PC Upgrade Advice

So... I'm a CG artist who has been looking to upgrade for some time now. 4 GBs of RAM just isn't cutting it... and even CoH is lagging behind. So here is what I have my eye on:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.596005

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231358

My concern is the compatibility of what I'm considering above with City of... specifically Ultra Mode. I've been able to enjoy UM slightly on my current build, but want to be sure that I'm not missing something in my quest for "MOAR POWER!" I truly don't know enough of the tech to know what is and is not an issue for CoH at this point. Any advice or feedback would be welcome!

The only thing that effects compatibility with Ultra Mode is your GPU (Graphics card). The CPU/RAM of most machines built today are more than sufficient. It's the GPU you should be worried about. Are you planning to upgrade your GPU? If not, what is your current GPU?

We'll see....

OK, wrong memory for that CPU/MB combo. Only i7-9xx series wants it's memory in groups of three, everything else on the desktop wants it in pairs. So 12GB would require a pair of 4GB sticks and a pair of 2GB sticks.

Other that that the speed, type and voltage of that ram is fine, just not three sticks.

As for UM, that's more of a video card thing than a CPU/memory thing. And since you don't mention what you have currently for a CPU and video card, can't really say if you will be worse off or not.

Hmmm, interesting point on the memory. I'll look into a better "fit."

Edit: This is looking good actually. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231309
If I'm going to be using all four slots, I might as well get the most for it. I know that's overkill for 95% of gaming, but that's not the reason for the upgrade anyway. A nice perk though :P

I was pretty sure the only UM issue was the GPU, but wanted to be sure, thanks! I didn't have any plans on upgrading that at this point. I'm working with a "1 x EVGA 896-P3-1260-AR GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card" I don't know where that ranks with current tech, but it's met my needs to now.

The GTX260 is a couple of "generations" old now, even though in timespan wise, its only at most 2 years old.

The GTX460 (which is more recent) is "last years" model, as Nvidia have now released the GTX5xx range

I figured the generational gap would be there, but... have there been any significant improvements in those two years? Again, as far as the graphics card is concerned, I've not been noticing it's limitations yet. I'd rather not have to replace EVERYTHING if I can avoid it.

Of course there are significant improvements. There always are. Whether they're significant to you is a different story

The GTX 260 pretty much does UM Medium-High without any issues (Some might even be able to squeeze some Very high settings out of it if they try). So it's entirely up to you whether you'd like to go above that or not

We'll see....

Well, the more recent versions of the cards (460 and 5xx range) support DirectX11 and OpenGL 4.1 as bare minimum spec.

Not to mention as well that if you use CUDA, you will notice a perfomance increase between the older and newer cards.

CUDA is the technology used in nVidia which allows you to use your GPU's processors rather than your CPU for some function. For instance, encoding a movie file would take minutes rather than hours.

Better yet: http://www.nvidia.com/object/what_is_cuda_new.html

We'll see....

Nice... I'll definitely be keeping my eye on that tech, seems like it has a lot of potential benefit. Thanks for all the info everyone, more than I was expecting

General rankings from Tom's Hardware.

Yes 16GB is a tad overkill considering non 64-bit programs (assuming you are on 64-bit Windows 7) still can't use more than 2GB.

Assuming you are interested in an upgrade and you want to stick with the nVidia, the $250ish new GTX 560 Ti is roughly 60-70% faster than the original 192SP version of the GTX 260, which is what you have. And the GTX 560Ti still uses around the same amount of power, actually a bit less. Even a stock clock 768MB GTX 460 would be roughly 15% faster.