Upgrade advice

FishPolice

FishPolice

FishPolice

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Joined
22 Aug 2003
Posts
768
Location
Bucks
Hi all, bit out of the loop & in need of advice..
Basically I fancy having a bash at The Witcher 3 and from what I can see of its requirements my current hardware won't cut it.
Bearing in mind I game at 1920 x 1080, what upgrade should I be looking at to run this game with reasonable performance?

(current spec in sig)

Is my cpu (overclocked at 4.5) in need of upgrade as well as my gpu?

All advice greatly appreciated :)
 
Chuck a GTX970 or R9 390 in there and an SSD - 240gb seems the sweet spot pricing/capacity at the mo and you're good to go with nice smooth rates and plenty of eye candy on the settings ;)
 
Great, thanks for the replies :)

I was worried I'd be having to upgrade cpu/mobo as well as gpu. Good to know I might be ok with the 2500k for now.

I was thinking £200 - 250 max budget for gpu but I always end up spending more..

I'll be honest, I've shied away from an SSD so far. Are they actually reliable nowadays?
 
I've had no issues with my Samsung Evo 840 - great drive. The controllers and firmwares are so much more sophisticated than earlier examples. Don't shy away it will make your system so much more responsive and boot quicker. Install your OS on there it's the new cheap revival for your PC the same way a memory upgrade was 15 years ago. You'll never look back :)

Your processor is fine by the way, you've overclocked it so it's keeping up - no issues there. Intel aren't making great speed leaps with every new generation at the moment as there's no competition from AMD.
 
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ok guys I'll look into SSDs as well then :)

At the moment I have a 2TB drive for general storage and a 1TB drive split into 2 partitions: 300GB for OS and the rest for installed games & MyDocuments

Can you partition SSD drives the same way (is there any point anyway?) or should I just use the SSD for OS & installed games?


Another [potentially stupid] question: I've downloaded the free Windoze10 upgrade but not installed it yet. Do you actually get a product key with it or is it a kind of 'one shot' install that I might not be able to reuse if I later swap to an SSD for the operating system?
 
FishPolice said:
ok guys I'll look into SSDs as well then :)

At the moment I have a 2TB drive for general storage and a 1TB drive split into 2 partitions: 300GB for OS and the rest for installed games & MyDocuments

Can you partition SSD drives the same way (is there any point anyway?) or should I just use the SSD for OS & installed games?


Another [potentially stupid] question: I've downloaded the free Windoze10 upgrade but not installed it yet. Do you actually get a product key with it or is it a kind of 'one shot' install that I might not be able to reuse if I later swap to an SSD for the operating system?
Click to expand...

I don't personally see the point or need to partition an SSD. However you should set aside some free space on it for over-provisioning which will affect wear levelling so the bigger this space, the longer your SSD will last in terms of writes. You can do this usually in the supplied drive management software.

I would use the SSD for the OS and a few load heavy and/or frequently used games. Then use your other mechanical drive for games and docs/music etc perhaps using a partition to keep these physically separate on the drive if you so wish.

Remember you don't have to defrag an SSD. Make sure your SATA controller is set to AHCI in the bios to and perhaps consider a UEFI installation of your OS to further improve boot times/hardware initialisation and faster shutdown times ;) UEFI installation creates a more modern GPT file system allowing up to 128 partitions by the way !

As for Windows 10 let it upgrade first before doing a fresh install. I don't think you get a key for it however it does perform a checksum that locks it to main components ie the motherboard. So change that and you have to buy a new license. There should be no issue if you want to go ahead now and later decide to do a fresh install on an SSD.
 
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