Need advice on upgrading my PC

It's best to hide money in places where people won't ever access and won't look/steal, eg if you send it to some person to fix your computer you might forget that there's money in there and they'll take it, or someone breaks into your house and sees a gamer's pc and you lose both the pc and cash lol.
 
somber said:
A friend of mine bought a SSD about a year ago when he was putting together his work computer (C# dev.), after about a week the drive got fatally corrupted. The SSD technology may have gotten better, but I do not feel as though the price tag for only 256GB (Isn't a TB like $99 now?) is worth the possibility of catostraphic failure, especially one a technology that's still new. But that's what RAID is for.
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I just saw this post. For your friend (and anyone else interested) setting up an ssd, particularly to run an OS off of, takes a good bit more work than just partitioning and formatting with an hdd but, to many people, the performance gains seem worth it. It is all rather straightforward, however. See here for further info.
 
My recommendation from looking at your specifications would be to upgrade your memory to 4GB's of DD3.

I'm running the following:

Intel E8200 Overclocked
4GB DDR3 Ram [ I forget what rating off the top of my head ]
2x1TB HD running in RAID
Nvidia GeForce 285 GTX Overclocked
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium

I think I'm going to upgrade my CPU and RAM later this year. That'll be fun. :]
 
tjchung said:
Thanks, that was a really informative article about SSD's.
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My pleasure. It's really not that difficult but I had no ideas of the necessary added steps until I really started looking into it. Also see here: Ask an Intel SSD engineer

Deebo said:
My recommendation from looking at your specifications would be to upgrade your memory to 4GB's of DD3.
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He'll need a new mobo, and might as well add in a new cpu, to upgrade to DDR3.
 
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If you have to upgrade, option 2 would be good. You don't have to go into hexacore computing anytime soon if gaming is your primary concern (mate, Core 2 Duo's are still going strong). You don't have to spend too much on a new cpu since the Q9550 is also great and the QX9650 shows minimal gains over the 9550 http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-desktop-cpu-charts-update-1/Far-Cry-2-1.0.1,1401.html

As for option 1, If you want to save a bit of money, consider going for a Phenom setup. The 955 Black Edition is around $100 less than the i7 930 (you could get a manix 2 for the difference!). The i7's will give you better performance, but not $100+ worth of performance.

Remember, tomshardware is your friend!
 
Herr_Noobien said:
As for option 1, If you want to save a bit of money, consider going for a Phenom setup. The 955 Black Edition is around $100 less than the i7 930 (you could get a manix 2 for the difference!).
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I went even more extreme in my cost savings and, admittedly, rolled the dice a bit and went with the X3 720 Black. I lucked out and was able to unlock the fourth core and keep it stable with a little voltage tweak. Surprisingly, it made little difference for my usage. I saw more gains from upping the clock speed though I think this may change as more and more software goes multithread.
 
I run windows 7 comfortable on 2gb of ram, an 80 gig hdd, integrated graphics and intel pentium D dual core (two pentium 4's). I have the windows 7 ultimate edition, but i am also a techie so i tweak my services and startup and stuff so.
 
eygen;8120860You really don't need a better computer than that to run W7 properly. Your computer is better than mine and I run W7 64 bit flawlessly.
Do you have any other reasons to upgrade?
If it ain't in need of an upgrade, don't fix it.
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My advice too.

What do you really gain from using 64 bit os ? You seem to be into gaming , are all your programs compatible with a 64 bit win 7 ?

Personally I would not upgrade anything , if you are running slow or sluggish and your current XP SP3 is an old install , I would save what you need then format and reinstall. Your cpu , ram and vid are all more than enough.
I have a little over half in power as you do and I run games in very high modes without a hitch.
IMO you are searching for overkill and if thats what your looking for and you have the extra cash then by all means do it.
Once again IMO I doubt you will see any improvment and going into windows 7 means possible driver issues.
It took Microsoft how many years to perfect thier best OS yet XP ? then the abortion known as Vista...:barf: I plan on waiting a couple years before venturing into 7 , let them work the bugs out !!


As far as DX11 , how many games even utilize it yet ( agh... yea and vid cards , good point !) ??? Seriously , why jump the gun just for bragging rights.


That's my three cents :D

Tostig
 
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Tostig said:
My advice too.

What do you really gain from using 64 bit os ? You seem to be into gaming , are all your programs compatible with a 64 bit win 7 ?

Personally I would not upgrade anything , if you are running slow or sluggish and your current XP SP3 is an old install , I would save what you need then format and reinstall. Your cpu , ram and vid are all more than enough.
I have a little over half in power as you do and I run games in very high modes without a hitch.
IMO you are searching for overkill and if thats what your looking for and you have the extra cash then by all means do it.
Once again IMO I doubt you will see any improvment and going into windows 7 means possible driver issues.
It took Microsoft how many years to perfect thier best OS yet XP ? then the abortion known as Vista...:barf: I plan on waiting a couple years before venturing into 7 , let them work the bugs out !!


As far as DX11 , how many games even utilize it yet ( agh... yea and vid cards , good point !) ??? Seriously , why jump the gun just for bragging rights.


That's my three cents :D

Tostig
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You need a 64bit os to run dx10.
 
Roger999 said:
You need a 64bit os to run dx10.
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And it lets you use over 4GB of RAM.

By the way tjchung, if you take a look at the charts on tomshardware you will notice that Gulftown offers almost no performance gains over the Bloomfield chips. Yeah, Far Cry 2 isn't optimized for 12 threads, but I don't think that even Crysis 2 will be optimized for 12 threads either and if it is, you will only have very small performance gains (it's been 3 years since the original Crysis launched and it's still used as the most demanding gaming benchmark today. If you can max out Crysis 2, you're good for another 3 or 4 years)

The Phenom II's are also great. I wouldn't cross them out just yet (especially at the price they're going for. It's almost like stealing them :D)
 
Just found out that 2 of the newest games, Metro 2033 and Stalker; Call of Pripyet are DX11. But unfortunately, my GTX 295 stops at DX10. Looks like I'll have to save up a little more to get one of those new nVidia Fermi GPU's someday!

Thanks for all the good advise. At this point the whole upgrade project is on hold, while I do a little more research and also wait for the prices to come down.
 
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