Is it a good time to upgrade, bitches?!

[Anery]

Everything Berk just said. Scrimping on a PSU is daft, not so much for power requirements these days (power consumption has dropped with newer arhitecture) but for efficiency purposes and safety to the rest of your components.

I currently have a Corsair AX750 in mine, gold I think not platinum (efficiency) modular so I can get rid of those unwanted molex connectors.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

This, You can probably run a reasonably specced modern machine on a 550w PSU, but I just wouldn't want to, all yourcareful planning can go right to shit if you need to replace your graphics card, and the new one is 150w rather than 75.

Also, it's worth understanding that your PSU only uses as much electricity as your computer needs so it doesn't matter so much if it's a 550w or 1500w PSU, it'll still only draw what it needs*

*Aside from the 10-15% loss from PSUs being slightly inefficient

[TezzRexx]

Ta doods

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I had a moment of gentle puckering when I thought I might have suggested This PSU.

I didn't though, so that's good. don't buy one.

[Dog Pants]

Wow, that guy (in the link) really knows his PSUs. Speaking as an electronics grad, reading him talking about the relative quality of the capacitor manufacturers was slightly arousing.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

He does, It's oddly compelling reading, even if I'm not in the market for a PSU.

IIRC, the guy who ran the site originally went off to work for enermax, which kinda speaks to the quality of the staff in general.

[TezzRexx]

Cheers :D I ended up with the SuperFlower Golden Green HX 750W which I can't complain about. It's the first time I've used a semi-modular PSU and actually attempted Cable Management™. It's great, whole new world!

The rest of my specs are:

i5 4690k
Gigabye Gaming 5 mobo
Kingston Fury
Kingston HyperX Savage Red 16GB

Still to buy a GPU, waiting on 970 GTX to fall in price due to the whole 4Gb scandal. I might buy a CPU cooler or liquid cooler as well, but I've never really overclocked before due to fear of ruining my machine (and only got the K series CPU cause it was like £2-3 more expensive than the default) so I'm not sure I'd start now.

[TezzRexx]

Thanks again y'all for the help by the by, i owe you a beverage whenever we bash again.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Interestingly, on the subject of PSUs, since upgrading wifey's machine, she's had weird stability problems, occasional freezing, possible overheating, generally weird behaviour.

HDDs have been replaced, memory has been checked, heatsinks have been refitted, overclocks have been disabled, no good.

Long story short, she has something like a 375w PSU, the PSU calculator suggests something like a 425w psu*.

But, the interesting side to this, is that the killer is her ancient 8800GTX OC'd thing, it draws ~150w by itself, ultimately it works out better to upgrade her graphics card, it'll improve performance and stop the instability.

[Dog Pants]

Is that my old card? Or did I sell that to Chickenz. I forget. Either way, those things were awesome. Apart from power consumption apparently.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I think that went to Chickenz, and was an 8800GT (a 512mb one, which only ate 105w)

This one is a EVGA thing I bought for silly money new, watercooled, replaced, aircooled and I think I sold it to joose for a few years, but it came back home.

[Dog Pants]

Slightly unnerving that you remember exactly what hardware I had 8 years ago.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

[Mr. Johnson]

Threadjack!

I too am in need of an upgrade but like I often mention on TS I think most parts will still last me a little while. I have:

-CPU is an i5-2500 @ 3.30 GHz quad, so that should be okay still.
-16 gig RAM, that should be okay too.
-The HDD is getting on a bit but I think I can put it off a little while longer.
-graphics card is a GTX 560 Ti, and this old horse I will need to put out to pasture.

So, what is a good, new graphics card? I'd say my budget is around the £100 mark at an absolute max of £150. Is there anything else I need to pay attention to?

Thanks, bitches.

EDIT: It's very well possible that my PSU needs an update as well, It's still running on this old thing: https://azerty.nl/producten/product_detail/?ID=11497

[fabyak]

If you don't already have an SSD I would recommend one of them. It's sped up my machine an insane amount.

[Joose]

agreed on the SSD. Its mostly just cut down on load times but there are a couple of games that run better generally from the SSD than they do on my regular drives.

[Mr. Johnson]

I'll see how much is left on the tech budget after a new graphics card, otherwise I'll get it for myself at Christmas.

[FatherJack]

For that money a GTX960 with 2GB looks likely. Try and find a well-known brand that's on special offer, you may even luck out and get a 4GB card. Work out the percentages, the differences on core speed and memory speed are likely to be trivial, but the 2-4GB difference is siginificant.

Make sure you get the correct size for your case and that it has the correct sockets at the back to fit what monitor/s you have - they now tend to come with a bunch of HDMI ports and some DVI ports - some or all of which may be digital-ONLY (ie: not have the cross-shaped socket that you can use to plug in a converter for a VGA monitor)

[Mr. Johnson]

Thanks FJ, that's some quality advice! Also, what are everyone's favourite shops for buying online? I always buy from those Dutch fellas up there but I feel like doing some comparisons.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

PSU is possibly alright, as time has gone on PCs are getting more efficient so you don't really need 1.21 gigawatt behemoths.

On the other hand, you might run out of appropriate connectors.