Hardware & Technical Is there a good time to upgrade?

[Schembri]

So, believe it or not I’m still playing E on ancient hardware :
Xeon E5450
Asus P5Q3
12GB of DDR3 ram
Sapphire Radeon HD5850 with 1GB ram.

The game is still playable for me but maybe I don’t know any better. Anyways I thought time for an upgrade.
Does it matter if I shop before Christmas or after Christmas?
I hear there’s a glut of unsold 1080 cards does this mean prices are going to drop soon?

Also I need to contain the expense and since the game is not CPU limited(1), would an Nvidia 1080 or the latest AMD card work in this setup above (2)?
(1) Between the E5450 and a Ryzen 2700X the latter has about double the performance in all categories.
(1) I only play E and nothing else really.
(2) I got a 600W PSU a Tagan if I’m not mistaken.

 

[Achilles7]

If you only play Elite at 1080p then a 1060 6GB is the optimum card with some wriggle-room for future development. I would recommend a Ryzen 5 2600 for 6 cores at a great price, but any equivalent mid price 4 core CPU - such as i5 6500 will be plenty good enough since ED is GPU intensive. Bear in mind that you will also have to upgrade your RAM - I'd go for 16GB. A SSD is obviously desirable for loading too. Your PSU is easily enough for the above - however, I'd still replace one getting on a bit...but that's just me!

As far as the right time? Well, in this industry there's always something better just around the corner...you could spend your whole life waiting for the perfect time to get the perfect deal.

I would continue....but I've gotta rush off for a thrilling meeting! Woohoo!! Definitely not ~1 hour totally wasted!

 

[TorTorden_VR]

In general, yes it's a good time to upgrade.

What are you expectations and or where do you see yourself going?
Particularly on regards to a screen resolution and fps.

For instance if you aim for 1080p@60fps even a 1050ti for about $150 would be enough to set every thing to max in graphics settings almost everywhere.

A 1060 6GB would do nicely for even ultra wide at 3440×1440 @60.

You really only would need the 1080 or above for 4k, 120+ fps gaming or VR.
And higher fps also take a much higher toll on cpu etc.

barebones upgrade would probably just be slotting in a 1050ti. that alone would give you a great performance boost and there are probably black Friday, or black week deals going on right now.

If you want a more substantial upgrade I would consider a six core Ryzen or i5 and a 1060 6GB.

Quad core are like sooo 2016.

At least 16GB of 3000mhz RAM, Yes it's starting to matter, especially for Ryzen but also Intel.

If the latter I would update PSU and throw in some SSD's or an M.2 drive.
You don't necessarily need higher wattage but a higher rated psu is more efficient so it runs cooler, and draws less at the mains.
You don't use more than you use either so even though I have a 1k watt psu, it's totally overkill, absolute stupidly oversized, my system still doesn't pull much more than 450w, and that's an i7 8700k with a 1080ti cause I don't do much overclocking.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Sapphire Radeon HD5850 with 1GB ram.

Ditch that, get an RX590 or a 1060, 6 or 8GB RAM on that; the newer effects in Elite eat video memory beyond the 4GB mark, so don't get cheap on that. Bam, game time already.

If you want to throw in a board/CPU/RAM upgrade too and have some but not all the money the 2700X would be big bang for the buck (to the point where it simply doesn't matter), if you want to get best value, the i5 2600 would be the better choice and you probably still wouldn't feel a need to upgrade for years unless CPU suddenly starts to matter again for some weird reason, not like it did matter much over the last 5+ years (seriously, even something like a 6-core AMD Phenom-2 is damn crusty but not totally unacceptable for many things except it's missing some extensions that games are just now starting to require, things are moving that slowly despite everything marketing wants to tell us). I would aim for at least 6 cores or 4 cores/8 threads these days, other than that... meh.

 

[Frank]

Has anyone seen any good Nvidia 1080 ti deals for Black Friday? Or is it still a wee bit early for that?

 

[Schembri]

Thanks for all your thoughts guys!

Where I want to go is what I have to decide. Basically I don't want to spend every 1-2 years I'd like a system to last 5-6 years.

Your comments led me to search some directions - I am not really interested in VR because I cannot live without seeing the kbd.
4K would be nice but I play on a desktop so I'm about 1 to 2 feet away from the screen the smallest 4K are 24 inches - way too big.
So I do not really need 4K.
One of the main thing bugging me is the visual quality I think the 6-8 year old video card I have is not rendering my game as I see on screenshots of others. Besides when I go to sites with surface features I see their place holder so to speak but they never appear.

This leaves me to get something like the 1060 then or equivalent Radeon and since power requirement is not too large I can first try out keeping the same rig. Maybe add an SSD. (I have 120GB SSD for windows and a normal HD for the steam folder).
This would save money from my budget and I could look at replacing my hotas which is falling apart. (2nd hand X52 probably 6 years old or more)

Once again thanks for your comments.
O7

 

[Morbad]

Has anyone seen any good Nvidia 1080 ti deals for Black Friday? Or is it still a wee bit early for that?

Best time to buy a t 1080 Ti was right before to shortly after the RTX launch. They are essentially sold out now and there were very few Black Friday deals for them.

 

[Hooplah]

Greetings,

Welcome to computer latest and greatest. It is all about advertising and the manufacturers do it so well. Some may reply that ED cannot be played without an Nvidia 1080TI graphic card. It is now obsolete. Purchase a new computer and the latest greatest is the RTX 2070/80ti. It is all hype getting customers thinking that they need it. Heck, in the '60s cigarrette advertisements were more honest.

ED on a 27 inch 1920x1080 monitor uses 6gb of RAM. It plays just fine on my old GeForce GTX 680 4GB video card without any dropouts or latency. I have two video cards in SLI mode per professional audio/video productions with Adobe products. ED doesn't support SLI. With the latest greatest video cards SLI is also becoming obsolete. Technology moves on.

Except for Virtual Reality (VR) which is stiil working the bugs out one doesn't need the latest greatest graphic card to play ED. Just one opinion.

Regards

 

[Zieman]

ED on a 27 inch 1920x1080 monitor uses 6gb of RAM.

This baffles me a bit. I play E: D at 3840x2160 resolution, an on my system Task Manager never shows more than ~4.5 GB physical RAM used, and almost half of that W7 takes just to show the desktop.
GPU-Z shows the video card using up to ~4.6 GB of its own memory.