Need help on choosing right upgrade please...

Inaharry

Inaharry

Inaharry

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Joined
3 Aug 2004
Posts
252
Hi,

I bought a whole PC in component form from OcUK at the beginning of 2007 which has always been stable but in the last few months it'll crash out of games like any HL2 based engine game, TF2 etc and things like COD:WAW. I've tried re-installing the OS without success. I'm sure it's probably driver related in some way, but i'm using the latest ones available. I suspect the sound driver, but the latest one on the Asus site is from the beginning of 2007:rolleyes:

Anyway, because of this and the release of Windows 7, I thought it's time for an upgrade. The previous setup cost about £1400 and I want to try and use some of the things from the old PC to keep the cost down this time round.

My current spec is an Asus Striker Extreme, E6600, 4GB (4x1GB) Corsair Dominator PC2-8500 DDR2, 2 x 8800GTX, (one BFG stock card and one XFX XXX Edition), a Samsung 1TB HDD, a Pioneer 20x DVD-RW and an Enermax Galaxy 1000W in a Antec P160 windowed case running Vista Ultimate x32 with SP2.

I've been trying to work out the best upgrade that'll keep the price down but will still make the upgrade noticeable and worthwhile. I'm considering the following:

A Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 or Asus Maximus III Formula motherboard, a Core i7 860 CPU, haven't got a clue on which memory :confused:, an ATI 5870 card and then run it on Windows 7 Home Premium preferably x64 if it'll work with games, but x32 if not.

The reason for looking at the 5870 is that there's no DX11 Nvidia card available and I would probably keep my 8800GTXs if I could get them to work together. I've never been able to get them running in SLi without games crashing within a few minutes. I bought the XXX Edition as a second card when OcUK had a special deal on them a while back. I'd read that mixing OC'd and non OC'd cards were ok as the speed of the OC'd card would drop to match, but in my system, it does the reverse and tries to overclock the BFG stock card to XXX speed, (I checked with the Nvidia monitor) and this happens even if I change the slots the cards are in. Adjusting them manually doesn't help, it'll still be unstable in SLi.

So, I looked at the newer i7 rather than the 920 which I originally had my eye on because it's a newer chipset and I read a review that said the 860 will outperform some of the higher end 9 series chips making the original i7s potentially dead. Does anyone agree?

Also, as the 5870s are so difficult to get hold of with the shortage, should I just get a GTX285 or GTX295 which will give me similar performance to my 8800GTXs, (if they worked:() and not worry about DX11?

The reason for the rush is I'm a bit impatient;) and I'm on holiday this week, so I'll have the time to completely rebuild and re-install the system.

Any suggestions on whether this is the right move or not or if there's a better way of utilising what I've got would be very, very much appreciated!!

Thanks!!
 
Chimerical said:
Get a proper i7.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice Chimerical. I'm a little bit confused though. Does that mean that the i7 9 series is still the best option despite it being older and not having the PCI Express lanes on chip? I take it that having QPI makes the difference up although it seems to fall short to the i7 860 in benchmarks?

Also, the Gigabyte UD3 only has 4 DIMM slots, but is triple channel :confused:, so would this be the best board for the i7 920 or should I be looking at the UD5 with 6 slots?

Thanks again for the advice!
 
2 8800gtx will last you unless u wanna go dx11 but yes definetly go for the 920 as its the most future proof/powerful CPU available
 
The 920 only falls short because it has an older version of Turbo Boost than what the 8xx and 7xx series chips have. Clock them to the same speeds though and the 920 beats everything else because of the triple channel memory.

The platform itself is more mature with a wider variety of motherboards, coolers and RAM so IMO it's the better choice.
 
Hi again. Thanks for all of your replies, it's very much appreciated.

I think I've narrowed down the choice to the following now:

Core i7 920 D0
Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme
Corsair XMS3 6GB DDR3 PC3-12800C7
Samsung F3 1TB
Windows 7 Home Premium Retail

The reason for choosing the GA-EX58-Extreme is that it says it supports 3-way SLi and I've actually got a 3rd 8800GTX in an HTPC that I don't really use, so I was thinking about putting it in this system, hoping that the GPU performance will last me until the DX11 Nvidia cards appear or the 5870s become more readily available.

Do you think that if I chose this setup that the 3 8800GTXs would work in 3-way SLi bearing in mind that one is a stock BFG, one is an OC BFG and the third would be the XFX XXX Edition? If not, I'll get the Gigabyte UD5 and use one 8800GTX for the time being.

Thanks.
 
8800GTX are still good cards for ther age, i havent played with SLI before but im guessing you woundnt see much gain over using 2, however if somebody with knowledge in SLI can help you get them running properly then I think 2 will pack enough power to last until Nvidia release DX11..

as for the platform if you are goin to SLI having the 2x16 lanes on X58 boards may help however ide personally go i7 860.
 
Please help....Any ideas with unstable system?

Thanks for all your help. After a bit of thought and a chat with somebody at OcUK to check the overall configuration and advice on the best cooler, I went for the following:

Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5
Intel Core i7 920 D0
Titan Fenrir Heatsink with Arctic Silver 5
Corsair XMS3 6GB DDR3 PC3-12800C7 (1600MHz)
Sapphire ATI Radeon 5870
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
Pioneer DVR-S18L
Razer Mamba Wireless
Windows 7 Home Premium (Installed 64 Bit)
Dell U2410 Monitor

As you can guess, I was pretty excited when this lot turned up, but unfortunately, over the last few days, it's been exhibiting some really strange unstable behavior :(

The system hasn't been overclocked in any way and is using the latest drivers for everything, but on two occasions, I've had it running so slowly in games that I haven't made it past the title screen. Checking Windows in the background shows very low CPU and memory usage and there's no disk activity, so it isn't that. When I exit the program and go back in, it's fine again.

Likewise, if I run 3DMark 06, the first test (Proxycon) will run fine, then when the loading screen for the next test appears, the screen is completely corrupted with coloured horizontal lines filling the screen and will stay like that until I press excape to exit.

I tried running Unigine and this was ok until I tried changing some settings and then it crashed out of the program with a Windows message saying it reset the ATI driver. However, it's intermittent because if I try again with either Unigine or 3DMark, there's a good chance it'll work, (the 3DMark problem is the most consistent).

At first, I thought it might be a problem with the Radeon, but this morning, I was away from the machine for a few minutes and it was idle at the desktop. I heard it reboot, but the time I got to it, I'd heard it rebooting again and the base of the Mamba Wireless Mouse receiver, (which glows blue) was flickering and all of the LEDs on the board were lit up, but the system wasn't posting. Unfortunately, in my panic to turn it off, I didn't take a note of the post code LED:rolleyes:. After powering it off completely it started to boot into Windows 7, then showed a BSOD for a second and rebooted again. My USB keyboard wouldn't respond, but after the Windows startup menu continued normally with Windows, everything is working again.

I'm really disappointed that after spending just over £1500 that the system is this unstable. I'm suspecting that it might be a motherboard problem now and I've read some issues others are having with the UD5, but there not like I'm having at all.

I'm sorry for the long post, but if anyone has any ideas as to what the problem might be, or if I should try anything, I'd be really grateful!

Thanks!!
 
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