Time for a system refresh...

john_s · 18 Sep 2016 at 13:18

I currently have the system, basics listed below, which is 6 years old and due for a refresh:

* Intel Core i7 950 Bloomfield 3.07GHz
* Asus Rampage II Extreme X58 motherboard
* 6GB DDR3 RAM
* Nvidia GTX 460

I'm thinking of something along the lines of:

* Core i5-6500
* Suitable cooler
* Z170 motherboard (probably Asus, as I've always found them decent motherboards)
* 16GB DDR4 RAM (as it's not a huge amount more than 8GB)

I'm probably going to avoid updating the graphics card for now (how do the on-CPU graphics compare these days?) as I don't game much anymore, so I'm not really pushing the graphics card I have.

I'll re-use my existing drives, case (Antec P183), PSU, monitor, etc

I don't really want to spend too much on the PC, but equally I don't really want to lose any performance.

Does my suggested system make sense, or is there something else that I should be considering?

Thoughts appreciated... Thanks, Folks.

stulid · 18 Sep 2016 at 14:12

What PSU do you have and what resolution monitor? what do you use the pc for?

john_s · 18 Sep 2016 at 14:30

stulid said:
What PSU do you have and what resolution monitor? what do you use the pc for?

I think the PSU is about a 600/650W modular PSU, maybe Corsair.
Monitor is 1920 x 1200

The PC gets used for bits of allsorts... photo processing (PS / Lightroom), occasional older games, web browsing, office apps, development with Visual Studio, playing video, some messing about with virtual machines...

jigger · 18 Sep 2016 at 14:42

Xeon X5670.
Decent 120mm closed loop water cooler.
3x8gb or 3x4gb of 1.5v 1866Mhz~ DDR3

Overclock the chip to 4.4Ghz~ and maybe look at upgrading the storage to an SSD.

You will pretty much see top tier performance for peanuts and don't even need to reformat.

john_s · 18 Sep 2016 at 15:27

jigger said:
Xeon X5670.
Decent 120mm closed loop water cooler.
3x8gb or 3x4gb of 1.5v 1866Mhz~ DDR3

Overclock the chip to 4.4Ghz~ and maybe look at upgrading the storage to an SSD.

You will pretty much see top tier performance for peanuts and don't even need to reformat.

Thanks. It's not so much of a performance issue I'm having. If all was well, I'd probably just stick some more RAM in and be happy. The system has had a SSD boot drive since it was built, which was replaced abut 9 months ago.

I'm not entirely convinced there isn't something not quite right with the current system. Just strange little things that don't seem quite right. I can't rule out some kind of driver issue with Windows 10; it's rather unstable and I've had to reinstall Windows three times since replacing the SSD.

jigger · 18 Sep 2016 at 16:57

Could be a few things. I've found most of the time random errors restarts are either power or heat. I would probably try running a few stress tests to see if you can pin down the problem.

john_s · 19 Sep 2016 at 18:25

jigger said:
Could be a few things. I've found most of the time random errors restarts are either power or heat. I would probably try running a few stress tests to see if you can pin down the problem.

Yeah, it's odd. It doesn't really seem to strike me as power or heat related.

I've not had any BSODs out of it.

One of its favourite issues is to seemingly freeze for a while, with loads of disk activity on the SSD but little throughput, then just carry on as if nothing happened.