lurker needs some upgradez

[bomberesque]

well, it's been another year of lurking but I'm still justr about hanging on in there. mostly playing Indie Humble bundle games atm (Torchlight 2 is too addictive)

so, I inherited a couple of 24" dell ultrasharp monitors and I have a Phillips something or other widescreen monitor already so I thought I'd get into some triple monitor pron/game/pron action only my card only has 2 outputs so I thought this would also be a good chance to make some upgrades. Current PC spec as follows

- Intel Core i7 920 2.66Ghz Overclocked to 3.40GHz! (Nehalem) (Socket LGA1366)
- Gigabyte EX58-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
- OCZ 6GB DDR3 PC3-10666C9 Gold Low-Voltage Triple Channel Kit
- Akasa AK-967 Nero Direct Contact Heatpipe CPU Cooler
- Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB GDDR5 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail (102-B50902-00-AT)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache <- this is already upgraded to a 3TB
- Samsung SH-S223F/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black)
- Corsair TX 650W ATX2.2 SLI Compliant PSU
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (ta FAB!)

if I scout flea bay I can probably get a second card the same for about 50 quid, but it's a risk as it'll be a used card. or I can buy a new card ... what do you rekon?
at the same time I was thinking of getting an SSD .... worth the expense? I'm not short on storage space in any way but faster is gooder, yeah?
finally, how about some more ramz ... get more or junk what's there and buy new?

anything I'm missing?

oh, yeah ... /me bums

[friznit]

Booooooommmmmmmmbeeeeeeeeeeerrrrr1

HAI!

I actually have nothing useful to add. I just buy computers from OCUK these days cos I'm fucking lazy, single and earn a decent income. Vouching for Dell Ultrasharps though. Got 2, love them.

[Dog Pants]

I have nothing to add either other than to say hello and admit I'm jealous of your monitors.

[bomberesque]

hey fellas

the pc was from OCUK originally (bout 3 years ago now) still going strong all in all.

[Thompy]

I've been out of the loop in hardware for awhile so can't say too much. I recommend the excellent "Week in Tech" articles on RPS. Annoyingly they're not all tagged properly so here's the lastest one on SSD's.

I have a Samsung 840 Pro as do others have around here. In terms of importance well if you need to decide between a decent upgrade to GPU and an SSD then I'd take the GPU but everyone should be considering them now. You'll hear people say, "It's only loading times, I can wait a few more seconds", and if you really can then fine but I'd bet on anyone not wanting to go back to a HDD after trying it.

Your mobo/CPU/RAM combo is still good. 4GB of RAM will still get you by so you're good with 6GB.

I have a GTX 660 Ti - took best bang for buck card (just, arguable) twice in row for nVidia after the 560 Ti and will be cheaper now the 7xx range is out. But I think AMD has hit back recently with its 7xx comparable range. I lose touch there so I'll defer to someone else.

[deject]

I wouldn't bother with getting another 4870 X2 for CrossfireX, as it's not really worth the hassle. You should be able to get a good price on a GTX 760 or a Radeon R9 280X that would be a massive upgrade.

SSDs are definitely worth it, provided you do some research and avoid the junk out there. 128GB is really the minimum you should get on an SSD, as larger SSDs perform better and more consistently as well as last longer. I would recommend the Samsung 840 EVO if you're looking for a good balance of price/performance. The 840 Pro will be faster but there is a significant premium on them over the EVOs. The 840 EVO will get you the orders of magnitude faster response times and is plenty fast, fast enough that you probably won't notice the difference between it and the Pro. Other models that are worth looking at include the SanDisk Extreme II, the Seagate 600, Corsair Neutron/Neutron GTX, and Crucial M500.

You should be OK with 6GB of RAM still, though if you can afford to double that it'd be good. I think that's probably enough as long as you're not doing a lot of multitasking. You can probably get away with not upgrading that until you're ready to replace your CPU and motherboard as well.

[bomberesque]

thanks dudz, that's helped a lot

bother transferring OS to SSD or just store games on there?

[deject]

thanks dudz, that's helped a lot

bother transferring OS to SSD or just store games on there?

I would make it your boot drive for sure. Watching Windows boot up in under 30 seconds is so awesome.

[Dog Pants]

I was curious and looked up SSDs last night, and you still don't get a lot of drive space for your money. 256GB seems to be the sweet spot at around £160. Which is fine for your OS, but I'm hesitant to get one because I know how much crap gets put on your C drive. I can just see it becoming a frustrating exercise in constantly cleaning the thing up. How do you guys who have them get around that?

[Thompy]

I'm pretty obsessive about having a clean computer and not keeping stuff I don't need. So I'm not the norm, but all photos and video etc I keep on external drives and/or online storage, I don't keep programs if I'm not actively using them, and I hit disk clean up every week. Windows 8 boots in 15 seconds, I don't think I could stand it to take much longer now.

I know what you mean about cost but as I bought my first SSD when they were more than £1 per GB, they seem pretty cheap to me now.

[TezzRexx]

I was curious and looked up SSDs last night, and you still don't get a lot of drive space for your money. 256GB seems to be the sweet spot at around £160. Which is fine for your OS, but I'm hesitant to get one because I know how much crap gets put on your C drive. I can just see it becoming a frustrating exercise in constantly cleaning the thing up. How do you guys who have them get around that?

The price drops have only just started, as they hadn't changed much over the last 12 months (they even went up for a short time) thanks to flooding in Thailand apparently affecting the factories for a long while after.

Regarding storage, I haven't gotten an SSD (yet) but I imagine that I would have the SSD hold Windows, Installed Games and Applications, and have my HDD hold everything else (Games backups for when not installed mostly, Applications that don't really benefit from an SSD) and a partition for Documents separate.

However I do imagine that would still require a fair bit of juggling... which, with the price, is part of the reason I haven't made jump yet. I'd be interested to hear how other people manage with them

[deject]

I was curious and looked up SSDs last night, and you still don't get a lot of drive space for your money. 256GB seems to be the sweet spot at around £160. Which is fine for your OS, but I'm hesitant to get one because I know how much crap gets put on your C drive. I can just see it becoming a frustrating exercise in constantly cleaning the thing up. How do you guys who have them get around that?

I have it as my boot drive, so I have Windows, my non-gaming programs, and 3 or 4 games installed on it. All of my documents, music, video and the rest of my games are all installed on other drives. There's no need to store the vast majority of data files on an SSD, as they work off of mechanical drives just fine.

Plus, you shouldn't store data on your system drive in case you need to wipe it out.

[spoodie]

There's the cheaper hybrid SSD option as well, a combination of traditional platters and solid state storage. I've just replaced my old 10,000rpm drive with one and it tests as faster, but I'm not noticing much difference. Apart from a large size increase, which is the important thing for me.

[Dog Pants]

Plus, you shouldn't store data on your system drive in case you need to wipe it out.

I don't, I have only my OS on my C drive, which is a seperate physical drive. The problem is, despite setting my docs to another drive I still find stuff on C secreted about the place. I might have a dig about and see just how much space I've used on C. If it's less than 256GB then it might be worth a look.

[bomberesque]

Thanks guys, order placed. Btw dp, you said160 for a 256 gb... I found this one for130 something. It's the apparently slower Evo version but my mobo personally couldn't make use of the difference anyway. Still need to shop for the graphics card

Thanks muchly all

[Dog Pants]

Hmm. I've only used 119GB on C. Maybe I could use an SSD after all. £134 for a Samsung eh? Nice spot Bomber.

[deject]

Thanks guys, order placed. Btw dp, you said160 for a 256 gb... I found this one for130 something. It's the apparently slower Evo version but my mobo personally couldn't make use of the difference anyway. Still need to shop for the graphics card

Thanks muchly all

As I said, while the EVO is slower than the Pro, it's not something you'd likely notice unless you were doing A/B testing on file transfers between them. The 840 EVO is a great drive that is quite affordable.

Plus with the Samsung Magician software, you can enable RAPID mode which uses space CPU and RAM to further increase speeds through caching.

[bomberesque]

so, SSD comes in tomorrow but I haven't ordered the GFX card yet...

was looking at this (OCUK link) one for 240GBP (2gig mem version is 200)

worth the extra 40 quid to get double the memory or should I just go with the 2 gig version?

for the drive, I can't recall what I did when I upgraded the HDD last time, can I get away with just dumping the HDD contents onto the SSD then changing the cables and starting up? or do I need to look at a clean install.....

cheers bummers

[deject]

so, SSD comes in tomorrow but I haven't ordered the GFX card yet...

was looking at this (OCUK link) one for 240GBP (2gig mem version is 200)

worth the extra 40 quid to get double the memory or should I just go with the 2 gig version?

for the drive, I can't recall what I did when I upgraded the HDD last time, can I get away with just dumping the HDD contents onto the SSD then changing the cables and starting up? or do I need to look at a clean install.....

cheers bummers

Don't bother with the 4GB model. By the time you use that extra RAM you'll be at such a high resolution that the 760 won't be able to keep up anyways. If you ant an upgrade on the 760, go up to the 770.

As far as your SSD goes, I prefer going with the fresh install but just cloning you current drive shouldn't hurt anything.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

As far as your SSD goes, I prefer going with the fresh install but just cloning you current drive shouldn't hurt anything.

IIRC you need to re-do the windows system assessment thing, else you'll have defrag on, trim off and a very, very dead SSD.