11 replies to this topic

[Il_napoletano]

Ok the time has come where I can choose an upgrade..

atm I have

i7 950 @ stock
Asus p6t se (soon to be asus p6t6 WS)
8GB Ram
74GB Raptor
XFX 5770 CF @ 950mhz

upgrade options:

#1
a 360mm rad and EK cpu waterblock to put together a nice WC system and OVERCLOCK!!

#2
Change the mobo and get something with SATA III then save up and get an SSD

#3
Change the GPU..maybe a gtx 480 or 5870..then save up and CF or sli

which one?

[wevsspot]

Having "upgraded" from a similar setup as yours to socket 1155s running i7 2600Ks and 2700Ks, I can truthfully say that I was underwhelmed. Other than the fun of overclocking a processor to 4.7 or 4.9Ghz I didn't notice a huge performance difference between the two platforms for the things I do on a day to day basis. Since you have a P6T6 Workstation board waiting in the wings, I'd personally spend my upgrade money on something other than a new board and processor.

Keep your i7 950 - grab a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler and overclock - you don't need water cooling to get a decent overclock out of the 950
Keep the P6T6 Workstation board - it's a dandy
Since you're running Windows 7 64-bit up your RAM capacity to 12Gb. Will you ever need that much? Probably not - but IMHO RAM is so inexpensive right now, it's silly not to run as much as you can squeeze onto your board
Go ahead and upgrade to SSD - no you don't have SATA III on your current motherboards, but you'll still see a nice performance increase with SSD - especially in lower access times and overall feel of the system - even if benchmarks don't reflect that in read/write speeds

GPU..... are you a heavy gamer? And if so at what resolution and what titles?

[Il_napoletano]

Having "upgraded" from a similar setup as yours to socket 1155s running i7 2600Ks and 2700Ks, I can truthfully say that I was underwhelmed. Other than the fun of overclocking a processor to 4.7 or 4.9Ghz I didn't notice a huge performance difference between the two platforms for the things I do on a day to day basis. Since you have a P6T6 Workstation board waiting in the wings, I'd personally spend my upgrade money on something other than a new board and processor.

Keep your i7 950 - grab a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler and overclock - you don't need water cooling to get a decent overclock out of the 950
Keep the P6T6 Workstation board - it's a dandy
Since you're running Windows 7 64-bit up your RAM capacity to 16Gb. Will you ever need that much? Probably not - but IMHO RAM is so inexpensive right now, it's silly not to run as much as you can squeeze onto your board
Go ahead and upgrade to SSD - no you don't have SATA III on your current motherboards, but you'll still see a nice performance increase with SSD - especially in lower access times and overall feel of the system - even if benchmarks don't reflect that in read/write speeds

GPU..... are you a heavy gamer? And if so at what resolution and what titles?

I heard that the 950 runs hot and especially in the summer my room would be 30C+ so my PC just heats up..but if I go for aircooled I was thinking of getting a Noctua... so I'll have a look into that...

Ram should be getting upgraded to 12gb soon..since my dad wants my ram for his 3770k

atm I'm using 1600x1200 but I'm planning on upgrading to a 23" or 24"..a 27" would be even nicer

I would say a medium gamer...I play TDU2, Blacklight, and planning on getting BF3...

SSD...was leaning towards this route...what about a PCI sata III card? how do they perform? are they stable enough for an operating system?

edit: I was also thinking of putting a little money into case modding...cold cathodes, sleeved psu..what do you think?

Edited by Il_napoletano, 03 October 2012 - 08:48 AM.

[wevsspot]

I don't have any experience with PCI SATA III cards so I can't give you any reliable info on that. Hopefully an expert will chime in with their experience.

As for a video card, if I were looking right now I'd probably be considering a Radeon HD 7870. That is based primarily on price to performance ratio and having 2Gb of VRAM. I know a lot of others are going to chime in with their video recommendations, but to me the 7870 GHz editions just seem to hit a sweet spot. Plenty of power to tide you over for now, and when you can add another for Crossfire you'll have a beast of a rig.

Case modding is such a personal endeavor, I don't have an opinion one way or another. As long as you think it's cool, that's all that matters

[Stonerboy779]

Second everything Wev has said.

I haven't used a pci sata card but have heard of issues with getting them to work as OS drives. I would also worry myself that it may have a negetive affect on access times which is where the main benifit of the SSD comes from. Since most people don't transfer large amounts of data often its the random read writes and access times which give you all the benefit.

Mod the case however you want that's up to you. Be prepared to loose your warrenty when you mod your PSU though and be very sure of everything and label every wire as you pull it out. Also be very careful not to go touching the caps in the PSU it can be a rather shocking and painful as well as dangerous experience.

[Il_napoletano]

Second everything Wev has said.

I haven't used a pci sata card but have heard of issues with getting them to work as OS drives. I would also worry myself that it may have a negetive affect on access times which is where the main benifit of the SSD comes from. Since most people don't transfer large amounts of data often its the random read writes and access times which give you all the benefit.

Mod the case however you want that's up to you. Be prepared to loose your warrenty when you mod your PSU though and be very sure of everything and label every wire as you pull it out. Also be very careful not to go touching the caps in the PSU it can be a rather shocking and painful as well as dangerous experience.

yeah...think I may be going for a SSD...and maybe a CPU cooler..

yeah I remember that from when I was looking into doing the G5 psu mod...

i was looking at the sleeved extension..so I might go that route...

[wevsspot]

What capacity is the Raptor? Even if you go the SSD route (and depending on how large a drive you get) you could always keep the Raptor for installing other programs and apps. Put Windows on the SSD, maybe a few of your most important or most frequently used programs, then put everything else on the Raptor. I've got two SSD drives in RAID0 and have plenty of SSD capacity, but the majority of my apps are installed on another RAID0 array that consists of two WD 640Gb Black edition drives. I try to keep the SSD Array primarily Windows, updates, drivers etc.

Another nice thing about keeping a non-SSD secondary drive is that you can move non-critical Windows files over to the traditional drive (like temp file folders, indexing file etc.) That will save a lot of writes on the SSD.

[Stonerboy779]

Wev it's in the first post the raptor is only 74gb

[wevsspot]

Duh I'm an idiot.

Still worth keeping as secondary drive IMHO.

[Il_napoletano]

Duh I'm an idiot.

Still worth keeping as secondary drive IMHO.

I have a 500Gb secondary drive...so I might give it to my dad...or keep it as a backup of a backup

[EuroFight]

I have a 500Gb secondary drive...so I might give it to my dad...or keep it as a backup of a backup

Something I've learnt, you can never have too many backups

[DanTheGamer11]

Keep video cards till next gen... AMD is launching Sea Islands and Nvidia seems to be skipping GK110 or whatever for gaming cards for something else