General enquiry about my PC.

Inimical

Inimical

Inimical

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Joined
13 Mar 2013
Posts
5
Location
Somerset UK.
Hello all,

First of I'm Josh,... Hows it going? :cool:

aaaaaaaand,........ WALL OF TEXT!:eek:

Ok I've a series of questions about my 'rig' and some,... not so much issues but lack of knowledge causing some disheartening or over expectations of my rigs performance.

I have built rig's before BUT my overall knowledge on PC's isn't amasing, I can fix most problems i come across i.e hardware/software faults, but as for Overclocking and utilizing the rig more effectively and what i have i really have no idea, It's all just Numbers numbers numbers!:confused: I've customized my current one on advise from a friend a little but as i said before a lack of knowledge has probably wasted my time and money, I work in HM Forces so starting a project is a tough one and having time to learn whilst learning other stuff is a nightmare.

so any help or advice would be brilliant, before i posted here i scoured the custom build section ect and got some question i had already answered. but on with it,..

RIG:

CASE:Cooler Master CM-690 II Nvidia Edition Advanced USB3.0 Dominator
MB: Gigabyte Z68X-UD3P-B3
OS: Windows 7 Premium SP 1
CPU: i7-2600k CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.7GHz
GPU: Asus GT560 Ti 900MHZ (SLI)
RAM: 16384 RAM Corsair Vengence 8gb DDR3
PSU: Corsair 850
DX: 11
REZ: 1680x1050

I've started this to pick at all your brains so any advise you have or suggestions please stick them in here, it will all be noted down and taken in!

1. Is more better? as you can see I have a large amount of ram, Is having all that ram useful or is it sucking that little bit of power away from the GPU/CPU that could increase FPS in games?

2. Is SLI worth it? or would I get better performance from upgrading to a single card?

3. Is it advisable to Overclock my current rig? even though it's not water cooled?

4. If i do Overclock what and where would i find better performance increases?


5. How can i utilize all the power of my GPU's?

I'm due to receive compensation for injuries sustained on operations so I'm looking at upgrading my rig,...

1. Shall i just buy a new one? (would rather not lol)
2. What do you advise to upgrade?
3. What could/should i upgrade too?

I hope I'm not wasting anyone's time and put this in the wrong place or asked some stupid questions,.. I did use the search tool but didn't really find a thread/post that game me any advise that would help me (it could be that I just over looked something)

And lastly.

If you're a gamer or just want to chat or anything check out my profile and you can usually find me under the following game nick,..

Inimical_rize
Inimical

If you find me, add me! I own most games that are out there, and I'm always up for installing or having a game with people. Especially Arma3 (not dayZ :mad:)

Thank you again.
 
Quite a nice rig there fella :)

8GB of RAM is the sweet spot for gaming, having 16GB of RAM doesn't hurt and makes for a better all round machine.

SLI draws more power as you have two GPUs obviously. I would think you are better off upgrading to a 1080P panel rather than change your GPU setup.

As you have the K CPU then overclocking is worth it. An aftermarket heatsink would be nice, even a good value cooler at ~£30 would help and should be quite a bit quieter. You can update your mobos BIOS to a UEFI version. There are plenty of guides to overclocking on that socket but the basics is essentially just upping the multiplier/ratio in the BIOS.

You can overclock the GPUs too with say MSI afterburner or EVGA precision software. Because you have two GPUs temps might be a little higher for the top card. Being Nvidia you also have CUDA support which some software can utilise to "turbo boost" the process.

So in short....what would I upgrade? Heatsink, monitor and consider adding an SSD

Hope this helps
 
Hi Josh,
To your first batch of questions:
1. I assume by 16384, you mean 16GB. If so, that is plenty for any home user at the moment. You will barely ever use half of it day-to-day. No, it won't suck performance away from the processor.
2. SLI can be good, often a useful way of getting more life from older cards too. But it can bring compatibility problems, and of course uses a fair bit of extra power. Stick with a good single card.
3. You can overclock away. I would recommend upgrading to a good air cooler, the stock cooler struggles when the speeds bump up. Plenty of threads on here for inspiration.
4. Depends on the software. You may notice an FPS increase in games with heavy CPU usage, and the system may seem just a little more responsive, but it will be subtle.
5. If a game needs to use all the GPU's power, it will. You could try overclocking the GPU with MSI Afterburner if you want a bit more power.

If you want to upgrade, the current cards to go for are the Nvidia 670 and the AMD 7950 series. Expensive, but powerful and should last you a good few years.
Also worth considering an SSD for your Windows install and most often used programs, if you don't have one already. You'd be amazed at the difference...
 
honosuseri.

Thank you for the speedy response. Please bare with my spelling I'm using my IPAD on a weapons range!

Your post surprised me, i was expecting a load of 'this needs to go, this needs to be replaced, why do you have this?'

I think i will remove 2 sticks of the Ram, and keep them as backups, I know they're stable and usable so that's good.

Sound advice, I will even look into downgrading my monitor. hopefully I will be able to swap it with some one, the resolutions incredible though, a real joy to look at.

EDIT:

Forgot to ask about how i would get UEFI I know I've tried this before using the @BIOS tool and for some reason the tool downloads the incorrect BIOS for my MB causing shutdown and power issues.

dougal1331:

I've never taken much notice of the SSD 'malarky' as i once called it, I thought it was a gimmick that was extremely expensive and only for running software such as 3dSMAX and Photoshops. I will take a look into this, I will look into selling both my 590ti's and using what ever cash i get for them to buy a SSD and COOLer.
 
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Inimical said:
honosuseri.

Thank you for the speedy response. Please bare with my spelling I'm using my IPAD on a weapons range!

Your post surprised me, i was expecting a load of 'this needs to go, this needs to be replaced, why do you have this?'

I think i will remove 2 sticks of the Ram, and keep them as backups, I know they're stable and usable so that's good.

Sound advice, I will even look into downgrading my monitor. hopefully I will be able to swap it with some one, the resolutions incredible though, a real joy to look at.
Click to expand...

Keep the RAM in fella. Whilst it's true that having all the RAM slots filled can limit the max overclock, I really doubt that will cause you a problem as a "newbie clocker".

You have a 1680x1050 monitor correct? I would upgrade (not downgrade) it to 1920x1080 (1080P) panel maybe even a 120Hz one. The two 560Tis have plenty of grunt for that higher resolution. You can keep them a while longer.

EDIT

To update the BIOS to UEFI. You need to make a bootable USB drive. GB give you a "special" program in the download to run off the USB drive to do that BIOS update. SSDs are great, a decent 128GB one will be around £100 and it seriously speeds up the boot times (off to using the OS in 15 seconds ish)
 
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Thank you all for your reply's.

Been looking at some good webpages after googling some of the suggestions. To be honest I'm really out of touch with PC's and Hardware now, Ever since i joined up so please forgive the questions that may seem dumfounded to you.

I noticed honosuseri, you said about CUDA cores. How would i go about turning these on or off? are these constantly on? can i change a setting to increase them? Google's not really turned much back to me.

What benefits can i get from upgrading to UEFI? I've read in a few places that it's unstable, or decreases the options that are presented in the BIOS.
 
You can't increase the number of CUDA cores. You can overclock the GPU though as I said. The speed is linked to the CUDA cores so OC'ing helps gaming performance and CUDA support together.

UEFI you should find articles on google easily enough. It's an upgrade to the BIOS but UEFI is really like a mini OS you boot into so is much more versatile. It's already on the new Z77 mobos by default. It's still in it's infancy but is an improvement
 
Honosuseri, Thanks for all your help. I recently installed Arma3 Alpha and before i made this post i was getting 20-30FPS witch isn't nothing to grumble at but i felt my PC could do more, and Boy can it! A slight overclock of the CPU in Gigabytes 'Touchbios' and EXGAPx has my game(s) (including others) maxed out at a smooth 60-80FPS. I was getting some stability issues, so I've been reading up on how to make sure that it's a stable OC, I would rather not Overclock because of horror stories posted online, I would much rather have a computer that just does it. But avast this is the age we live in though. lol

Apart from whats on the website would you or anyone have any other tips to try out? or a specific order in witch to do things?

Thanks again.

EDIT: Furthermore to this post, again been Googling about bottlenecks ect and a friend pointed out that if I upgrade my card(s) i will no doubt end up bottle necked some where. What card would be the best to get?
 
Call me Hono....save your keyboard ;)

Arma III is in Alpha so don't expect it to be great, it's not even at Beta level yet. A good way to improve FPS is simply to turn off AA in the game settings. Also make sure you have the latest GPU drivers, this can help especially for SLI setups.

If you have the intel stock cooler don't faff with OC'ing too much. If you add a good value air cooler ~£35 you should easily get a 1GHz OC from stock speeds. The better cooler will help temps and reduce noise.

You could sell the GPUs and get say a 7950. It has more VRAM and your electric bill will be lower but in terms of pure performance it probably wont be that much better. Of course your PSU is good enough to run a 2nd 7950 later on. For the resolution you are playing at I don't think upgrading the GPUs makes much sense.

So a new monitor might be nice (120Hz maybe?) but if you are happy with what you have then adding a SSD will make the whole system much snappier and along with a heatsink you could do some mild overclocking. Both those items should come in around £150ish
 
Cheers again Hono.

I've been fiddling with OC and running various tests, they all passed without a hitch how ever, since installing 3d mark (demo) and running the tests my display drivers crash.

looking at the event viewer ''Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.''

The drivers im using on my cards are 314.07, any one advise on different drivers. a few people have said these drivers are twitchy at best.
 
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