Upgrade PC now or wait..?


Garrett

Advanced Member
Joined
Aug 24, 2011
Messages
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Location
Workington, Cumbria, UK
I've been considering a few upgrades for a while now & might have a bit of money to play with soon, I know there's a few hardcore rig builders kicking around these parts.. I'd appreciate people's thoughts..

Current setup:

Gigabyte X58A-UD3R (1366)
i7 920 (DO) @3.8Ghz
Corsair XMS3 (6GB)
GTX 670 Windforce 3x (2Gb)
XFX PRO750
Iiyama Prolite E2607WSD 26"

Should I bother atm & if so what would you guys recommend I upgrade? (make/model recommendations would be helpful)

Primary use is gaming, closely followed by video/photo editing & music production.

I've potentially got around £400-500 to play with

Thanks.
 
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You have a good up to date i7 processor and the Nvidia card is a real good one even still.

I would wait. Seems like a very nice rig now imho.
 
I think that's hard to say for someone else. I would in general only upgrade when it's absolutely necessary, because the later you upgrade the more you get for the money. If you can still work with what you have, don't upgrade.

If something is just too slow for what you do, then upgrade only that one part.

If it's just the graphics card, upgrade only the graphics card, it should automatically be compatible with future upgrades (that is, mainboards).

If it's RAM, just buy some more (I didn't look up the motherboard, but I assume it takes DDR3 RAM - so the RAM modules should be compatible with future mainboards too), depending on which speed RAM your motherboard takes maybe faster RAM than is actually supported, they operate at lower speeds too and then when you get a new motherboard they'll be faster.

If it's the CPU upgrade the CPU to one with the very latest socket and get a matching mainboard.
 
You have a better set up than me.

I have an i5

560 ti

But i do have 8gb ram

and frankly I find my setup completely adequate. As has been recommended, I would feel it would be wise to wait as long as is possible to upgrade... personally I'm looking at 2015 -2016 when VR is set to change the whole experience... then I'll dump a whole bunch of money into upgrades. No point now as I can play everything on the market. On another note - trying to stay on the cutting edge is extremely expensive and quite frankly illogical. Bragging rights? pfff.... seriously. Get wise with your money and you can do a whole lot more in the long run for far less.
 
Yeah, when we come to exchanging hardware specs: I recently upgraded. Before the upgrade it was an old computer I had gotten for free
-some old deluxe main board
-some Intel 2 core CPU at 2Ghz or so
-2*1GB of DDR2 RAM
-a graphics card of which I never even bothered to find out it's model - it's not written on it prominently. Certainly cheap. The first card which was in that PC broke and then previous owner just got a cheap one because the computer had become old anyway (he bought a new one later)
-powerful high quality power supply
-nice case
This worked pretty nicely with Linux (though not that good with Windows, but I'm rarely using that anyway). But sometimes I wanted to do too many stuff at once and sometimes I do graphics/CAD stuff and for that it was too slow. So a while ago I replaced some stuff:
CPU: Xeon E3-1230 v3

RAM: 2x8GB DDR3-1600Mhz

Mainboard: The cheapest matching one I could find

Graphics card: an used 9800GT I could get for free

That will now last me quite some years. Huge amount of RAM and I can still double it in a few years if I want to. Maybe some better graphics card in a few years, but I don't do much gaming and it's good enough for all I do at the moment (though if I get deeper into CAD I guess it won't suffice). I might have to replace or get a new hard drive now and again, but other than that I think this will do for at least five years. And after that I can either upgrade again or give it to my mother or someone else with low needs.
 
why not get an SSD? They speed up the system quite a lot. I'd recommend: Intel 530 and Samsung 840 Evo
 
why not get an SSD? They speed up the system quite a lot. I'd recommend: Intel 530 and Samsung 840 Evo
If you've got enough RAM they only matter for boot up and program start times. After that everything is in RAM anyway.
 
My benchmark: 

Ooooo... that looks awesome! *tries it* Damn! Have to scale down... hmm... this isn't the experience advertised. not sure I'm happy with this level of playability. Is this game worth the upgrade? Yes? It is that awesome? Ok, upgrade.

So far everything is buttery smooth and the visuals are eye-watering on my system. So absolutely pointless me upgrading. But then I only have a 1080p panel.

It seems that is the deciding factor... how many pixels do you need to push? IMHO 1080p is perfectly fine.

That will change with VR, because then i will expect retina quality and of course that resolution will be doubled. My current system certainly wont cope with that.
 
Yeah, I'd seriously consider an SSD for video work, even though you get much less bang for your buck with them. I don't do any video editing myself, but playback, and particular searching for a point in a film is so much nicer on an SSD I'd expect it to be a boon in video work. I guess with budgets being what they are you'd have one for the current project and archive everything else off to an HDD though.
 
Yeah, I'd seriously consider an SSD for video work, even though you get much less bang for your buck with them. I don't do any video editing myself, but playback, and particular searching for a point in a film is so much nicer on an SSD I'd expect it to be a boon in video work. I guess with budgets being what they are you'd have one for the current project and archive everything else off to an HDD though.
Ah, yes, video work is an area where SSDs are actually useful, didn't think of that.
 
Dude, your system is 2 or 3 times faster than mine, why do you want to upgrade?

I got

- 3 cores

- 1gb ATI gfx-card

- 4gb slow RAM

and all new games I buy still run great (and even PS2 runs good enough),

but I'm completely into indie by now, so that may be the reason.

What games have problems on your current system?
 
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I would suggest SSD as primary Drive then use platter drives for programs and stuff. I would also suggest getting more RAM if you can afford it.

Forget doing a complete upgrade as you are inspired to do as what you have will run almost every game still.
 
Get more ram thats also faster so you dont have to clock on multiplier alone.  You should be able to go 4.2GHz without any extra vcore.

Also you could overclock the GPUs, but if you dont have extra cooling dont.  Take a picture of the thing.

Install http://musixdistro.wordpress.com/  or  www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html

What do you use for storage?
 
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There is never a good time to buy new hardware.

So as long as you don't have any issues with applications not running or not running well enough, I would not upgrade.
 
There are 3 things I'd do at the moment if I got 500€ for free.

1: Get a 1TB SSD

It's the latest SSD model available and would fit perfectly all my needs.

As it's low power I could use it for Pyra as well.

Downside: I don't know how SSDs envolve and if I'll get the same model for half the price in some months.

I'm still happy with my Core duo 3GHz Laptop (really. I don#t own a big PC) and my Radeon 4650.

I'm not a PC gamer, and it's far enough if I want to play some Spring engine games or Torchlight or YGOPro.

Your PC sounds pretty good for me.

I once upgraded my boot HDD to SSD and my 2.1 GHz to 3.09 Ghz processor.

I'd say go for SSD. All the other stuff will be cheaper in two months :D anyways.

2: Get a 256 GB SDXC card.

Upgrade your Pandora (if you have one. Can't remember any post of yours in the Pandora sections)

3: Buy other gadgets.

Your PC is good enough.

Get some other gadgets.

Leap motion controller

Oculus VR

Omni

Gaming mouse with lots of buttons

This thing: http://www.amazon.de/Razer-RZ07-01030100-R3M1-Tartarus-Gaming-Keypad/dp/B00ELGHM8C/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&qid=1390164938&sr=8-28&keywords=gaming+razer

For me this would be the best upgrades.

I get lots of stuff for my money and good gaming equipment is vital for PS gaming I think.
 
your PC is still pretty good. you can't really get a worthwhile upgrade with your budget. but as other mentionned if you do not have a SSD now get one right now!
 
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An SSD makes working with a pc way smoother :)
No way. The only way it helps is when reading/writing large amounts of data. When do you do that? Unless you have some specialized use cases (like video editing, because videos are huge) only when starting programs, booting up, manually doing file operations. For the latter you just put it in the background. The other you only do seldom.

All the GUI, windows, etc. is in RAM anyway.
 
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