Upgrade?

[Rich46yo]

What kind of upgrade would make sense for my rig? I dont want to spend $$ on a new rig but its starting to get a bit old. I guess the easiest thing would be to upp the Vid card and power right?

Anyway...i7 950 @ 3.07 GHz, 12 gig RAM "all slots used", 750 watt power, GTX 580 vid card 1.5 gig memory, Asetek Liquid CPU Cooler (120mm Radiator),(1TB Western Digital Caviar (7200 RPM) (64MB Cache), EVGA X58 SLI 3 Edition (USB 3.0 & SATA 6Gb/s), Windows 7 Home Premium.

I bought my kid a new box so I now have the 2nd best computer in the house. Im wondering if theres a reasonable upgrade thats worth the money. Thanks.

[titanic3]

Looks like a sweet enough rig to me. Upgrading the graphics card wouldn't really be worth to price for performance gained. The GTX 680 and 780 are the only card worth upgrading to but they also cost 400 bucks. You could possible go SLI but my opinion is that one strong card is better than two slower card. The CPU could be upgraded but that means a new mobo. A decent $100 mobo plus the latest Intel CPU (i7 4570K) is about 350 bucks, that would give you the most performance increase.

[olds442]

Looks like a sweet enough rig to me. Upgrading the graphics card wouldn't really be worth to price for performance gained. The GTX 680 and 780 are the only card worth upgrading to but they also cost 400 bucks. You could possible go SLI but my opinion is that one strong card is better than two slower card. The CPU could be upgraded but that means a new mobo. A decent $100 mobo plus the latest Intel CPU (i7 4570K) is about 350 bucks, that would give you the most performance increase.

Why dose he need a i7 anyways? or a haswell? My sandy bridge i5 2500k at 4.4ghz takes anything i throw at it.

[Krusty]

There's really nothing on that rig that needs updating. It is in no way getting "old"....

What are you unhappy with? Why is it not fulfilling your expectations?

[titanic3]

Why dose he need a i7 anyways? or a haswell? My sandy bridge i5 2500k at 4.4ghz takes anything i throw at it.

Because i7 is faster? 

He wanted an upgrade, I gave him my opinion on a decent upgrade. Is the performance gain going to be mind blowing? No. But you'll see some sort of FPS increase no doubt. For AH, I don't think it'll do much but it will for the newer generation of games coming out.

[Debrody]

Why do you want to upgrade that computer? Thats a quick, well-balanced, nice one. Upgrading one part would possibly result a bottleneck somewhere else, ergo the real performance gain would be marginal.

I would use that puter until it starts to feel slow (a good couple years, for sure), then would be thinking of replacing a CPU-mobo-VGA-RAM combo when the DDR4 comes out.

[Krusty]

The one thing he didn't mention was an SSD. For a low-budget upgrade to an already fast PC like his, I think that would gain more performance boost across the board than anything else.

Once he goes SSD, he won't want to go back.

Downside: Requires a full reinstall to make the SSD your primary drive.

[guncrasher]

I would probably suggest a new monitor higher than 1920x1080 or a new sound card or perhaps trakir.  maybe a new keyboard with all the pretty lights or a gaming mouse.  heck get that chair with the speakers behind you.


semp

[Dragon]

So you want to add nitrous to your Ferrari because you bought your son a Lamborghini while most of us are still getting by on tri-cycles.

 






 

[wrench]

The one thing he didn't mention was an SSD. For a low-budget upgrade to an already fast PC like his, I think that would gain more performance boost across the board than anything else.

Once he goes SSD, he won't want to go back.

Downside: Requires a full reinstall to make the SSD your primary drive.

+1 on SSD. For this machine most bang for buck. Benchmarks probably show your bottleneck is the hard drive.

[Rich46yo]

Funny I posted this yesterday. After I rtan a check disk utility, shut the computer down "which has been flawless since I bought it". And now I cant get Win-7 to start, safe moide or anything. I keep recycleing into system repair and cant remember the default password to get thru that. So now my upgrade $$ is going into getting it fixed, and I have no idea what happened. ?When you cant even get to safe mode you have trouble. 

[ACE]

So after what they told you, you still want to upgrade or no? 

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Funny I posted this yesterday. After I rtan a check disk utility, shut the computer down "which has been flawless since I bought it". And now I cant get Win-7 to start, safe moide or anything. I keep recycleing into system repair and cant remember the default password to get thru that. So now my upgrade $$ is going into getting it fixed, and I have no idea what happened. ?When you cant even get to safe mode you have trouble. 

Just reinstall the OS, problem solved. Takes about 30 minutes. Just make sure you don't opt for the format unless you have good backups.

[Rich46yo]

Just reinstall the OS, problem solved. Takes about 30 minutes. Just make sure you don't opt for the format unless you have good backups.

Yes but it wasnt that easy. I couldnt get the computer to accept the installation disk. Unfortunatly I couldnt do a repair and had to "eventually" do a fresh install. All my games, drivers, settings.................. But at least I got it to accept my install disk, really a royal pain in the butt.

I knew my only real upgrade option was maybe a new vid card,power source. Anything else wouldnt make any sense. And from what Im hearing even that wouldnt make sense. So no Im not going to put money into this thing now. I have a full plate just getting it back to where I was, and an awful lot of downloading. Thanx for the help.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Yes but it wasnt that easy. I couldnt get the computer to accept the installation disk. Unfortunatly I couldnt do a repair and had to "eventually" do a fresh install. All my games, drivers, settings.................. But at least I got it to accept my install disk, really a royal pain in the butt.

I knew my only real upgrade option was maybe a new vid card,power source. Anything else wouldnt make any sense. And from what Im hearing even that wouldnt make sense. So no Im not going to put money into this thing now. I have a full plate just getting it back to where I was, and an awful lot of downloading. Thanx for the help.

The 'repair' option almost always fails. What you can do is to install windows again over the existing installation, that way only your windows gets reset and all your files remain intact. You'll need to reinstall any software that relies on windows registry to work though.

I always partition my windows machines into two partitions, C: contains only windows and D: contains all data and files. This enables you to even format c: without losing your installation files for games, drivers etc.