PC upgrade odyssey

FZD

Space Marshal
Nov 22, 2016
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FZD
! RAMBLE ALERT !

So, I was supposed to build a new PC last year or so, but obviously a lot of happened last year, and I didn't.
Though the cool thing now is, that my current PC is 10 years old. That's sort of what I was going for, a PC that lasts bloody forever.
AND IT RUNS STAR CITIZEN!
Well, doesn't run it all that well, but it does run it! My PC is older than the public portion of the project and still manages to run it. Just imagine that.

Naturally, I've done some upgrades over the years, it is a PC after all. At one point I had my GPU bottlenecking, so I got a new GPU, it's RX480 which was new at the time so, even that was a while ago.
Funnily enough, last week I was going over my ram speeds, Stick #4, Stick #2 reported 1600Hz, Stick #3 1333Mhz (I must've been drunk), but Stick #1 got nothing.

"Hmm... Is it broken? Nah, still says I got 16GB ram here."
...
"Waitaminute. I got 2x4GB + 1x8GB. I GOT AN EMPTY RAM SLOT!"

Which was just as well, since SC has been maxing out my RAM. Now the reason it was empty was pretty obvious, when I build this I wasn't too sure about the clearance under my CPU cooler and the empty slot was indeed under the CPU cooler. Also explains why I hadn't noticed it before. Well, DDR3 is dirt cheap nowadays, so I figured "Sure, why not." and ordered a new 8GB stick (which I made sure would fit under the CPU cooler). Since I had to remove the CPU cooler, I figured I'll change the thermal paste as well. Haven't changed it since 2011. Sure, the tube says it'll only last 5 years, but I've checked the thermals every now and then and I don't tend to fix what's not broken so... Yeah. But yeah, changed the thermal goop while I was at it.

The kinda FPS I got before this was something like 15-20 fps at Everus Harbor and slightly more playable 25-30 FPS in space. Yeah, it's kinda low but then again until recently everyone's been kinda limited by the server anyhow. Oh right, and the larger cities I've been mostly avoiding since the frame rate drops to like 20FPM - 10 FPS.

After the upgrade, I initially got only something like 10-20% improvement, which was, well, it was an improvement. I tweaked the virtual ram a bit though, I found out that
1) Maximum Size (40GB) wasn't all that relevant, I didn't touch it one way or another
2) Dropping Initial Size to 8GB A) Reduced my actual ram usage as well and B) Reduced FPS.
3) Bumping the initial size to 30GB gave a nice framerate boost

After that, my RAM is now sitting at 16.9GB to 18GB, so nowhere near fully utilized, but apparently going from 15GB to 16.9GB matters a lot.
My GPU is around 50%-80% utilized.
My CPU is hitting 100% pretty much all the time @3.8GHz. <- Bottleneck.
Well, I got my trusty i7-2600k, so I overclocked it a bit, to a rather conservative 4.2 GHz. This provided another boost to FPS. It still remains the bottleneck though, so I might try 4.5 GHz someday.

Now I'm getting something like
25-35 fps at Everus,
Way over 30 fps in space and 10-20 fps in cities. (Remember, I used to get frames per MINUTE before on the lower end)

I mean, sure, it's no 60 fps but for a 2011 machine, I'd say that's pretty neat. (And of the games I play it's pretty much just SC that's at such low FPS.)
And, yes, I'm still going to build a new machine, but there is just something about keeping such an old machine alive and well that I find totally awesome.
 

Bambooza

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Sep 25, 2017
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Nice. I keep putting off upgrading mine until SC goes into beta but I too am thinking maybe its best to just go ahead and get a new one this year, since the last full build was back in 2013... I guess this is what happens when on gets married and have kids, they no longer upgrade their PC's.

And do keep it alive, think of the coal miners who need to send their children to collage. Does make me laugh to think all these people who think they are going green by having an EV when in truth they are running their car on coal.
 

Lorddarthvik

Space Marshal
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Feb 22, 2016
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Lorddarthvik
! RAMBLE ALERT !

So, I was supposed to build a new PC last year or so, but obviously a lot of happened last year, and I didn't.
Though the cool thing now is, that my current PC is 10 years old. That's sort of what I was going for, a PC that lasts bloody forever.
AND IT RUNS STAR CITIZEN!
Well, doesn't run it all that well, but it does run it! My PC is older than the public portion of the project and still manages to run it. Just imagine that.

Naturally, I've done some upgrades over the years, it is a PC after all. At one point I had my GPU bottlenecking, so I got a new GPU, it's RX480 which was new at the time so, even that was a while ago.
Funnily enough, last week I was going over my ram speeds, Stick #4, Stick #2 reported 1600Hz, Stick #3 1333Mhz (I must've been drunk), but Stick #1 got nothing.

"Hmm... Is it broken? Nah, still says I got 16GB ram here."
...
"Waitaminute. I got 2x4GB + 1x8GB. I GOT AN EMPTY RAM SLOT!"

Which was just as well, since SC has been maxing out my RAM. Now the reason it was empty was pretty obvious, when I build this I wasn't too sure about the clearance under my CPU cooler and the empty slot was indeed under the CPU cooler. Also explains why I hadn't noticed it before. Well, DDR3 is dirt cheap nowadays, so I figured "Sure, why not." and ordered a new 8GB stick (which I made sure would fit under the CPU cooler). Since I had to remove the CPU cooler, I figured I'll change the thermal paste as well. Haven't changed it since 2011. Sure, the tube says it'll only last 5 years, but I've checked the thermals every now and then and I don't tend to fix what's not broken so... Yeah. But yeah, changed the thermal goop while I was at it.

The kinda FPS I got before this was something like 15-20 fps at Everus Harbor and slightly more playable 25-30 FPS in space. Yeah, it's kinda low but then again until recently everyone's been kinda limited by the server anyhow. Oh right, and the larger cities I've been mostly avoiding since the frame rate drops to like 20FPM - 10 FPS.

After the upgrade, I initially got only something like 10-20% improvement, which was, well, it was an improvement. I tweaked the virtual ram a bit though, I found out that
1) Maximum Size (40GB) wasn't all that relevant, I didn't touch it one way or another
2) Dropping Initial Size to 8GB A) Reduced my actual ram usage as well and B) Reduced FPS.
3) Bumping the initial size to 30GB gave a nice framerate boost

After that, my RAM is now sitting at 16.9GB to 18GB, so nowhere near fully utilized, but apparently going from 15GB to 16.9GB matters a lot.
My GPU is around 50%-80% utilized.
My CPU is hitting 100% pretty much all the time @3.8GHz. <- Bottleneck.
Well, I got my trusty i7-2600k, so I overclocked it a bit, to a rather conservative 4.2 GHz. This provided another boost to FPS. It still remains the bottleneck though, so I might try 4.5 GHz someday.

Now I'm getting something like
25-35 fps at Everus,
Way over 30 fps in space and 10-20 fps in cities. (Remember, I used to get frames per MINUTE before on the lower end)

I mean, sure, it's no 60 fps but for a 2011 machine, I'd say that's pretty neat. (And of the games I play it's pretty much just SC that's at such low FPS.)
And, yes, I'm still going to build a new machine, but there is just something about keeping such an old machine alive and well that I find totally awesome.
Really cool!

I was keeping my old PC alive in a similar fashion, but had a chance to build new so I took it. It still lives though, just gave it to my father to play the new MSFS.
Btw, your CPU isn't bottlenecking you with it's lack of GHz, it's everything else around it that you cannot really change just by bumping it up to 5ghz. The PCI controller and lanes, bridges and whatnot. Basically the stuff that brings the data in and out of your CPU. Those parts got a real boost over the years and thus increased the actual performance even though CPUs still run at 3.5-4ghz mostly. So if you want to really upgrade it, you need to make the step that I took, meaning new mobo, cpu (+cooler), and with mobo comes new RAM cos different slot. I also did house+psu but you can keep those if they still work fine, nothing wrong with that, I just wanted it all shiny. So in the end, apart from storage and GPU, it is a complete new build...

In the more dense places like Area18, fps is still totally random for me, even on a 10th gen i7 with 64 gigs of ram so yeah, it's not just your PC. Invictus on NB was a real strain on the first day, but it was fairly smooth on the second, so yeah, random.
 

FZD

Space Marshal
Nov 22, 2016
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FZD
The PCI controller and lanes, bridges and whatnot. Basically the stuff that brings the data in and out of your CPU. Those parts got a real boost over the years and thus increased the actual performance even though CPUs still run at 3.5-4ghz mostly.
I mean, if my CPU was at like 80% and everything else was at 80% or below, then yes, it'd probably be the bus bandwidth. But my CPU is at 100% on all cores, and bumping it up 0.5GHz did provide more FPS, (and now it sits at 100% on the new frequency as well) so I'd say it's bottlenecking. Sure, I wouldn't be opposed to checking the datalanes, but I'm not quite sure if there is any way to do so.

Also, RX480 won't saturate PCIe 2.0 x16, so at least that lane isn't bottlenecking, nor am I trying to put two GPUs in or anything like that. The memory isn't bottlenecking either, I mean, it's perfectly within spec. Hmm. Yeah, I can't figure out a way to check it, but there shouldn't be anything that saturates the bus.

The newer CPUs might have the same frequency, well, some of them, but they'd also have like twice the internal working memory, which also causes a huge difference in performance.
 

Lorddarthvik

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Feb 22, 2016
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Lorddarthvik
I mean, if my CPU was at like 80% and everything else was at 80% or below, then yes, it'd probably be the bus bandwidth. But my CPU is at 100% on all cores, and bumping it up 0.5GHz did provide more FPS, (and now it sits at 100% on the new frequency as well) so I'd say it's bottlenecking. Sure, I wouldn't be opposed to checking the datalanes, but I'm not quite sure if there is any way to do so.

Also, RX480 won't saturate PCIe 2.0 x16, so at least that lane isn't bottlenecking, nor am I trying to put two GPUs in or anything like that. The memory isn't bottlenecking either, I mean, it's perfectly within spec. Hmm. Yeah, I can't figure out a way to check it, but there shouldn't be anything that saturates the bus.

The newer CPUs might have the same frequency, well, some of them, but they'd also have like twice the internal working memory, which also causes a huge difference in performance.
Hmm, truth!
I was wondering about my experience, although I went from a 4750k (+ had 4770k also later), to 10700k, with the same GPU. My gpu load actually went up, obviously along with the framerate. So I'm guessing your GPU could take more load if you had a better CPU pushing more data... so clocking it up until it bottlenecks some bus or lane, it will get faster.... yep, that makes sense.
Carry on, nothing to see here, just being dumb while thinking out loud...

Btw, nice to see that it gives you actual +frames.
I tried to do some slight OC yesterday on the GPU with msi afterburner and the results were mostly bad for my work use case at least. Lots more noise, some extra heat, really nice big numbers reported back.. and my render times tanked. The wrong way. Went from 9min/frame to 11... so yeah, not always a good idea. I'm gonna try some OC on my CPU, see if that helps but frankly I don't have a need for it at the moment.
Good luck with your quest for more Ghz and frames!
 

bikerlater

Captain
Mar 24, 2021
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bikerlater
You'll just buy the game a second time. They don't offer an option like Steam to upgrade to the Gold/Ultimate edition unfortunately.
 
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