need some upgrade advice!!

Matson · 31 Oct 2012 at 17:18

I have had this computer for a couple of years now and im looking to upgrade but not sure what i should upgrade that would give me the biggest performance boost. Should i go for one of the overclocked bundles from this site or a new graphics card or just a single part? Out of the parts i have at the moment which upgrade would give me the biggest performance increase.

My spec is:

i7 920 @ 3.8

Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P6T SE

8gb crucial 667mhz ram - overclocked

900watt psu

2 x ati 5870 cards in crossfire.

Any advice would be aprechiated.

cmndr_andi · 31 Oct 2012 at 17:23

Have you already got an SSD?

That system may be a few years old - but to be honest it should still be more than capable of playing modern games very well.

If you don't already have an SSD then that would absolutely be the best upgrade - the performance boost for general use of running your OS on a modern SSD is very noticeable. I would recommend a 256GB Crucial M4 or Samsung 830 SSD - both are fast, high capacity and good value SSDs. Don't worry that your motherboard doesn't support SATA3 - even at SATA2 speeds the performance increase will still be huge.

Apart from that - a graphics card like a GTX 670 2GB might be worth considering. Since it doesn't rely on multi-GPU scaling you will find in many games that it outperforms the HD 5870 arrangement, plus it runs cooler/quieter and offers much more VRAM - so you can use a higher resolution monitor. That reminds me:

Reccomenation #3 - A high resolution large monitor - like this 27in 2560x1440 one. It won't make your system perform any better but it sure does make everything your system do look mighty pretty.

Matson · 31 Oct 2012 at 17:27

I dont have an ssd, ill definatly check them out if you think it will be a big benefit for me. What would be the biggest benefit of putting the OS on one of those? just all round faster loading of programs and apps ect?

cmndr_andi · 31 Oct 2012 at 17:39

Yea, I found moving to an SSD with a similar system (see the sig) the overall responsiveness of the system increased massively and didn't noticeably degrade over time. This is because with a relatively high-performance CPU and RAM like what we've got - the main bottleneck in many tasks becomes the mechanical storage drive (which compared to an SSD has random read/write speeds and response times of the order of 100x slower). Using an SSD removes this bottleneck - so overall performance seems to increase greatly. Therefore I wouldn't say the benefits just come with loading up applications or windows itself - but all tasks that need to access the primary storage drive during their operation.