What would you do?

spacedskunk

spacedskunk

spacedskunk

Associate
Joined
9 Jun 2008
Posts
349
I bought all my PC equipment around 2 years ago now and well...I bought it with the intention of being able to upgrade it later on. I've never done so other than replace my HDDs to raid 0 and buy a new GPU.

This is my current spec;

case: Hiper Osiris
mobo: MSI 790fx-GD70
cpu: AMD Phenom II x2 550 unlocked to 3 cores and @3.7ghz
cpu cooler: Thermalright heatsink with noctua nf-p12s
ram: Corsair dominator 2x2gb 1600mhz cas 9
storage: 2x1TB samsung spinpoints in raid 0
gpu: XFX black edition radeon 6870
PSU: 750W Corsair

I'm spending around £100 to upgrade it, and I'm not too sure what to do. Would it be good to go for 2X4gb ram? or get a 965 quad core?
 
Last edited:
Is this PC for gaming? Do you mean 6870 and not the 6780 for the GPU?

Can't really see what you can upgrade with that budget. Maybe an SSD, the 64gb M4 is a good choice.
 
I game on it mainly, just playing world of tanks at the moment but getting pretty bad rubbish fps, around the 30 fps mark and it doesn't change much from changing graphic settings which is telling me it can't be the GPU.

And yes I mean the 6870! haha...oh dear I used to be so up on these things....:S

thanks for the swift reply! an SSD seems to be a good choice actually, do you think I'd notice any fps difference or would it just be loading times?
 
It's usually quite good to be fair but I don't really go on graphic intensive games, TF2 hits easily 60 fps on very high settings and multi-core enabled. Just on world of tanks I think my PC needs an upgrade, or is WoTs just a badly coded game?

I think an SSD drive sounds like the most sensible option and just assume it is the game, following writing this thread it triggered me to really think whether it was my PC or the game and my research has led me to believe WOT isn't CPU intensive as such although it isn't a multi-core capable engine, and that people with very high end machines have been struggling for FPS.
 
Your mobo doesn't support sataIII so you could exploit the offer on this sataII SSD

YOUR BASKET
1 x Sandisk Ultra SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA II Solid State Hard Drive - (SDSSDH-120G-G25) £59.99
1 x Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (BLS2CP4G3D1609DS1S00CEU) £43.99
Total : £103.98 (includes shipping : FREE).



120GB is a good size for the OS, software and a few games. Ok it's not as fast as a sataIII SSD but it's still an improvement and cheap enough that you can get some more RAM in the rig too.

I'd advise against upping the CPU. You can reuse the RAM and SSD, GPU etc. It would make more sense to upgrade the mobo and CPU later in my opinion.
 
Surprised you're getting such low FPS with your 6870. I'm able to maintain upwards of 50fps in BF3 and I think that's considerably more FPS intensive?

Above upgrade looks nice though, you'll love the speed of the SSD.
 
spacedskunk said:
It's usually quite good to be fair but I don't really go on graphic intensive games, TF2 hits easily 60 fps on very high settings and multi-core enabled. Just on world of tanks I think my PC needs an upgrade, or is WoTs just a badly coded game?

I think an SSD drive sounds like the most sensible option and just assume it is the game, following writing this thread it triggered me to really think whether it was my PC or the game and my research has led me to believe WOT isn't CPU intensive as such although it isn't a multi-core capable engine, and that people with very high end machines have been struggling for FPS.
Click to expand...
Actually the problem you are facing is problem the same one as why people have to upgrade to the latest and fastest CPU just to have WOW runs better.

The problem with games like these are that they ARE CPU demanding, yet they only use 1-2 cores...so having more cores won't help, where as having CPU that are faster (got higher IPC) will help a lot in improving fps.
For online games that I play, on my old Q6600 3.6GHz it would dip to low 20s in busy area or intensive scenes all the time, but after upgrading to i5 2500K, my fps went up to constant 55+ on the same 5850.

For online games with lots of things happening at the same time, upgrading CPU is the way to go; whereas people that play graphic intensive single player games, upgrading graphic card might benefit them more. But either way, Core2 or Phenom II with just 3 or 2 cores is not fast enough for today's stardard.
 
i was playing WoW when i upgraded (6 months ago) from a rubbish AMD cpu and old GPU to an i5 2500k and a 6770 and omg on max settings i could get over 200 fps and that was in OG so i would think of changing the CPU if you want better fps
 
CPU does have an effect yes. Thing is I have the 555BE (run as a dual @4ghz) in my HTPC with a 1GB 460. It's still gaming capable, the OP was lucky too and his CPU managed to unlock, I really don't think a 965 CPU is going to be a massive improvement

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/102?vs=204

Scroll down to the game benchmarks and you see in some cases the extra cores aren't helping much at all. The i3 2100/2120 is better (whilst still being a dual core) than the 965

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/289?vs=362

You can see thats vs the 980 as i assume the OP would OC the 955/965BE CPU.

Trouble is switching to intel will be more than £100. If he wants to switch to intel then a budget Z77 mobo (£80) would make sense with all the clever tech it offers alongside an i3 or even better a i5K CPU.

My thinking was the SSD is a speed improvement now (even though it was a sataII SSD) had plenty of space and the extra RAM quite frankly isn't going to hurt is it? 12GB seems excessive but i would look to sell that CPU,mobo and 4GB of RAM as a bundle later on to help fund a mobo and CPU upgrade. Then carry this "new" 8GB of RAM over to the new mobo you switch to, Ivybridge i3 is expected before the end of this year (Q3).

As I said, I kept mine to use as a HTPC which is actually a "console killer". I must confess i'm quite proud of this lil Phenom II X2 CPU, I'm sure the OP feels the same for his rig :)
 
Last edited:
honosuseri has good input.

Comparing performance on games:
Dragon Age Origins shows massive jump for 70.2 to 121.4, a 73% improvement
Dawn of War II not so... 55.9 to 60.1, only a 8% improvement
World of Warcraft same.. 77.1 to 80.6, only a 4% improvement

Everything suggested will move to new build later. I like it!
 
That's what I would do. Buying the 965 is basically paying out £100 to get 1 extra core, it's really false economy.

Interesting he went with the 6870. I went with the 460 to get CUDA support, so the £100 for the GPU also boosted my CPU in various tasks via CUDA. I then overclocked the 460 @900mhz so it near as damn it as fast as the 6870.

I'm not bragging just showing that when you consider upgrades there is more than meets the eye.

People can fairly argue that a sataIII SSD would be a better purchase if you are looking forwards. However the sataII is cheap on offer and this lets him afford some RAM too. If it was me I figure that sataII SSD would probably end up in my laptop sometime down the line ;)
 
Thank you for all your help! I'm tempted on the SSD and RAM idea honosuseri, got the reply too slow being at work today and now the offers are gone, but really tempted with the idea. I'll up my budget to around £150 since I've been good with cash this month.

I just run this benchmark on my current setup for HDD, I couldn't do the write for some reason but this is the read results;

HD Tune Pro: AMD 2+0 Stripe/RAID0 Benchmark

Test capacity: full

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 107.0 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 274.5 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 205.8 MB/s
Access Time : 15.7 ms
Burst Rate : 204.8 MB/s
CPU Usage : 6.8%
Click to expand...

Knowing this would it prove a noticeable upgrade to the SSD?

Thanks for all the feedback on the CPU suggestion, sounds like it would have wasted my money looking at the small increase.

And yes honosuseri, I was massively pleased my CPU unlocked to 3 cores! It took some playing about in BIOS but got the 4th core working stable on an overclock too which is apparently very lucky. Made it all the worth while too because my mobo was the winki version which didn't get the BIOS update to include the unlock core feature till months after purchase.

I choose the 6870 a good few months back now, it was on offer at the time which made me buy buy buy and you're right in that I didn't really check other features. I just assumed nowadays an AMD processor and chipset would work better with a Radeon card.

If you guys think it's better and more fair to say save up for a full upgrade bundle then fair enough. I've asked for your expertise because I'm so out of touch with the world of components!
 
UPDATE-

Something's come up, and I needed to order before I went out to get them for tomorrow. I've ordered the Crucial 128GB M4 SSD purely based on benchmark/review research and the customer reviews on this site, and I've changed my ram choice to this;

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-017-SA&utm_source=sub_cat&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=samsung_green

I believe this new ram OC's like a dream and avoids any clearance issues so very good as this was a problem I have with my current ram. Should be fun trying to overclock!

Thanks for your help, you guys suggested getting an SSD so I hope the performance increase makes me awe :D

I'll update when everythings installed.
 
Got everything today, excellent service from ocUK and DPD.

Installed very easy, I cannot believe the size of the ram modules, they barely come past the height of the ram clip and managed to fit them no problem over the CPU heatsink that protrudes over the primary ram slots.

Anywho, the drive was an excellent choice, boots extremely quickly and programs are extremely responsive compared to before. Not installed everything on there at the moment but ram is running @ 1600mhz 7-8-8-24 1n no issues apart from I had to put it to 1.5v to get it to work whereas ocUK techs managed these timings on 1.4v, no biggie though. FPS HAS gone up, averaging easily over 60fps now on world of tanks and this is down to the ram as that's on on my old RAID 0 install and not the new SSD install as I haven't got the SSD installed fully yet so went back to my old boot for now.

Thanks for your help guys, I know I didn't go for the choices but I did up my budget. You guys influenced what type of upgrade would be most effective.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom