Refreshing up an old-ish build.

Monketron

Monketron

Monketron

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15 Dec 2014
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4
Hiya. Thanks for helping.

My PC is getting on to 5 years old now and has an Asus P6X58D-E (LGA1366) mobo, AMD 6850 1GB card, 6gb Ram (3x2GB running triple channel) and an Intel i7 950 CPU.

Lately I've found it running considerably slower and on inspection saw that the ram is constantly getting max-ed out due to the apps I'm using (one uses 2gb alone and then there's Chrome using 1gb+ as well, etc).

Here's what Speccy says each stick of ram is:

  • Type DDR3
  • Size 2048 MBytes
  • Manufacturer Kingston
  • Max Bandwidth PC3-10700 (667 MHz)

I'd like to upgrade this ideally to 12gb.

What's the best way to go about this? the Mobo has 6 slots so could I add another 3x2gb? would it still work triple channel (each 3x2gb separately) or is it best to sell what I have and buy say 3x4gb or even forgo triple channel and go 1x12gb or something like that?

What's a good priced replacement ram that would be compatible.

I'd also like to upgrade the gfx card. What would be a decent upgrade that wouldn't cost the earth? I'm thinking of going Nvidia as I hear their cards tend to run cooler and use less electric?

The CPU I'm pretty happy with not needing an upgrade, I also added an SSD a few years back which helped considerably.

Thanks for reading. :)
 
Hello,

what do you use the PC for?

I have the same processor and I have no issues at all playing most games and i have just upgraded to a 970 from a Radeon HD 5830.

after replacing the GPU i have also overclocked my CPU to 4ghz from 3ghz stock and stable.

you will need to get some triple channel memory which is not commonly sold anymore.

the only ones i can find on OCUK are the following

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-033-GS

the GPU i got was this one but any 970 compared the card you currently have will be a big improvement

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-263-EA&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1010

a cheaper GPU maybe possible depending on what you use your system for and what PSU you have etc

you can get a max of 24GB so another 6GB is fine to give you 12GB in total
 
Last edited:
You should be fine just picking up another 3 x 2gb sticks of the same speed kingston.

Shouldn't be a major problem if it is not exactly the same.
 
Gaming mostly. I use it for open world RPGs a lot which is why I'm having ram issues I believe.

I'd love a 970 card but I feel my budget will let me get a 760 maximum. But even that is easily over 2x the speed of my current card.

Thanks for the reply.
 
I just upgraded my ageing X58 platform, replaced the i7 930 with a Xeon X5670 hex core, overclocked it to 4.2ghz, added GTX 970 SLI and changed memory from 6Gb to 12Gb.
I used Kingston memory, 12Gb can be had for around £95.
Still a bit of life left on these old platforms!
 
jamiehavok said:
interested to hear what your having ram issues with, never seen my ram usage go above 80% with any game!
Click to expand...

World of Warcraft. It eats up like 1.7-2gb alone. If I'm also running Chrome to browse that uses over 1gb too. Often open task manager to see I'm using over 5.5gb of my 6gb. (usually when Wow starts running like ****).

I couldn't find any 1333mhz ram in the end so just went for some 1600mhz which I've read should default to 1333 anyway.
 
Monketron said:
World of Warcraft. It eats up like 1.7-2gb alone. If I'm also running Chrome to browse that uses over 1gb too. Often open task manager to see I'm using over 5.5gb of my 6gb. (usually when Wow starts running like ****).

I couldn't find any 1333mhz ram in the end so just went for some 1600mhz which I've read should default to 1333 anyway.
Click to expand...

mine by default is set to 1333mhz until I enable the XMP options in the bios then it runs at 1600mhz
 
Monketron said:
World of Warcraft. It eats up like 1.7-2gb alone. If I'm also running Chrome to browse that uses over 1gb too. Often open task manager to see I'm using over 5.5gb of my 6gb. (usually when Wow starts running like ****).

I couldn't find any 1333mhz ram in the end so just went for some 1600mhz which I've read should default to 1333 anyway.
Click to expand...

Before spending money it would probably be worth seeing if it is actually using 5.5GB, the simplest way to do it is remove a stick, if runs out of RAM and lags to hell and stuff spend the money, if not it isn't really using 5.5GB just caching and Windows trickery.

EDIT: **** me memory is expensive these days, it has actually tripled in value, should have bought a load before the price ballooned lol.
 
^^^ Tell me about it - I just gave away my old stuff - even after looking at how much it was going for second hand. Geil BlackDragon 800MHz DDR2 RAM.... Going for pretty bloody expensive for just DDR2! Gave away 2 9500 GT graphics cards as well haha (mainly cos they've been out my rig for so long I was unsure if they worked).

Got 2x GTX 260 XFX XXX Editions to sell though, not sure how much to sell them for though...
 
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