petee_c

There was a pretty decent thread in 2016 about gaming PC's.. see: https://rennlist.com/forums/rennlist...endations.html

My 12 yr old son and I would like convert our family desktop into a budget gaming rig. He wants to try PUBG on it. He plays about 1-2 hrs of minecraft / day on our family PC presently - depending on spare time after single A minor hockey and homework.

It currently is an ASUS M11AD desktop with a core i3-4150 CPU, we have 8gb of ram for it, as well as a 240gb SSD and a 1 TB internal HDD and a 2gb USB 3.0 drive. The 8gb of RAM is a single stick. There appears to be an empty RAM slot if more RAM is needed.
https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Tower-PCs...pecifications/

We openned it up and looked inside and it has an Asus H81M-A motherboard. It has a free PCIe x16 slot that I believe is where we would plug the Video card in. We will need a larger PS as the one it has only does a peak of 350W.
https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboa...pecifications/

We found this used video card on Kijiji. It is in our budget. (now sold to someone else less than 2hrs after ad was posted ) It was a MSI GTX 960 w 2gb ram.
https://www.kijiji.ca/v-view-details...equestSource=b

https://www.msi.com/Graphics-card/GT...GAMING-2G.html

Locally there is also a Zotac brand gtx 960 card with 2gb RAM listed for $120.

Budget is under $400 cdn, that's why we're looking for used stuff. The PS is cheap enough that we will likely buy that new for under $70 after tax. He is going to put $125 of his own money in to the computer, and I'll match each of his $1 at $1.80.

$120 for a used video card and maybe $150 for used i5 cpu & motherboard if need be.

Dad got a gaming laptop on black Fri.

MSI GP62M 7RDX-256CA Leopard Gaming Notebook
15.6" FHD,
Intel Core i7-7700HQ(2.80 GHz), 16GB DDR4,
128GB SSD+1TB HDD (7200rpm)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX1050 2G GDDR5,
BT4.2, Win10 Home

He can use my laptop almost anytime, I'm only on it max 1hr/day. We wanna try pubg together.

Let the geeks come out.

928gt

Ignore previous post content... for some reason I thought I you were asking about playing Minecraft.

For a game like PUBG I am afraid that $400 would be wasted spent on upgrading that system. It would be like looking to spend no more than $4K on (used) parts for a 944 that you then expect will be able to successfully compete against a 911 RSR. You'd need to spend about 5x that amount on a completely new rig before you can get acceptable frame rates (60 fps) at a half-decent resolution and quality settings.

kgoertz

I disagree. The minimum requirements according to steam are an i3-4340 CPU and a GTX 660 video card. It might be reasonably playable with your CPU and a decent video card (like the 960 you found earlier).

I'd start by finding a used video card on Kijij, google to compare the performance against the GTX 660, and if it is substantially better give it a try. If it doesn't work you can then investigate buying a new system or upgrading your CPU. The biggest concern might by your power supply though...

petee_c

Thx. Will update you on the progress.

As well as updating our family pc, it may be a lesson on managing expectations...

Hopefully it works out
Peter

928gt

The published minimum requirements reflect what the game will actually load on and run, not what you would realistically need for it to be playable (as opposed to just frustrating). It's about as realistic as, say, using minimum wage or minimum CPP benefits to calculate the actual cost of living.

A much more accurate analysis and requirements can be found in the article at http://www.logicalincrements.com/gam...-battlegrounds.

jman81

My recommendation keep the current board and processor.

Spend your money on a video card and upgrade the power support to a 500w unit.

Best bang for your buck is the 4GB 1050 TI video card. Amazon has this one for $220:


500W Power Supply


For reference here is a video of someone playing PUBG with an I3-4150 and 4GB 1050 TI

petee_c

This card peaks my interest... Can't find much info on it... I believe it's a grey market /off brand gtx960 card.... 4gb. Price is right.

https://www.kijiji.ca/v-computer-com...ationFlag=true

This one is a gtx970 with 4gb ram as well.. but $200
https://www.kijiji.ca/v-computer-com...5gb/1325744564

colombiano

I was in similar boat, ended up buying a used GTX 760, got a new power supply to support 500 watt and give cleaner power and voila. Frame rates up for IRacing.

That GTX 970 seems like a decent deal, I used https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/g...eForce+GTX+970 to check what video card was worth it. Happy hunting !

jman81

You probably can't go wrong with either of those kijiji ads. The 970 is quite a bit faster than the 960.

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...960/2577vs3165

petee_c

The 1st ad turned out to be a fake 960.

There was a post on Kijiji from a good Samaritan tonight who claimed that the posting with that picture was for a fake eBay (China counterfeit) graphics card. I had my suspicions when I was trying to google it today from work.

We ended up buying the 970 from the 2nd ad, and the seller offered to meet us in kitchener at big Al's. Cool guy in his mid 20s to early 30s. Was very friendly to my son and offered to be tech support for him if we needed it. He also offered us a free i7 core, but it's the wrong socket for my motherboard unfortunately. His was a 3rd Gen. My son was very impressed. He works in IT as a computer tech.

​​​​​​My son helped install the new psu and graphics card. Drivers took a couple reboots to install. Moved my steam account to the upgraded machine.

Darn PUBG servers are offline tonight for an upgrade. Will have to wait until morning to try it out.

Ran rainbow six siege better than my gaming laptop. 100+fps

Our 22" monitor maxes out at 1650*1050@60hz

petee_c

Success. Stayed under budget at $248. $200 for graphics card and $48 for a new 500w PSU from Canada Computers.

Son's happy. He sees 300fps in Minecraft.

PUBG runs at 50-70 FPS at high settings at the 1680x1050 resolution that our monitor does. Seems pretty smooth to my 45 year old eyes.

Too bad our monitor maxes out at 60hz.

Will keep an eye out for 4-8gb of 240pin RAM and a 4th gen i5 or i7 core cpu that fits our motherboard.

fenixv8

144hz will make a big difference for tracking and aiming.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/produ...item_id=094124

Tj40

Overall performance on these systems is typically limited by the weakest link, you might want to use some of the system monitoring tools to see if you are maxing out the memory or processor before just upgrading for upgrade sakes. More memory might be worthwhile even if you are not maxing it out as PC's use memory in a a number of 'banks' adding a second bank enables the motherboard to do parallel read/writes on the memory as opposed to just having a single bank to use. These things are more graphics intensive then anything else so aprocessor upgrade might not get you much other than quicker boot times....

On the processors the biggest difference in i3/i5/i7 is cache sizing and processor speed - they are actually all the same bit of silicon just crippled in performance in the lower SKU's. You can play with a mild overclock on the existing part, or go to a i5 and overclock a bit as opposed to spending lots of money for an i7.

The other factor then is networking, no use paying lots of money for a killer PC if the network is killing performance, that's another whole discussion in itself.

Finally a lot of people are playing these games online with terrible performance and old hardware, if you are getting 50-70fps out of the graphics card then you should be fairly happy ;-)

petee_c

Bought the 4 gb of RAM from a University student off of Kijiji... Was really surprised at how warm the inside of the case felt when we went to install the RAM.

Anecdoctally, looks like the FPS went up about 10 fps.... Don't have a good way of measuring it. PUBG plays well.

Trying to monitor temperatures and usage of cpu, gpu etc. just to see where the bottleneck is. I have a feeling it will be CPU. Done upgrading for now, as there are no cheap CPU's that fit currently on kijiji.