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Build a new comp now or wait until Ivy? Wait until PCI-E 3.0?
JayFiveAlive
Member UncommonPosts: 601
in Hardware
I am looking at building a new computer with a budget of around 1200 give or take. I am wondering if it's worth waiting until either Ivy and or PCI-E 3.0 comes. I have a dual core wolfdale atm with an 8800 GTS as my desktop.
I've been playing Deus Ex and would love to max that baby out. I am also really looking forward to TES: Skyrim.
Also, not sure how far out new GPUs are..
Comments
Well that depends if you need IVY or PCI 3.0. Are you going to do anything that requires the new specs? If you are buidling some super all you can eat PC then yes, but that is assuming that whatever you are running requires it. You can also upgrade later. Just remember the new shiny isn't always needed.
Get a new PC now, as its still probably a good 6-8 months before the new wave of hardware releases and its going to be expensive. Plus there are a slew of great games coming out during that time, and as you've said you're playing Deus Ex atm, and Skyrim in a few months, not to mention Diablo III will probably release before the end of Feb...
As the poster above me said, do you really need the level of power the next gen of hardware is going to give!? I can honestly tell ya that the hardware available now is more powerful than what is required for every game out now and to come in the next year or so. And thats playing them on Max settings and using DX10/11. Besides a few games every year that really push the current hardware to its knees, most developers are making games that are more accessible to everyone.
And for $1200, you could build a great PC! Even more so if you can reuse some of your older parts.
Ivy Bridge will be a huge deal in laptops. It won't matter so much in desktops. Once it's out, you'd probably rather get Ivy Bridge than Sandy Bridge, but that will basically be in the sense that after Penryn was out, you'd rather get that than Conroe. Maybe it will get you a little higher clock speed, but it's basically just a die shrink of Sandy Bridge, so don't expect big architecture improvements. It's not worth waiting months for.
PCI Express 3.0 doesn't particularly matter unless either you're planning on putting some seriously high end cards in it that are much faster than even the not entirely safe top end dual GPU cards available today, or planning on a CrossFire or SLI with two high end cards and only x8 bandwidth for each. And if the latter is the issue, then just wait for Zambezi and get a 990FX chipset that can do x16 bandwidth for each card. Now, you'd rather have PCI Express 3.0 than not. But it isn't a big deal, and it's not worth waiting for.
AMD's next generation of video cards could launch as soon as next month. It's not clear what the first cards out will be, and it won't necessarily be the high end. If you're anxious to get a new computer now, then just get a new computer now. It's a decent enough time to do so.
If your current computer works fine for you now, and you're thinking that you might like to replace it sometime within the next year, and are looking for the optimal time to do so, then check back around the end of next March. Southern Islands, Kepler, Zambezi, Sandy Bridge-E, Trinity, and Ivy Bridge will likely all be out by then, and then there's nothing terribly important coming after that until 2013.
whether to wait for ivybridge depends on how zambezi do. if zambezi is designed well, then the only reason to wait for ivybridge would be the power savings you'd get from a 22nm chip.
as for PCIe 3, you wont NEED that within the lifetime of this build. no game will need that kind of bandwidth unless you are seriously considering using 6 x 30 inch(2560x1600) monitors in your gaming:D heck you wont even need that kind of bandwidth if you are running 10g ethernet and SSD array while gaming:D
Thanks for the feedback all! I think I will look at building one in the next month. I want to see if bulldozer causes Intel to lower their prices at all.. it probably won't be you never know :P
I will spec out something in a day or two and post it for feedback - most likely getting core i5 2500k and GTX 570, It looks like the GTX 570s are cheaper than the 6970 with fairly close performance.
I agree, current video cards still can't come close to using all the bandwidth of a single PCI 2.0 slot. There's no reason to think that the any time in the next 2-3 generations that video cards will all of a sudden become bandwidth limited. It's mainly going to see a lot of use in servers (where you have multiple high speed ethernet and RAID controllers, especially SSD storage, hogging a ton of bandwidth).
As far as power requirements go, which is probably the only real area that graphics cards do stress the PCI specifications, PCI 3.0 just consolidates the PCI 2.0/2.1 specifications. So you have the same 300W power limitation, and that is probably the biggest bottleneck for the graphics manufacturers.
It kind of depends on future upgrades. If you're planning on getting a pair of dual GPU cards with two high end GPUs on a 20 nm process node in a few years, that might make good use of the extra bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0. For any cards that are on the market today or will be within the next few months, it doesn't matter--partially because no video cards on the market today actually support PCI Express 3.0.
I'm not sure that servers can put the bandwidth to good use in the near future, either. PCI Express 2.0 already gets you 8 GB/s for an x16 slot. Even eight high end SSDs in RAID 0 can't come anywhere near saturating that. Enterprise SSDs with a native PCI Express SSD controller don't even push 1 GB/s in sequential transfer speeds. That's already 64 times the bandwidth of a gigabit ethernet connection, too.
I think the justification is more along the lines of, PCI Express 3.0 will cost basically the same to build as PCI Express 2.0, and some years down the road, the difference in performance could matter. Thus, it isn't good to make the PCI Express slot a bottleneck if it doesn't even save you any money. If it cost an extra $1 to implement PCI Express 3.0 rather than 2.0, then we probably wouldn't see it show up in chipsets for years to come. It's kind of like how gigabit ethernet ports are ubiquitous on even low end motherboards, even though many (most?) people don't have a gigabit ethernet router, because there's no money to be saved by using a lower bandwidth ethernet port.
Actually, upon further thought, you know what will make the extra bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0 matter? If you run out of dedicated video memory and have massive paging to system memory. The real solution there is to pick a card with adequate video memory, of course. High end video cards often have over 100 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and are still somewhat constrained by memory bandwidth. If you're running out of video memory and the card would like to have another 10 GB/s of bandwidth to system memory, having the extra bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0 might mitigate the performance hit somewhat, though it still won't be nearly as good as having enough dedicated video memory on the card.
For gaming purposes, it's not too hard to get adequate memory capacity. For some GPGPU purposes, the extra bandwidth might be incredibly useful. That's probably a long way away from becoming a mainstream consumer application, though.
there are "some" applications that MAY use pcie3.0. but it wouldn't be cheap:D
http://www.ramsan.com/
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Gigabit_Ethernet
are both under way to NOC's around the globe:D
granted a $100,000 file server isnt something people use every day:D but it's possible people like google may see a use for it:D
I would wait mainly because how much Oblivion taxed systems. Skyrim is likely to need a graphics card released a year from now to pull out all the graphical juice from the game.