Upgrade Advice Please

Rids

Rids

Rids

Soldato
Joined
30 Sep 2008
Posts
6,774
Hello all,

Long time PC fanatic, first time poster, I wonder if I can pick your brains for some advice please!

About 3 months ago I bought myself one of these!

- Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 2.40GHz Guaranteed to run at 3.00GHz
- Abit IX38 QuadGT Intel X38 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
- Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB)
- GeForce 9800 GX2 1024MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Daul DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express)
- OCZ StealthXStrean 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 Power Supply
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache
- Pioneer DVR-216DBK 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)

Its a great PC, blows my old one away, but I have a few challenges.

Firstly, I run two monitors simply because I like to have a seperate screen for games vs msn/firefox/whatever. Obviously this means I am effectively halving the processing power of my GPU, since I'm doubling the workload.

I've also noticed some games (Crysis, Crysis Warhead) bring my PC to its knees, even at reasonable resolutions with High Settings. I've tried switching from two monitors down to one when playing games that are graphically intensive, however this is a lot of aggro.

Anyway, I've recently had a little win on the football, so I've got around £300 to spend on upgrading this. My first thought was throw another Geforce 9800 in there, SLI them up, and away we go. My next thought was to add another 4 gig of RAM - since its relatively cheap these days. Both of those would fall (just) within my budget.

I have a number of questions though, is my PSU powerful enough to run two 9800's or that going to be a challenge? Also, will another 4gb of memory make that much of a difference? (I do run Vista 64)

Please bear in mind that I'm not the most technically gifted of people. I buy pre-built PC's simply because I dont have the patience to do it myself. When it comes to swapping out simple components like more RAM, a new graphics card, a new DVD drive, I have no problems, but go further than that and I'm up against it.

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.


Cheers

Edit: Perhaps the "SLI ready" tag on the PSU might have answered one of my questions for me. Sorry, I'm special.
 
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Adding another 4 Gig of RAM won't make a lot of difference, certainly not in Crysis where 4 Gig is plenty.
Your idea of adding another graphics card isn't going to work either because your motherboard does not support SLI, only Crossfire (AMD's equivalent). Also, ignore the SLI sticker on your PSU , I don't think it would support another graphics card, 600-700W is recommended for just one 9800GX2!!
In short, if you are desparate to upgrade then your best bet is to flog the 9800GX2 and buy a 4870X2.
 
Hmm, bugger!

Apparently the motherboard doesnt support 4870X2 cards either, so that idea is out the window.

I've had another thought, now providing a new PSU isnt impossible for a moron to fit, what about a new PSU and a new graphics card, not in SLI mode.

The idea being one graphics card for each monitor, should work in theory, right?

I guess the question is, how hard is a new PSU to fit for somebody with 10 thumbs?
 
I'm a bit out of the loop now. But back in the day of the NVIDIA 7950 GX2 you couldn't use dual monitors with both cores (sli?). Is this still the case with the 9800 GX2?

I played warhead all the way through at the weekend on the 2/4 graphics settings (they had funny names and dont remember them), but I was playing at 1680x1050 and it seemed playable. I've only a 8800GT, so perhaps your only using one of your cores on your GPU? :(
 
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