How well should this rig run Aces High for the forseable future?

[Rob52240]

when will the 8 series Nvidia cards come out?

[Gman]

Soon Rob, no exact date released yet however.  And as I eluded to earlier with my own experience buying the x79 and 3930k and 3820k chips, the price on the MB and CPU's didn't drop much, even to this day, and it was late Nov 2012 I built both of those systems, so Chalenge does raise a valid point.  Unless you're looking at the higher end 780s, or even the 770s, the prices may not come down all THAT much, it is hard to predict.

I guess my point is you may be able to buy slightly newer and more current stuff if you wait a short period, as the newer x99 boards may not be all that much if any more expensive than the current x79, if as Chalenge mentions, the prices don't drop much.  You'll be better off getting the latest stuff if it is around the same price, as it'll be upgradeable for a longer period of time.  Example, they aren't going to be making any new CPUs for my 2 390$ motherboards, the x79 Sabertooth and ROG board.  However, the new socket 2011-a or whatever they'll call it, the x99, will have most likely another round of new CPUS in the future, just as the x79 did with the 4820/4930 and whatnot.

All I'm saying is unless you need it NOW, waiting for a couple months at most may either save you a bit of $, or at the very least let you get into the latest tech motherboard/cpu for close to the same price as the x79 setups now, as again, the $ of those haven't changed a whole lot over the last couple of years.  One of two things will happen - they'll either come down now as they are phased slowly out, OR they won't, in which case, like I said, the newer x99 stuff will be close enough in $ to be worth the extra few percent it may cost you to go with the most current, and hence the stuff with the most longevity upgrade wise.  That's all.

The rumors are flying that it'll be the end of August or mid Sept at the latest that the new Hawell-E Intel x99 platform stuff will be launched, so it won't be too long now.  Some of the rumored eVGA x99 MB prices are in the 250$ or less range as well, so like I said, compare that to the current x79 mb price in your OP link, and you'll see what I'm getting at.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Soon Rob, no exact date released yet however.  And as I eluded to earlier with my own experience buying the x79 and 3930k and 3820k chips, the price on the MB and CPU's didn't drop much, even to this day, and it was late Nov 2012 I built both of those systems, so Chalenge does raise a valid point.  Unless you're looking at the higher end 780s, or even the 770s, the prices may not come down all THAT much, it is hard to predict.

The good old days of no competition for Intel are back it seems! 

[Bizman]

--- upgradeable for a longer period of time.  ---

That's a point I've been thinking about quite some time. I understand the logic and I've upgraded to better components myself. My question is, how long should a motherboard last? Mine is over seven (7) years old socket 775 one, for which I upgraded the processor from E6750 to a second hand E8500. Based on what some people here have written it's ancient, although still capable to run AH. A common opinion seems to be though, that a gaming rig should be upgraded every three or four years, in which time there will be totally new sockets, chips, CPU's, RAM speeds or even generations using another slot design.

So, how long should a motherboard be upgradable?

[Chalenge]

August 29 (x99 release)

[Gman]

That's a great question Biz - Chalenge probably has a better grasp of that than I ever will, he'll answer I'm sure. 

For me, and this is just personally, I would say around 4 or so years.  I've always found since I got into PC gaming, and since around the time of the P2 400/450 sort of timeframe, that every couple of years I've needed to upgrade to "keep up with the Jones".  Stuff will work well beyond that, and AH being a game that is really friendly to older hardware is a good example too.  However for the really elite cutting edge games out there, there are some that will crush my current 3930k system at 1440p, or crush my 3 screen 3820k system as well.  There are a few games out there that 3 or 4 unit 780ti's in a 4930k cpu system can smoke even, depending on the detail and res.

But I go by a playable level of FPS, say 60 "most" of the time being ok by me, and I find that to keep that up, every 2 years I get a new CPU, and every 4 or so, a new complete system including of course the mother board and cpu.  So, for me, I find I can get away with a MB in the last couple of upgrade seasons for around 4.  I bought the MB in the last post, x79 Sabertooth and an ROG almost 2 years ago, and with the 4930k plunked into both of them, they'll run OK with a 780ti, and a 680 SLI setup for most games in that optimal sort of performance zone.  Again, I CAN smoke them with a few of the higher end resource hogs, especially if I'm using 3 screens or 1440p.  I'm just getting into the 4k stuff now, so we'll see how that plays out. 

[Chalenge]

I'm pretty sure there are people here that use the same board longer than I ever have. I would only add that the weakest link is probably the thermal compound, if there is any. So, if you maintain the thermal areas of the board it should last as long as long as you can buy components for it.

[save]

I just retired a linux running on an intel 3.0 ghz... and if it was not for the power supply, it would be running in the basement for some more years.

My old 1366 i7 930 are now waiting to be a Linux server with 4 gig of memory

[Bizman]

I'm pretty sure there are people here that use the same board longer than I ever have. I would only add that the weakest link is probably the thermal compound, if there is any. So, if you maintain the thermal areas of the board it should last as long as long as you can buy components for it.

How long would that be? I'm not too familiar with motherboard generations, I just look what's compatible now when someone asks. But I have a feeling that there has been some quite short lived processor/socket combinations during the last few years. How long do Intel or AMD have their flagships in production or otherwise available? Or better yet, will the yet unreleased more effective processors be compatible with current motherboards? And if the new processors were compatible, would the old RAM cause a bottleneck? Bus speeds?

My idea about parts is to compare the fastest and most expensive components to the nearest affordable ones to find out where the price jumps without giving any significant performance gain and then choose the best performer from the cheaper ones. For some parts I have had to lower my criteria to fit my budget, but as a rule of thumb I find it a good way to get the best bang for the buck for a long living rig.

[Chalenge]

Evga released this image of what must be the x99 Classified.

http://instagram.com/p/r-UeBQuIc3/

[Chalenge]

Biz, it's time to upgrade, if for no other reason than to make use of the UEFI boot scheme. Probably you already know about its existence, so I won't bore you with the details of transitioning unless someone asks. The reason that I think it is a great time to move over is to make use of coming changes, like greater capacity drives. For anyone not familiar with the difference it is a limitation of MBR that drives larger than 2.19 TB must be broken into smaller partitions. GPT partitions can make use of partitions up to 9.4 ZB (zettabytes), or one billion TB (for capacity comparisons you could put the entire world wide web on 4 ZB as of 2013). While we are not in any danger of seeing ZB size drives anytime soon, we will probably be seeing 20-100 TB drives sometime next year. Even if that does not come true there are already 4TB Enterprise drives, and 6TB NAS drives.

Another use for UEFI is cryptography, of course, so as you are checking motherboards for UEFI you might also consider checking for trusted platform module (TPM) support. I moved to ASUS boards from EVGA myself because I wanted to test out the TPM modules they sell (HP and Intel sell them also).

Skuzzy may have a few comments on this, as my research indicated that Microsoft insists that any system with the Windows 8 logo on it (Motherboards inclusive) will include TPM keys with the UEFI secure boot system. So, when you setup a UEFI system on a board that shipped with the Windows 8 logo you might want to audit the keys and remove their keys (unless you trust them).

Lastly, when I switched from MBR to GPT (and UEFI) I noticed an immediate speed increase in boot times. Even with an SSD this is not as immediate as the promise of instant-on, but it is very, very fast.

[Dicedealer]

Is AH going to upgrade graphics and knock off half of its already low number of subscribers. When AH became AH2 they lost a lot of people including half my squad. I had a chitty chitty bang bang computer back then,but they should be able to keep as many systems able to play on it as possible. If they are going to change it when is that going to happen? 

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Is AH going to upgrade graphics and knock off half of its already low number of subscribers. When AH became AH2 they lost a lot of people including half my squad. I had a chitty chitty bang bang computer back then,but they should be able to keep as many systems able to play on it as possible. If they are going to change it when is that going to happen? 

It's the opposite. HTC is hurting their business by dragging the low spec users along. They have a potential customer base of 100 million which they sacrifice to keep the few thousand along. All the competition is graphically vastly superior, even the new upgrade will be only dx9 meaning a decade old tech. AH is a niche product so I think its a tough spot. If they upgrade the graphics it will raise a lot of interest but then the learning curve will limit subscribing. If they keep the ancient graphics requirements they limit new interest but keep part of the current subscribers.

So far it seems that user base is dwindling so perhaps the first approach would be worth the risk. Who knows.

[Chalenge]

. . , even the new upgrade will be only dx9 meaning a decade old tech. . .

Are you sure? I could swear I saw ambient occlusion at work in the tower shot they released.

[Skuzzy]

Correct Chalenge.  

Every feature of DX11 can be done in DX9.  It just takes code.  Whether it is written by HTC or Microsoft, does not matter, as long as the function accomplishes the same thing.

Yes, we have ambient occlusion support.