Its Upgrade Time (or is it?)

powdaman · 11 Jun 2013 at 08:43

Its that time again. I haven't done a serious upgrade in approximately 3-4 years and so I'm thinking that my system is started to look old and is due for an upgrade. The questions are Do I really need it? and what should I upgrade too?

Current System:
- AMD Phenom II 955i
- 16GB RAM
- Nvidia GTX580 Graphics Card
- SSD's in RAID0 for OS
- 2 Storage drives (large)
- USB Soundcard with Creative Force Recon Headset (new buy and actually really good)
- Mid sized tower
- Hazro HZ27WD 10-Bit 27" LED (2560x1440)

Now I do experience some slowdowns when playing Wow especially when there is a lot happening onscreen and I have heard that this could be related to a CPU bottleneck but i'm not sure.

I would like to look into getting something with a much smaller footprint, say that fits in one of those BitFenix Prodigy Mini-ITX Cube Cases. But I'm also aware that there are new graphics cards out (gtz780?) and Intel's new Haswell CPU so I'm unsure of if they would be able to fit adequately into that case (plus cooling etc).

Anyway over to you guys. What should I do?

mickyflinn · 11 Jun 2013 at 10:05

What motherboard do you have ?

Doomedspeed · 11 Jun 2013 at 10:10

Considering the amount of hdd's and ssd's you have mini itx may not be a great idea. It will certainly take the amount of drives you have but the space to add additional is very limited.

Anorher problem with itx is cooling. They tend to favour clc's due to space constraints..

powdaman · 11 Jun 2013 at 11:37

forget motherboard, if I upgrade it will be to Intel as I have had my share of AMD based woes over the past 5 years or so... With regards to the case, I may be included to go down the modders route and build something with oober watercooling etc.

snitcher · 11 Jun 2013 at 12:37

you would make a wise choice to go from an AMD to intel i7 3.6 or thereabouts.

mickyflinn · 11 Jun 2013 at 12:43

powdaman said:
With regards to the case, I may be included to go down the modders route and build something with oober watercooling etc.

In a BitFenix Prodigy ? :confused:

Doomedspeed · 11 Jun 2013 at 12:47

powdaman said:
forget motherboard, if I upgrade it will be to Intel as I have had my share of AMD based woes over the past 5 years or so... With regards to the case, I may be included to go down the modders route and build something with oober watercooling etc.

So you're after an ITX intel build, thats highly possible.

What sort of budget have you got in mind?

snitcher said:
you would make a wise choice to go from an AMD to intel i7 3.6 or thereabouts.

An 4670k would be more than enough..

mickyflinn said:
In a BitFenix Prodigy ?

It can be done, bit of a push but it can. May not be worth the effort though.

powdaman · 11 Jun 2013 at 16:30

Might actually go down the modders route. I was thinking at first that if you could get a 780 and a Haswell i7 in a small case then that might be a goer but thinking on cooling etc it might not be a great idea so I may try something completely different!