Upgrade advice

Wolfgang Megahertz

Hi folks. I built my PC a while back thanks to some absolutely fantastic help from this forum. With Xmas on the way I'm wondering if Santy should have some PC components in his sack for me. I'm currently able to play Battlefield 1 on medium at a pretty solid 60fps. What would you suggest to push this setup to high/ultra?


8GB RAM

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 4GB

Intel Xeon E3-1231v3

ASRock H97 Anniversary

Serephucus

I recently swapped my 970 (MSI Gaming) for a 1070 (Palit GameRock) and am very happy. Quieter than my (already very quiet) 970, and am getting usually a 50% or more performance bump.

SterlingArcher

I'd second that. A 1070 is a nice card. selling your 970 and upgrade to a 1070 should only cost you in the end around 150-180 ish.

If it's just about bf1. don't panic. it's very very early days and a much more positive start than bf4.

If you don't have an ssd get one. Looking at your spec I'd think you may already have one if I remember.

TerrorFirmer

GTX970's fetch around 200 even these days, and GTX1070's start at around €420. So it's a hefty enough price to replace the GTX970 with it's own successor.

However, the GTX970 really should do better than medium 60fps assuming you're at 1080p I would have thought.

I know a small minority of people are having performance issues at present that are unrelated to their actual hardware spec.

Some people with 8GB of ram are experiencing stuttering/frame drops, others with certain i5/board combinations are experiencing extremely high CPU usage, etc.

Wolfgang Megahertz

Thanks for the advice folks. (Hello again, Archer - you were a legend when it came to helping me with my build last time!) I do indeed have an SSD.

Yeah I thought medium was a bit of a surprise for BF1 at 1080p. Maybe I'll wait a while. I've noticed however that the less demanding Fifa 17 stutters at some points too. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I'm still very wet behind the ears when it comes to PC gaming in general. I have the latest Nvidia drivers but find that the Geforce Experience program is well... awful. It usually takes an eternity to open (if it opens at all). I had to uninstall the latest version as it wouldn't open/find any of my games even after reinstall. Is this common?

K.O.Kiki

I think you might be running into "EA being EA".

Also yes, the Geforce Experience app is awful since 3.0; however the Shadowplay recording feature is still great.

SterlingArcher

Was away so have not used pc in a week. Also explains my ****ty guesstimates on price corrected by el terror.

But last week I too tried to open geforce experience (shadowplay wasn't active) and it was acting up taking ages then crashed.

Frankly shadowplay is all I use of it. There are some good YouTube vids for setting up your graphics in the actual Nvida control panel to get best results.

Wolfgang Megahertz

SterlingArcher wrote: »

Was away so have not used pc in a week. Also explains my ****ty guesstimates on price corrected by el terror.

But last week I too tried to open geforce experience (shadowplay wasn't active) and it was acting up taking ages then crashed.

Frankly shadowplay is all I use of it. There are some good YouTube vids for setting up your graphics in the actual Nvida control panel to get best results.

Will check those out. Anyone in particular you'd recommend I subscribe to? Medium settings or not, BF1 is probably the most beautiful game I've ever played.

Venom

SterlingArcher wrote: »

Was away so have not used pc in a week. Also explains my ****ty guesstimates on price corrected by el terror.

But last week I too tried to open geforce experience (shadowplay wasn't active) and it was acting up taking ages then crashed.

Frankly shadowplay is all I use of it. There are some good YouTube vids for setting up your graphics in the actual Nvida control panel to get best results.

Nvidia have been releasing game ready drivers like mad this last week for BF1 and Titanfall 2. The 3rd one just dropped this evening.