Rig Upgrade

michaelc

michaelc

michaelc

Associate
Joined
21 Apr 2012
Posts
106
Hi All,

With the release of the new Witcher, I've been rudly reminded that my PC is definately overdue for an upgrade! I was hoping that somebody could give me some suggestions, as unfortunately, I'm lacking time to do proper research that would be needed to pull all this together by myself.

Below are my specs:

Case - CM Stryker Full Gaming Case
GPU - MSI Radeon 280x 3GB (Perhaps needs upgrade)
CPU - i5 3470 3.5ghz (needs upgrade)
RAM - 8GB (needs upgrade?)
Monitors - 24" Acer Predator 144hz / Hannspree 20"~ (currently unused as I've only got 1 DVI slot on the GPU)
PSU - Antec VP550p 550w (needs upgrade)
Motherboard - Will need a new one if I go with CPU that requires 2011 socket
HDD - WD Caviar Green 3TB 64MB Cache
SSD - None (considering buying one and installing OS & used applications on this)

I currently have a fan cooling on CPU but would you consider switching to watercooling? Will my CPU ever reach silly temperatures without being overclocked?

Should I be considering SLI? PSU will definately need an upgrade then due to the amout of 6pins available.

My budget is around £1500.

Thanks
 
You seem to be in a bit of no mans land.

Nothing is too rubbish and nothing needs desperate upgrading.

8GB is fine for gaming, you CPU isnt slow (what motherboard do you have as you maybe able to overclock it a bit).

Your PSU will cope with a GTX970/980 for example.

You would benefit from a SSD.

What cooler do you have on your CPU?
 
Not much wrong with that build tbh, I would look at a new GPU and SSD for sure. Perhaps a chip that is overclockable but you can see how it goes with a new GPU first.

What motherboard do you have?
 
Hi Stulid,

Indeed, but I can't seem be able to even hold up 60FPS on low/medium settings on games such as witcher and Ultra settings on Skyrim..

I'll have to check MB and cooler when I get back home (currently at work).
 
A GFX card upgrade will give you the biggest boost immediately and without any faffing around.
 
Motherboard is P8H61-MX Asus. I'm still tempted to get some upgrades along if possible while I have some budget dedicated to it :) If nothing really is worth upgrading, should I consider going for Titan?
 
Problem is Intel will have some new CPUs that work with Z97 out June/july called Broadwell.

Skylake is later in the year and uses a new socket and thus chipset.
 
That makes sense. So GPU & SSD sound like good upgrades to focus on for time being and waiting for arrival of new CPUs before upgrading MB and CPU itself.
 
Yes.

Skylake may even need DDR4 (might depend on the board its combined with) but in a dual channel kit rather than a quad kit like X99.
 
Alright cool. (Not 100% about the channel kits - probably some reading material for me before I buy those components).

Suggestions for GPU/SSDs then? Is Titan really worth that amount of money? Pretty sure 980 would be enough, I could potentially SLI but I would need to upgrade my PSU also. Would you recommend doing SLI? Will the difference be noticable? It might also solve the issue of not being able to plug in the second monitor due to DVI slots.
 
Even a 970 would be enough. As you've got a fairly large budget I would probably go with a nice big 500GB SSD as well.
 
SSDs, 250Gb at least, Samsung 850 Evos are good price/performance.

GFX cards err might be worth waiting for review sites to test the game and compare cards at different resolutions first.

There is this,

http://translate.google.com/transla...266/Specials/Grafikkarten-Benchmarks-1159196/

Which seems to have the TitanX on top and the 980+970 2nd and 3rd and very close to each other.


P.S yeah a new PSU would be nice, EVGA GS550/650 PSus are nice, made by Seasonic, fully modular, gold rated and have that eco fan mode feature.
 
In terms of SSDs, what sort of stuff would you limit it to? OS and applications that are frequently used? Can you create partitions from SSD?
 
Use it like a regular HDD, get the OS on it and as many games as you can.

No need to make partitions, why make something that has smaller capacity than a hdd even smaller?

Make sure your boards BIOS is upto date just in case the new GFX card doesnt work.
 
No problem, just to get you started I'd probably look at the following PSU and SSD.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Samsung 500GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E500B/EU) £155.99
1 x EVGA SuperNova G2 850W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £114.95
Total : £280.54 (includes shipping : £8.00 Ex.VAT).




850w with 10 year warranty, plenty of headroom for overclocking and upgrades in future without worry about cap degradation etc.

As Stulid said it's worth waiting till next month to see what AMD and NVIDIA offer at Computex. Likely to see the R9 300 series of course and 980ti from NVIDIA which is rumoured to feature 6GB VRAM.
 
Hi Decads,

Thanks for the suggestions. I've been looking into getting a titan to reduce the need of having to upgrade it any time soon. It's likely that the R9 300/980Ti will have a steep price for a while and probably(?) still rank under the Titan.
 
I can see the AMD having a high price because it has this new stacked memory thing so will need to recoup R+D costs.
 
I've been running R9 200 series for over a year now and I'm not too happy with it. The Catalyst Control Centre and the way the drivers need to be updated are a real pain.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom