System upgrade

martyca3839

martyca3839

martyca3839

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Joined
11 Sep 2013
Posts
25
Hello Gents,

Looking to upgrade my system and unsure of what to upgrade to get the best performance leap. Im not really bothered about a SSD as Im happy enough with my load/boot up speed its just game performance I want to improve. I play a lot of Arma 3 multiplayer and just want to maximize my fps. My current build is as follows:

GPU - MSI Radeon R9 270x OC
MB - Gigabyte AMD 970A DDR3
CPU - AMD Piledriver FX-6 3.50GHz
Ram - Elite Black 8GB DDR3 1600MHz
PSU - Superflower 550w
HDD - Seagate Barracuda 1TB

I just upgraded my PSU to a 'BeQuiet Pure Power L8 730W'. Im obviously trying to keep as much of my money as I can so Im really looking for a few options to choose from. As always thank you very much in advance fellas.

Marty
 
Get a better GFX card if you dont want an SSD.

Maybe add a cpu cooler and overclock the CPU to get more out of it.
 
thanks for a speady reply stu. Whats the story with Xfire? would it be worth my time to get another OC 270x and run Xfire or should I just upgrade the card altogether?Would a SSD improve my game performance?I was under the impression it only really improves load times.

Marty
 
SSDs help loading times and make the desktop experience quicker (click on a folder or something and boom! its open).

Problem you have is your board is not ideal fro Crossfire, the 2nd long slot runs at 4X while the top slot your current card should be in is always 16X.

A 990 chipset generally does 8X/8X or more likely 16X/16X so both cards get equal bandwidth.

Plus if a games doesn't support Crossfire or its profile isn't optimized then you are effectively running on a single card and not a single faster card. This is rare and generally fixes from AMD/Nvidia do come, but it does happen.
 
I see man. Well looks like I will be going for a new GPU in that case. Is there a way of just getting a new gfx card and not having to OC myself, while still getting best results? I want to stay away from OC'ing as Ive never personally done it. The components I have were purchased factory OC'd.
 
Im looking at gfx cards now and if im honest im starting to get lost in the numbers. Of all the cards Im looking at my current card seems to have the highest core speed, what do these other more expensive cards have that are making them so superior to mine? for example the weekly special r9 290 is a lot more expensive, it has double the memory but the core speed is less...? Apologies for the noob questions buddy. Im only just delving into the computer realm with my current desktop being my first build a good few month ago. :D
 
ignore core speeds etc.

Its what inside that counts, number of stream processors or cuda cores etc, you cannot directly compare the specs of an AMD card to and Nvidia card.

How much would you like to spend?
 
well i think around the 200 quid mark might see me still sleeping in my own bed. Anything more than that and I think the missus will permanently relocate me to the sofa.
 
the longest card i could have is around 29cm long. The 290 would maybe just fit but it would be insanely tight. I hadnt even llooked at nvidia cards as I thought they wouldnt run as well in an AMD system.
 
They will run ok, but its not as fast, use that Anandtech link to compare two different cards.
 
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