if you are having performance issues with Poe, i believe its due to only having a 2gb vid card. opt for just a straight motherboard replacement, and at least a 4gb vid card. if you save some more money in the future. you can transfer the vid card to the new mainboard/cpu/ram setup.

none the less, with a new mainboard, its wiser to have a fresh install of windows. so its really up to you wether you feel you are happy with the performance of your current system and just upgrade it slightly, or if you truely feel the need to pretty much build an entirely new system.



PoE system req's:

OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Windows 7/8.
Processor: x86-compatible 1.4GHz or faster processor.
Memory: 2 GB RAM.
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT or ATI Radeon X1950 Pro or better.
DirectX: Version 9.0c.
Network: Broadband Internet connection.
Hard Drive: 5 GB available space.


mainboard replacement, ram upgrade, vid card upgrade: ~> https://pcpartpicker.com/list/8CdBQV

system reqs mean nothing for PoE. Just a metric of what you need to reach Brutus, basically. I can get that far on a Pentium D + GT 240 but that won't even handle Dominus despite being above and beyond the 'reqs', and what the endgame demands is far more than that. Also Idk how you came to the conclusion it was a vram issue unless you misconstrued 2gb system memory with 2gb of vram (how embarrassing if so), the cards listed in the requirements you cite sport only a few hundred mbs of vram themselves, so...

Assuming it's not due to throttling/a malfunction, and that your OS is not a dumpster fire of pando media boosters. PC Optimizer Pro's, and various other adwares and scanners, the most likely cause is the cpu not being able to keep pace, followed by lack of SSD; try adding --waitforpreload to your launch parameters to alleviate HDD i/o related stutters. Third most likely cause is poor compatibility between PoE and AMD gpu drivers, this was a big issue 5 yrs ago or so. Barring those issues, lack of ram bandwidth with one stick. Not enough vram is dead last on what I would consider a possible culprit here.

/e Not to say he shouldn't upgrade his 7870, but if he does need to for Path of Exile, it's due to aforementioned AMD driver related shenanigans, not a lack of vram.

This post was edited by DCSS on Jan 5 2018 06:09am

Shinigami, regardless of what you choose to buy, here's a little guide on how to track down which components are holding you back in any game, PoE included:

Download Process Hacker

go to View -> Tray Icons -> Show graphs for CPU History, Physical Memory History, GPU History, and Disk History. Play in windowed mode maximized and do take note of what your graphs look like when your performance is dropping, both ensuring nothing else is eating up your resources and to see which are being most utilized to find which is holding you back.

Essentially, if your GPU usage is low during these times but your CPU is maintaining a regular 40-60% load or whatever PoE is able to utilize of a 6300's 6 threads, it won't be 100%, then probably you are experiencing a cpu bottleneck.

If gpu hits 99%-100% during these times but cpu goes lower, your gpu probably can't keep up. I don't believe this would happen in PoE though in a 7870 unless you were experiencing low clocks due to Perfcap reason Power in gpu-z (another good program to download), which could be caused by anything from the drivers going bad, the gpu's power delivery, or even the psu dying

If both your cpu and gpu utilization dip and you see the disk graph going crazy, it's probably i/o related stutter BUT it's important to note that since disk utilization is not absolute metric like cpu/gpu the actual graph visual is less useful than the others: going from a few seconds of 0mb/s to 500kb/s will look like it's maxing it out and going from 100 mb/s to 2mb/s even if the 100mb/s was sequential and the 2mb/s is all random access and is maxing out your HDD's seek time will look like it's suddenly barely being used at all.

If disk usage, cpu utilization, AND gpu utilization are all low, it's either a driver or the game itself bugging out, or you're experiencing the rare RAM bottleneck, I've only seen this type of bottleneck in Fallout 4, and since there's no way to measure RAM bandwidth utilization, it's hard to be sure of when it happens. Just make sure you use dual channel RAM in your next build to be safe. This can also happen when there's a vram bandwidth bottleneck, but that is something we can somewhat verify with gpu-z's "memory controller load" percentage.

This post was edited by DCSS on Jan 5 2018 06:25am

Thanks for the input guys, it's really helpful

For PoE, I would lag primarily under 2 circumstances:
1: When I have a video playing on my second monitor. If I was watching a youtube video / movie / stream or anything like that, I would go from fairly fluid gameplay to a much choppier / laggier situation.
2: When I play in groups with just about anyone else. If anyone else is around shooting off their graphically intensive attacks, I would get terrible performance as a direct result. Group play seems borderline unplayable for me. I still do it for in game reasons, but it's terrible.

One other thing is that I'm notorious for leaving open like 10+ Google Chrome tabs at all times, Steam in the background, and usually always has some playlist going etc. I feel like these habits definitely have a noticeably negative impact on my overall performance, so that's something I would hope to improve upon.

As for Process Hacker, that's something I could look into but since I can't start my primary rig right now, it's something I would have to do after I replace my Motherboard, so it's a bit of a shame that I didn't check that out while I still could. Will give it a look later though.

As for right now, I passed on the Asrock Mobo that I linked earlier since no one seemed to recommend it, but now I've got my eyes on a new deal:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=IGNEFL010518&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL010518-_-EMC-010518-Index-_-DesktopMemory-_-20215160-S0E&ignorebbr=1&Item=N82E16820215160

This is 16GB DDR4 Ram with 3000 speed, this would fit with Ryzen 5 + B350 Mobo type setups right? I'm still mostly considering that sort of three item upgrade I suppose, and this is the cheapest 16GB ddr4 RAM I've seen so far, just checking to see if you guys think it's a solid pickup for the $150.00 pricetag.

I'm looking at these two items:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16820215160
+
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157761

I thought they should work together, but on the Memory QVL list, I couldn't find that specific RAM:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350%20Pro4/#Memory
The ram = Memory Model AX4U300038G16-DRG

That means they definitely don't work together right?

This post was edited by Shinigami on Jan 7 2018 11:32am

It should work