Upgrading my PC for less than or equal to price of a PS4

[UndefinedViewer]

Hi, I'm looking to upgrade my PC to run as well as a PS4 and for about the same price or less. I'm not sure if it's possible but that's why I'm here.

These are my computer's specs:

AMD A10-5800K APU
MSI FM5MA-E35 motherboard
8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 kit
500 GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive
430W Corsair CX430 Power supply

Thanks in advance for any help.

[_I_]

why aim at console specs?

consoles are designed to run games at 30fps 1080

monitors can go alot higher and gaming at 60-144hz looks so much better

at console prices buy a console, it will play all games desgined for it

else spend $600+ for a good gaming pc that can handle 60fps at 1080p

[NaughtyNerd]

UndefinedViewer님이 먼저 게시:

mitch2211님이 먼저 게시:

Thanks. I'm just curious now, could you help me find out how many Hz my monitor is? It's a Gateway LP1925. I couldn't find any of the specs online but maybe I didn't look hard enough. And I didn't see it say it on the back of the monitor

Its a 50/60Hz Monitor, but only with 1440 x 900 resolution (which is the same as some older PS4 games). You can run your games at full HD, but cant see them in full HD (1900 x 1080), which doesnt make sence at all.
btw i found the Hz here at page 14:
http://panam.gateway.com/s/Manuals/Monitors/8513019.pdf

[Tusken GA]

_I_님이 먼저 게시:

why aim at console specs?

consoles are designed to run games at 30fps 1080

monitors can go alot higher and gaming at 60-144hz looks so much better

at console prices buy a console, it will play all games desgined for it

else spend $600+ for a good gaming pc that can handle 60fps at 1080p

Cost. I made the same calculation back when they announced the new consoles; should I spend $400 to replace my 360 or pu $400 into my PC?

I went the latter route and got a GTX 970 for TW3.

It's a totally arbitrary self-imposed budget, but it's a pretty decent framing device to give yourself context for the purchase. Especially since, like the OP, I already had a computer I could upgrade instead of replace.

@OP, the CPU side of your APU is good enough to play games for now, but as soon as DX 12 and it's OpenGL counterpart (or Mantle, whichever is going on on that side) starts getting integrated in games, it is going to be pretty useless.

It'll be the bottleneck of almost every game as it is right now, but once games start heavily relying on the CPU when the above happens, your A10 is going to struggle a hell of a lot.

So keep in mind that in six months to a year, no matter what GPU you get right now, you're going to have to replace that CPU. If you went with a higher end AMD chip you'd be pretty well off.

(To the other tech people here, the lower singlethreaded performance relative to Intel will mostly be mitigated by the higher multicore performance once games start utilizing actual cores better)

[UndefinedViewer]

Thanks for all the advice guys. I'll invest in buying a better monitor for sure. And I'll be saving so I can eventually upgrade my APU.

[UndefinedViewer]

I decided on a monitor: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-G226HQL-Bbd-21-5-inch-Widescreen/dp/B009POS0GS/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1440091429&sr=1-1&keywords=1080p+monitor

Would I need a HDMI to DVI adapter cable? I don't think I do but the only reason I ask is because Amazon said people frequently bought an HDMI to DVI adapter cable with the monitor

[lai3n]

Get a 550W Corsair PSU, best and cheap.

[Kartoffelsuppe]

UndefinedViewer님이 먼저 게시:

I decided on a monitor: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-G226HQL-Bbd-21-5-inch-Widescreen/dp/B009POS0GS/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1440091429&sr=1-1&keywords=1080p+monitor

Would I need a HDMI to DVI adapter cable? I don't think I do but the only reason I ask is because Amazon said people frequently bought an HDMI to DVI adapter cable with the monitor

if you want HDMI then you need one, DVI is good enough I don't see a reason to get an adapter

[UndefinedViewer]

lolibus님이 먼저 게시:

UndefinedViewer님이 먼저 게시:

I decided on a monitor: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-G226HQL-Bbd-21-5-inch-Widescreen/dp/B009POS0GS/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1440091429&sr=1-1&keywords=1080p+monitor

Would I need a HDMI to DVI adapter cable? I don't think I do but the only reason I ask is because Amazon said people frequently bought an HDMI to DVI adapter cable with the monitor

if you want HDMI then you need one, DVI is good enough I don't see a reason to get an adapter

Ok, thanks. DVI is good enough for me

[UndefinedViewer]

I'm wondering if anyone would advise me to get a new hard drive. I have a 500 GB hard drive and I checked my computer and I roughly have about 261 GB of free memory. I don't game heavily and I don't plan on ever doing so but I plan on getting GTA V, Fallout 4 (when it comes out), The Witcher 3, and probably some others. Are all those games gonna take up a ton of memory where it might be worth replacing/getting an extra hard drive?

[Kartoffelsuppe]

500GB is enough if you don't hoard music, videos & other stuff. Just don't install every game at once that you own in Steam & you will be fine.

Just get an extra external usb hard drive to save all the junk that you don't need immediate access to all the time.

[UndefinedViewer]

Ok thanks for the advice. I appreciate it

[Tusken GA]

lolibus님이 먼저 게시:

500GB is enough if you don't hoard music, videos & other stuff. Just don't install every game at once that you own in Steam & you will be fine.

Just get an extra external usb hard drive to save all the junk that you don't need immediate access to all the time.

For the price of an external, he could just as easily buy a 1TB HDD or even just a second 500GB and save a fair bit of cash.

[Exonalixe]

For a budget build with a similar experience to a PS4 check this build (great article):
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-budget-gaming-pc-guide

The build was tested to almost match the PS4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxUPJdcChzE

[Tusken GA]

UndefinedViewer님이 먼저 게시:

Ok thanks for the advice. I appreciate it

For more context, in my Laptop I have a 480GB SSD split into two main partitions. On the Data partition, I have 9 AAA games (L4D2, Portal 2, Metro 2033 and LL Redux, Sleeping Dogs definitive Edition, Sniper Elite 3, STALKER CoP, TW3, and Tomb Raider 2013).

Three of those are open world, most of them are very high in hi-res texture count, and all but one of them larger than 9GB is size.

On top of that I have roughly 30GB of music, pictures, documents, and the like (no videos, though).

All told, of the 367GB of my Data partition, less than half of it is being used. I have just under 200GB to store more games.

It's totally doable to store quite a lot of games on a 500GB HDD, it's just a matter of staying over the !5-20% free space window needed to make sure your drive can access things fast enough to not slow down.

But the tradeoff is way less space for documents, pictures, and music. One of the reasons my computer has as much space as it does is because I painstakingly went through and deleted duplicate files, unnecessary files, and found ways to reduce file on-disk size (I put installers in a zip file as soon as I download them, and make sure there aren't any obsolete or duplicate installers there, for instance).

You can't just move and forget when you're dealing with constraints like that. A ton of extra space could be freed up for more games if you put the time into it, but a lot of space could be wasted if you don't.

[Rove]

UndefinedViewer님이 먼저 게시:

Hi, I'm looking to upgrade my PC to run as well as a PS4 and for about the same price or less. I'm not sure if it's possible but that's why I'm here.

These are my computer's specs:

AMD A10-5800K APU
MSI FM5MA-E35 motherboard
8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 kit
500 GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive
430W Corsair CX430 Power supply

Thanks in advance for any help.

Here's a good option that will (by the official specs which recommend 400W) run on your PSU:

EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SuperSC ACX 2.0+ Video Card
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-video-card-02gp42966kr
NCIX US $194.99 -$20.00 In stock $174.99+
$20.00 mail-in rebate

The GTX 960 is better than the PS4 GPU and the rest of your system is already up to par. However you may want to get a larger HDD and maybe a SSD or just a SSHD instead of both.

The specific card I recommended is 10.12 inches long so you need to make sure there is room in your case for that length. If there is not you can either get a shorter and more expensive version of teh GTX 960 or you can just buy a bigger case for cheap. Tell me if you need further advice on that.

You could probably technically also run a R7 260X or maybe even a R9 270 as they are 115W and 150W while the GTX 960 is 120W. So if the GTX 960 runs on 400W then the R9 270 could probably run on 430W without a problem. I think the official AMD specs 9while they still posted PSU recommendations before they stopped) were actually 450W and 500W but their estimates might just have been higher than Nvidia's cause they wanted a more generous margin of safety or some extra room for overclocking the GPU and the CPU likely also. I do believe in your specific system (until and unless you start adding lots more upgrades or overclocking the CPU a lot) that the R9 270 would run just fine for now.

Either a R7 260X or a R9 270 is likely to be cheaper. The R7 260X will be a worse card and the R9 270 should be pretty similar in performance though in some cases better or worse.

Here's the cheapest R9 270:

Gigabyte Radeon R9 270 2GB WINDFORCE Video Card
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-video-card-gvr927oc2gd
Newegg $159.99 -$20.00 +$2.99 s/h In stock $142.98
$20.00 mail-in rebate

Again a 10 inch card so you need to make sure it will fit.

Here's a cheap new full size ATX case that will fit either of these two cards no problem:

Raidmax ATX-402WB ATX Mid Tower Case
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/raidmax-case-atx402wb
Newegg $39.99 -$15.00 +FREE s/h In stock $24.99
$15.00 mail-in rebate