Upgrade advice

Ephraim

Ephraim

Ephraim

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Joined
18 Jan 2006
Posts
209
So, my current set up is:

Antec 900 ATX mid tower
Corsair HX750W PSU
Asus P5K-SE Mobo
Intel Q6600 CPU
8Gb OCZ PC2-6400 DDR2
Asus EAH6850 DirectCU 1Gb Gfx
Soundblaster X-fi PCI-e Sound card
128Gb Crucial M4 SSD
Samsung 1.5Tb Spinpoint F2 HDD
Samsung 500Gb Spinpoint T series HDD
Samsung 250Gb Spinpoint P120 HDD
Win 7pro 64-bit

It's not bad, but I'm thinking that the time might be right to look at upgrading again. However, I've been out of the loop on PC hardware for the last couple of years, so really am not sure which way is best to go. I'm a casual gamer, with a tendency to enjoy MMOs. Current games on my frequent play list are Secret World and Guild Wars 2, neither of which will run well with all the graphical bells and whistles. I occasionally do a bit of sound editing/remixing work.

Budget is flexible, but is likely to be less than £400 initially. I don't really have the patience for overclocking, and have rarely seemed to manage to get a system stable when doing so. Stability is much more important than the extra 10% to me.

So, thoughts?
 
Firstly overclocking isn't the game it used to be, yes if you know what your doing you can drag some great amount of speed from your system however all the Z77 mobo's come with a let me overclock it for you button. It volts the chip higher than a pro would but still within safe margins and is very stable in all the testing i did before having a play myself so dont be put off 4.6Ghz can be done with a single click on my chip.

Looking at your rig i would hesitate to change very much, the SSD's and HDD's will last and the GPU is fairly solid so your looking at a £230-300 card to make a truly meaningful difference, if your not wanting to overclock then a 660TI at about £230 or a 7950 for the same money if your willing to clock it up.

as for your CPU my mates still running that and its not bottle-necking his 680 in most games and only slightly in BF3 so i would be tempted to go for a big nasty GPU and hold off on the rest until haswel. if the sound editing is a big thing for you you may benifit from a new CPU but i think the bigger difference will come from a GPU upgrade
 
Ephraim said:
OK. Cool. Would getting another 6850 in crossfire be a worthwhile thing? Or a total waste?
Click to expand...

Well it depends on how much you game, the 6850 is capable of playing most modern games on high settings so I would see no need in getting another one.

You should probably look at getting a 7850 or 7870 instead.
 
Jaskaran said:
Well it depends on how much you game, the 6850 is capable of playing most modern games on high settings so I would see no need in getting another one.

You should probably look at getting a 7850 or 7870 instead.
Click to expand...

err no! i had a 6950 which was rubbish for modern games and just upgraded to 7950 and what an improvement!!!
 
Well the 7850 is a straight upgrade from the 6850, was trying to say it would be a better option for the OP.

The 6850 is capable of playing most games on medium to high settings, isn't it?
 
If you play Guild War 2, or mmos in general mainly, then you should upgrade CPU before graphic.

Even my overclocked i5 2500K would struggle when fighting dragon and its minions or in WvW or Dynamic Event with huge number of people, with CPU usage hitting 80% (the game seem to no optimised enough to use beyond that...yet) even on my 5850. Upgrading your graphic card might give you more headroom for using SuperSample instead of Native for Render Sampling, but it won't help with improving your frame rate at moments that are the most demanding and with lots of things going on.

If you overclock your 6850, you should be able to run everything on High with NativeSampling, provided that your CPU is not bottlenecking.
 
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