Best comp upgrade for an ENB?

[Passerby]

So I tried to add in an ENB or two a few times and was always met with pretty significant FPS drops. I'm pretty happy with the way skyrim looks with my current setup, and most of the time I won't drop lower than 45 fps but sometimes have to shy away from resource-heavy mods like ENBs or some particularly busy houses.

 

I was thinking of upgrading my comp for the holidays but can only really afford one big upgrade or two cheaper upgrades, since I've got a budget of around $500.

 

Right now I'm running an Intel Core i7 960 processor at 3.2GHz,

GeForce GTX 460,

16 GB DDR3 in RAM

All on a Gigabyte GA-x58a-UD3R motherboard.

 

My first impulse was to upgrade the GPU to a GTX 780, but I'm not too sure if I'd see more results from that or from fiddling/replacing my CPU. Difference is it's cheaper than a processor upgrade and it's easier to sell off an old video card to a friend (especially a 460) than it is to try to pass off a used processor.

afaik I'm running at standard clock speeds for everything, but if I sprung for better cooling for my PC I could definitely squeeze some more performance out of my processor...but would it really be enough to support some of the nicer graphical mods and an ENB?

I guess the last option would just be buying more ram, which is always nice but I'm not entirely sure I'm hitting the capacity on the stuff I have now. I'd think more VRAM would help me deal with some of the more cluttered/busy mods that I find a lot in Skyrim, which is why I'm leaning towards a GPU upgrade.

 

Thoughts, advice? Am I on the right track here?

[Leito86]

GPU will do more for videogames.  I have a GTX  780 Ti.  It runs well with the most popular ENBs.

[Alpia]

I would indeed update the gpu 1gb vram is not enough and the gpu is also quite slow, but allways remember the next bottleneck is not far away.

RAM upgrade is good when it actually is an upgrade take a look at the clock rate of your ram and see what if you have the max what is compatible with your processor

CPU well you have a good cpu so this would be the last thing to think about if you decide to upgrade your cpu I would rather get me a i5 (k) version the can be easy overclocked on the level of any i7.

 

In short get yourself a nice gpu especially when its about ENB I would not buy a 780 I would buy a 770 with 4gb vram. For the price of one 780 I get a new processor and a 770 so you should really think about that.

If you are willing to buy a 780 why not instead buying a 970 where I life it costs nearly the same you can even get a 970 cheaper than a 780, but well guess it depens on where you life.

[Passerby]

Hm...sounds like good advice. I'd heard the processor is the bottleneck, and that might usually be true in casual use but I guess in this case my CPU isn't so outdated after all. Especially when it just comes to gobs of raw graphics processing, which is exactly what skyrim demands.

 

The reason I'd thought of going for the 780 was that it thought it was only around $300 when I checked, which I thought was a good value/dollar price...but I haven't looked into them too much and the 780 was mostly pulled from the top 5 skyrim mods youtube specs, or something along those lines.

But I think you're right, I haven't really shopped around, and if I could get a nice new GPU and a SSD for the cost of a high-end GPU that'll be outdated in a few years anyway, that'd probably be the better pick. Though that's probably not realistic as I doubt I can find an SSD big enough to hold 55Gb of Skyrim AND and OS AND whatever other game(s) I might try to stick on there for a decent price, they've stayed surprisingly expensive over the last couple years.

[blabba]

ENB is Post Processing effects. It's single threaded CPU based actions.

 

Strictly speaking upgrading your CPU is what will get you the biggest performance jump with ENB.

 

However, ENB pulls a lot of data from GPU calculations and requires them to finish first for it to do it's thing. So upgrading your GPU will more or less lead to increased FPS overall as your game can finish calculating the raw frame data faster for ENB to apply it's calculations.

[Passerby]

Ah, so that's how that works. I was never entirely clear on what it did, other than look good. If it's single threaded it's no wonder SLI does nothing. It sounds like the ideal output increase would be a GPU upgrade with a little bit of overclocking for my processor though, so I guess that's how I'll plan on doing it.

Chasmx was right about the price point of the 970 not being that much more than the 780, so I'll probably go with that since it sounds like the added speed is going to help with ENBs and the VRAM is just a bonus. I'll use what I have left over to add some better cooling to my CPU, hopefully get the best of both worlds.

 

Thanks for all the help and info

[Ashkandii]

pretty hard to answer for me so ill just put a short contribution on the matter.

 

i currently use a r9 270x 4GB with AMD FX-6300 and only time i ever drop below 40fps is when i rather download grass on steroids with flora overhaul or probably inside whiterun or riften. 

 

but since your going the nvidia route. my friend is kind of an expert on the matter and told me that i could just get a 750TI with Intel i5 and it would probably run near exactly same as my 270x so.

but if you do buy a 780 then you wont have enough for an i5 itself and since i7 is like not even worth the money since no games out now even requires i7 at all i5 would be your best bet specially if it has like 3.2 ghz. but in my opinion buying that i7 was probably ripping yourself off. unless  your planning on playing 2 games at time theres not instance where you need a i7 

and if you dont already got a 600W PSU then you'll have to add that to your list.

 

which if you went the 750TI Route could buy I5 and 600W PSU and should come about 20$ more then your originally budget but run games like skyrim really well. but dont go using like 2k/4k landscape textures with grass mods with like insomnia ENB.

 

But in no way am i expect in computers and how they run, i just listen to my friend blabbing on about his 780TI and how bad nividia is and how waste of money these top i7 and intel xeon's are who cant help himself telling me i should get a better CPU.

[ousnius]

ENB is Post Processing effects. It's single threaded CPU based actions.

 

Strictly speaking upgrading your CPU is what will get you the biggest performance jump with ENB.

 

However, ENB pulls a lot of data from GPU calculations and requires them to finish first for it to do it's thing. So upgrading your GPU will more or less lead to increased FPS overall as your game can finish calculating the raw frame data faster for ENB to apply it's calculations.

 

No. Well upgrading either part will give you an FPS increase, but the GPU upgrade to e.g. a GTX 970 will be way higher.

(don't upgrade to GTX 780, a 970 costs the same and is faster + more efficient)

 

http://enbseries.enbdev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25609&sid=5715977dca5fc6bd543bace7e7543ae0#p25609

[Passerby]

in my opinion buying that i7 was probably ripping yourself off. unless  your planning on playing 2 games at time theres not instance where you need a i7 

and if you dont already got a 600W PSU then you'll have to add that to your list.

 

The i7 was just kinda a bonus, I picked up most of my comp through a really nice bundle they had going at newegg a few years back. It came with my board, a 700w power supply, an i7 and a 2TB hard drive. If I was buying it on its own I probably would go for the i5, depending on how big the price gap was between then. But in the meantime I've been fine with my i7, and considering there actually are times I'll play multiple games at once I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

I'd only thought of replacing it because I figured it was getting old by now, but doesn't seem like it's become that dated after all.

 

No. Well upgrading either part will give you an FPS increase, but the GPU upgrade to e.g. a GTX 970 will be way higher.

(don't upgrade to GTX 780, a 970 costs the same and is faster + more efficient)

 

http://enbseries.enbdev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25609&sid=5715977dca5fc6bd543bace7e7543ae0#p25609

 

 

Oh damn, a citation. Love those.

Yeah, after Chasm brought it up I looked into it, it's hard to disagree with sacrificing speed and power efficiency for 20-30 dollars when I'm already paying 300+ or so. My only hesitation is the 970's use of PCI-E 3.0 where my mobo is only rated for 2.0...but from what I've read that's not going to have any real effect other than losing a miniscule amount of performance from the card's potential. The CPU cooling change is actually pretty low priority, just because I'm mortified I'll mess up the thermal paste somehow and ruin my processor.

But at this point I'm leaning toward the MSI version of the 970 and hoping I didn't miss some glaring specification that means it's not going to be compatible with my board.

 

That thread's a good read though, I'd recommend it to anyone trying to squeeze a little more out of their enb.

[Rayblue]

 

i currently use a r9 270x 4GB with AMD FX-6300 and only time i ever drop below 40fps is when i rather download grass on steroids with flora overhaul or probably inside whiterun or riften. 

 

This is touted to have more balance and less system impact:

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/25370/?

[afa]

I still don't get it after reading the citation from enbseries

 

So GPU is what counts majority of the time, but still get bottleneck by cpu when it comes to shadows due to the way the game works?

[Passerby]

That's a good question, actually. Do particular affects have an affinity toward a specific part of the CPU-GPU interaction in what they work harder? I wouldn't mind a little more clarity on the issue, but the first thread that popped up searching for CPU GPU interaction might at least shed a little light on it:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/326191-28-bottlenecks

 

As it was mentioned in that link and earlier by blabba, Skyrim isn't threaded well to begin with. Adding an ENB (and no doubt a pile of extra scripts on top of it since we're modding) is probably just going to add to that and make the CPU even more of a bottleneck. But having lots of things on screen at the same time (like grass mods) or having a lot of screen and lots to put on it (High definition, high res textures) would make the GPU a bigger bottleneck than the CPU.

That's just my understanding of it though, if I've got anything wrong or backwards by all means say so.