PC Upgrade (It's the time again)

Hello Grim Dawners. It’s been aeons of time since I’ve posted here. The Grim Dawn has come, gone, come, gone, and come again. I hope all is swell with everyone these days. My old PC has pretty much melted from god knows how many thousands of hours of gaming, from the past. I haven’t been doing much PC gaming in a long time, and I can’t wait to play Forgotten Gods.

Anyways, I remember you guys helped me pick out a new PC back in the day. I’m ready to upgrade again. I don’t have a whole lot of free time these days, and I don’t have time to be building a new PC. I’m just going to go ahead and pick something from IBuyPower.com.

I should state that my primary purposes of PC Gaming these days will be ARPG’s, RPG’s, Borderlands3!!, and I’d like to get something powerful enough to potentially play some games that come out in the near future that I may be unaware of at this time.

So here is a link to IbuyPower:

IBuyPower

Edit I forgot to add that I’m looking for a Desktop, not a laptop.

What would you folks recommend for a PC in the $1000-$1500 range?

Thanks!

Sorry to bump, but I would appreciate some feedback help. Maybe help me decide on a CPU? With a game like Grim Dawn shouldn’t I be more focused on getting a PC with a really good CPU rather than the latest greatest graphics card?

I’ve been trying to understand the difference between the i9 vs i7. So far, I know that the i9 is like $2-300 more. is anyone playing Grim Dawn with the i9 CPU? How well does it do?

if it’s just for grim dawn don’t bother with the i9. From what I’ve seem when I’ve watched the core utilization while playing the game mainly hammers a single core.

The i9 is just a higher end sku that has more cores/threads and potentially a higher stock clock speed. The difference between the i7 9700k and i9 9900k (which is what I assume you’re looking at) is the i7 is a 8 core 8 thread processor while the i9 is a 8 core 16 thread processor and has a 100mhz higher boost clock

Thanks for the explanation, Feralwarlord. Yeah I remember reading on the forum ages ago about Grim Dawn essentially using 1 core, but I don’t know or understand anything about that. I know GD has underwent a lot of engine refinements through out the years though.

As far as games I want to play on a new rig, yeah mostly ARPG’s, but I definitely want to check out some newer games. Like I said, I’m excited for Borderlands 3. I like to play some shooters on PC every now and then.

Thanks for the feedback. :slightly_smiling_face:

Generally, more cores will be helpful for tasks that involve heavy processing, such as rendering or compiling. The average person will not benefit from it.

With almost any game, you will benefit from a high clock speed.

This is a decent list of CPUs to consider depending on your budget.

in general I’d recommend starting with a ryzen 5 cpu and getting the most powerful gpu you can afford within your budget, and then if there’s still room in your budget look to see if you afford an intel i7 cpu instead of the ryzen one as for gaming it’s usually better to spend more money on a better gpu than on a better cpu

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Would these specs be able to run Grim Dawn on max settings very well?

Processor :: Intel® Core™ i7-9700K Processor (8x 3.60GHz/12MB L3 Cache)
Processor Cooling :: iBUYPOWER 120mm RGB Liquid Cooling System
Memory :: 16GB [8GB x 2] DDR4-3000MHz ADATA XPG Z1
Video Card :: GIGABYTE Windforce RTX 2080 - 8GB GDDR6 (VR-Ready)
Storage :: 480GB Adata SU650 SSD + 2TB Seagate Hard Drive
Motherboard :: ASRock Z390 PHANTOM GAMING 4-IB w/ WiFi
Power Supply :: 650 Watt - 80 PLUS Gold
Internal Wireless Network :: On-Board Wireless Network

edited from original post

I’ll be careful and say “very likely”.

Honestly, it looks like an overkill if that’s with just Grim Dawn in mind. I’m running Grim Dawn with best settings on my PC and the only component that is maybe better than spec you listed is Memory. The rest of your spec is significantly superior even with stock frequencies in mind, and given the liquid cooling it is probably a system designed to bring the most from overclocking 9700k, which would widen the gap even further.

Perhaps the i3-6100 is a good bet for a gamer on a budget because high Ghz i5’s are quite costly. And above all folks, stop lowering your video settings because, honestly, check your GPU usage during grim dawn :wink: Its probably only at 20% load