So a buddy of mine just put together his first system. He opted to just get what his $800 budget could afford now so he could start playing, and upgrade as much as possible in the next 3-6 months. The eventual goal is to be able to livestream/record DayZ and other demanding games while playing at 1440p. This is his current system.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/I2qJ
I figured he'll probably be replacing the motherboard, CPU, and graphics card but for now it works. He's currently getting around 20-40fps while running the game on fairly low settings. My question is, what kind of hardware solution is he going to need to hit 60fps at 2560x1440 with everything maxed? I assume he'll probably want to look into SLI/Crossfire, but what card would be best to do it? Will an i7-3770k(or Haswell conterpart) be sufficent or should he look into a 2011 option?
i would say its not worth it to switch over to intel if he has an am3+ mobo just get hd89XX graphics card when they come out. and possibly upgrade to a 8350 or the new steamroller equivalent when it comes out. if he wants to drop the cash on an intel build go for it but as far as streaming game play goes the amd route is a bit better suited for the task. with how close the cpu arms race and gpu arms race is going its hard to say which is best. more physical cores or better single threaded cores with hyper threading. and who will have the better drivers for gpu's right now amd is in the lead for gpu and on par for cpu at price ranges. only major difference between the intel and amd options right now is the ram speed options.
Any word on when the Radeon HD 8000 series cards are going to launch? I've read Q2 but is that still on? And I was expecting him to replace the mobo regradless, but do you think it could handle Crossfire and a decent overclock on an 8350?
If he is going to get a second graphics card to crossfire, the 8350 will be holding back the performance. For multi-GPU systems, Intel is a far better choice.
That's unfortunate... why is that though? Is there not enough bandwidth for the PCIe or is the CPU just weak or what?
Its impossible, except if you buy a mobo that can accept two CPUs and Nvidia Geforce Titan :P