Reasonable upgrade from 3570k or just hold on to it?

[traxxton Tomorrow]

Next month im getting a GTX 980. Im wondering, while I am upgrading is there a *reasonable* CPU upgrade available. I would also be getting a matching mobo and ram. I currently have a ATI 7970, I5-3570K @ 4.4ghz, 32gb ram @ 1600mhz, asrock Z77, and ssd for storage. I could afford under 1k for the cpu, ram, mobo.

I am running win 8.1 64bit and 1080 resoultion. I havent been too happy with my framerate. I will only use the firestorm viewer, and currently use the 32bit as it seems faster then the 64bit. I have cable internet and mostly keep firestorm's settings near low to get good 30+fps.

Anyways, just wondering if there is anything worth the cost to upgrade over my i5-3570k or just keep it for a while. Thanks!

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

I would have thought that you would get better performance from the card you have. I have a GTX 660 which is about half the price of an ATI 7970 and a quarter of the price of a GTX 980 and I run at Ultra all the time.

All I'm saying is check you whole system before you splash out a high power card like that. You didn't mention your Internet connection speed. Could that be a bottleneck for you?

[traxxton Tomorrow]

Im getting the graphics card unrelated to SL, but figured it could help. I ran a speed test. Im getting a ping of 8ms, download speed of 7.58 Mbps, and an upload speed of 1.89 Mbps.

[Nova Convair]

The viewer doesn't use my 4770 cpu fully. All cores each under 50% usually and SL seems to use about 1.5-2  cores so replacing your cpu will not give you any performance advantage I assume.

The biggest impact on performance will you will get by replacing your ATI with any NVIDIA of comparable performance level. A 980 should do fine but on the high end SL does not scale well with the GPU. (means 200% GPU is not 200% fps) You can utilize the GPU by setting up the quality though.

[Ohjiro Watanabe]

The ping is good but the download speed is a bottleneck. If you have any options on that it is the place that I would invest in.

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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traxxton Tomorrow wrote:

Im getting the graphics card unrelated to SL, but figured it could help. I ran a speed test. Im getting a ping of 8ms, download speed of 7.58 Mbps, and an upload speed of 1.89 Mbps.

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A speed test to where? You have to do one to Tuscon. Thats the only place they have servers now.

Speedtest.

This is the slowest i have seen yet.. MYTEST

[traxxton Tomorrow]

I ran a few tests using the link and got    365ms  ping   7.27 Mbps download     1.20 Mbps upload.   I live in PA using Pen Tel Data cable modem. Nothing else in the house was downloading at the time.

[Nova Convair]

Regarding speed tests. One thing is what your connection can do but what counts is what the SL server is willing to give you.

If I TP into a '"heavy" place with empty cache I saw 2-3 peaks of 8 MBit but many peaks of 2-3 MBit. Most of the time it stays below 1 MBit. So it doesn't matter for SL if you have a 5, 10 or 100 MBit line.
My ping is much higher than any of the americans since I'm in europe. But I have no troubles in SL. That lets me guess that the ping is not the problematic factor either.
I have zero packet loss though. That is maybe one of ther more problematic issues.

 

[Perrie Juran]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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traxxton Tomorrow wrote:

Im getting the graphics card unrelated to SL, but figured it could help. I ran a speed test. Im getting a ping of 8ms, download speed of 7.58 Mbps, and an upload speed of 1.89 Mbps.

---

A speed test to where? You have to do one to Tuscon. Thats the only place they have servers now.

Speedtest.

This is the slowest i have seen yet..

MYTEST

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Uh Oh. 

I think I have him beat.  LINK

(without going into details I only have a 6MB connection available where I live)

 

[Drake1 Nightfire]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

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traxxton Tomorrow wrote:

Im getting the graphics card unrelated to SL, but figured it could help. I ran a speed test. Im getting a ping of 8ms, download speed of 7.58 Mbps, and an upload speed of 1.89 Mbps.

---

A speed test to where? You have to do one to Tuscon. Thats the only place they have servers now.

Speedtest.

This is the slowest i have seen yet..

MYTEST

---

Uh Oh. 

I think I have him beat. 

LINK

(without going into details I only have a 6MB connection available where I live)

 

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I meant sllowest for me when i test.. I pay for 50.. Sometimes i get 75-100..

[dd Temin]

What?........

365 ms ping?

Is that a typo?

If it's really 365 ms  ...you need to find out why..  as any where in USA  should be 100 ms or less to Sl servers.

Check  packet loss...should be 0.0 all the time

7.27mbps connection  is not fast but should be ok 

Check your draw distance setting...as this  has the biggest effect on Frame rate.

The complexity of the region that your are visiting is the next biggest factor.  If your avatar is facing an empty "Ocean"  then your frame rate should increase dramatically even in the higher graphics modes (high or Ultra)

dd

[Coby Foden]

My results (from northern Europe):

To my ISP
Ping: 3 ms
Download: 12.22 Mbps
Upload: 12.49 Mbps

Tucson, AZ
(Hosted by Login Inc.)
Ping: 358 ms
Download: 9.87 Mbps
Upload: 4.27 Mbps

Tucson, AZ
(Hosted by Bluespan Wireless, LCC)
Ping: 189 ms
Download: 12.68 Mbps
Upload: 7.95 Mbps

Phoenix, AZ
Ping: 174 ms
Download: 12.72 Mbps
Upload: 12.25 Mbps

Ping to Tucson, AZ (Hosted by Login Inc.) was very slow.
I tested it many times, ping was every time over 350 ms.

[Perrie Juran]

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Coby Foden wrote:

My results (from northern Europe):

To my ISP

Ping: 3 ms

Download: 12.22 Mbps

Upload: 12.49 Mbps

 

Tucson, AZ

(Hosted by Login Inc.)

Ping: 358 ms

Download: 9.87 Mbps

Upload: 4.27 Mbps

 

Tucson, AZ

(Hosted by Bluespan Wireless, LCC)

Ping: 189 ms

Download: 12.68 Mbps

Upload: 7.95 Mbps

 

Phoenix, AZ

Ping: 174 ms

Download: 12.72 Mbps

Upload: 12.25 Mbps

 

Ping to Tucson, AZ (

Hosted by Login Inc.

) was very slow.

I tested it many times, ping was every time over 350 ms.

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Then add to it the fact that Ping SIM will have less and less relevance.

"We moved out of the facilities we had been using in Dallas; it's all in Phoenix now. Well, we call it Phoenix... I assume it's in that general area somewhere - I don't need to know, and usually you won't either.

With the use of the CDN, your network distance from the datacenter will make much less difference than it did before."  

Oz Linden   LINK

[traxxton Tomorrow]

I ended up getting 2 GTX 970's for my computer. Framerate is doubled over using the ATI 7970. I have SLI disabled so its really only using 1 card, but my problem must have been using the ati graphics.