I built my system in January of this year 2015 and have a question Specs: MOB: Asus Sabertooth990fx R2.0 CPU: FX6300 OC:4.6Ghz Cooler: Enermax Liqutec 240 Water cooler RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum 2x4=8GB 1866mz GPU: At first had no $ so used my old Gigabyte HD5750 silent cell Just upgraded to Asus R9 280X directCUII TOP 3GB PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 850W G2 SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 250GB All in a Corsair 500R case as seen in gravitar
Question: after upgrading my GPU to the R9 280X my system is using allot more RAM I have 8GB's installed as listed above and I figured that would be enough for gaming. however I play BF4 for at least 4 hours a day. after a couple hours or rounds of BF4 online my pc will give me a warning message saying im running low on RAM ! when I open task manager it shows exactly that ! pc is using all 8GB of my RAM and BF4 is using it all. I now i can run the game in 32bit mode to prevent it from using more than 3GB of RAM but I have 8GB and a 64bit OS so don't really want to go that route. ill also mention that I have my paging file size reduced to 2048MB / 2GB on my SSD to reduce wear on the drive. so this is my first question. should I worry about having a paging file on my SSD as far as longevity and reliability go? will it kill my SSD I know I can set the paging file to system managed and I will no longer get the low memory warning.
Second Question: is it worth it for me to upgrade my CPU and RAM? I paid $160 for my FX6300 when I bought it last december and right now I can buy an FX8350 for $160 Same with RAM paid $160 for 8GB kit dominator platinum now I can get the same kit in 16GB for same price when I play BF4 my CPU runs pretty much at full load on all 6 cores. I know this is dumb question but is it Bottlenecking the GPU?
I own a FX6350 and yes it is a mild bottleneck. BF4 being a bit more optimized so you're not seeing too much hinderence. but a faster CPU is never a bad thing.
First, if your system is running out of ram after a while of playing there is a memory leak somewhere. I'm not sure if it's the game or something else but it should not be happening.
Second, the extra tow cores are not worth the upgrade in your case, games will hardly ever use 8 over 6 considering they barely touch quad cores. Only upgrade if you need the two extra cores for something else like rendering or content creation/development. However in BF4, what you primarily play you will see a bigger improvement compared to other games
I would save up some more dough and upgrade further down the line.
Also out of curiosity- Why the dominator plats? That's some pricey (sexy) ram for a lower spec'd machine.
the Dominator platinum was a aesthetic choice and at the time of building rig it wasn't really low specs as x99 and r9 300 series were just coming out and im not into spending $1500 on just a CPU and MOB. I almost took offence to that low spec comment lol. but this is y im considering upgrading to the 16GB RAM kit and if i keep the ones i have that makes 24GB of Dominator plats :) so about the memory leak ? what is that and how to go about figuring it out and since im running windows 7 could it be windows 7's horrible memory defragmentation issue. and paging file, when it was set to system managed i never got the low memory error is it damaging for my SSD to have a regular system managed paging file size. the price is y im considering upgrading to the 8350 I might not need it but socket AM3+ is not gonna benefit from waiting to upgrade as AMD has stated there will be no more development for that socket type and zen will use a new socket type from what i hear plz correct me if im wrong
1: Page file on the SSD should basicly be fine. It will be faster then on a normal HDD for that matter.
2: Upgrading to a FX8350 is not going to make a huge diffrence in allot of games. The FX6300 should not realy have much problems with keeping up with the 280X. Allthough in BF4 you could benefit from the extra module of the FX8350. But i dont think that its worth it to upgrade the cpu atm. THe FX cpu´s are realy starting to show their age. There is not realy much to gain from them anymore in terms of gaming performance. Only in those very few games, that realy scale well over multiple cores. Like Watchdogs for example.
Still i would recommend to just stay with your FX6300 for now, and just upgrade your ram. Add a 2x4GB kit of the same ram if you can find. Then you will have 16GB in total, and you should be totaly fine. DDR3 ram doesnt cost much anymore nowdays. You could also pick 2x8GB kit, then you will have 24GB of ram. But i dont think you will need that much for gaming.
A memory leak is when software "forgets" to return memory it is no longer using to the OS and thus takes up more and more memory over time, even though it doesn't use/need it. To determine whether this is a memory leaking issue you can start BF4 after a system reboot and as soon as you're in-game (the part where you shoot things) check out the ram situation. If you aren't close to maxing out ram at this point, but get the same warning later on it's likely a memory leak, unless BF4 has wildly varying ram usage. Another thing to look out for is how much ram BF4 uses the first time you're in-game compared to when you run out of ram.
For paging on SSD if you still have some spinning rust you can dump the page file on those instead and keep it off the SSD. That's what i did. For a while I had no page file because SSD and never had any on the secondary drives but GTA 5 had a bit of a fit over memory so some page file on the HDDs fixed it right up.
I had the same problem with my fx6300 and r9 290. I just upgraded to 16gb of ram. I thought it was a memory leak at first, but if it was a memory leak it would start with lots of available ram then slowly run out. That wasn't the case for me and I'm guessing it isn't for you. I don't think you would have to worry about a bottleneck too bad. I wouldn't upgrade from your processor to an 8350 and just save money and wait for something better.
even if I can get the FX8350 for the same price as I paid for my FX6300 if i sell my 6300 for like $100 and buy the 8350 for $160 im not out much same with RAM kit i can get the 16GB Dominator plats for $160 same as i paid for my 8GB kit 1 year ago