, a better bet if going for a discreet gfx card.

[BeefMasta]

I would drop to 8gb of RAM

Psh, more RAM! I have 32GB

[Superfly Guy]

Psh, more RAM! I have 32GB

Massive databases, video encoding or RAW editing.

[BeefMasta]

Massive databases, video encoding or RAW editing.

Maya mostly. It's a bit overkill for what I need but work paid so I'm not complaining.

[Superfly Guy]

Maya mostly. It's a bit overkill for what I need but work paid so I'm not complaining.

I only went to 16gb initially due to RAM prices dropping, however its not hard for some games, certainly with various add-ons and patches to push upto and over 8GB. Plus I have several hungry progs open at once so its nice to be able to game and run productivity in the background.

[joeking27]