Current spec is: MOBO: Asus P5E3 Premium CPU: Intel Q9450 PSU: Tagan BZ1100 (1100W) RAM: Corsair Twin XMS3 DDR3 1333 2x2GB x2 (8GB) GFX: ATi 4870x2 SFX: Creative X-Fi Extreme Music CASE: Antec P182 Limited Ed HDD: Samsung F1 2x 750GB (1 main, 2 storage) OS: Windows 7 64bit Pro What would you upgrade? My thoughts are to only upgrade where I will see a good increase in performance over my current parts, therefore I'm thinking of keeping the CASE, PSU, RAM, SFX, OS and keep one HDD for backing up system and essential files. So, upgrade MOBO, CPU, GFX and upgrade to SSD's? I was wondering if it would be worth getting 2 OCZ Vortex 3's in raid, but a friend says I would be better off staying with the F1's and raid them ... ? I was thinking of grabbing one ATi 6990 to power the 30" monitor, because it appears the best single solution and the P182 case is not really that great for adding more than one 30.5cm GFX card. Should I be getting an unlocked Sandy Bridge 2600K or a fast i7-900 series? I don't want to OC anything other than the CPU, and even then I want to do it on Standard air cooling. No water cooling, no OCing (aside from CPU as mentioned). But the choice is yours, what would you do? EDIT: I just priced up these items: Sandy Bridge i7 2600K - £239 Asus P8P67 Deluxe Rev3 - £191 OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 (x2) - £440 XFX 6990 - £540 Budget now £1410 Would you do anything different?
+1 for the 580, unless your running a triple monitor setup the 6990 is a waste. Personally I can never see the point of raiding ssd's as your disabling the trim command. either get one large ssd like 256Gb or just one 120Gb. Also take into consideration (with your budget) that the GTX 590 is rummoured for release on the 22nd of march. Also if your want to stick with air cooling I'd stick with sandy bridge, also what will you be doing with the cpu? If all your doing is gaming a 2500k is perfectly adequate.
The GFX card has to power 2560 resolution. Looking at Metro 2033 at 2560, high everything, AA and AF you get at least 50% more FPS than the 580. That's a significant increase in power! I didn't know the trim feature was disabled under raid with SSD's. Would it be better to stick with the F1's? I have no idea what the real world performance increase will be with my F1's versus a fast SSD. Game loading times aren't too shabby I guess. As for the 590, I was going to wait for it, but I really think Nvidia would have hurt ATi's launch with rumours about how good Nvidia's new card is ... but we've heard nothing, so that must mean that there is nothing to get excited about. Even if it does compare or even slightly improve on ATi's 6990, it'll probably be because Nvidia's card comes pre OC'd, hot and noisy.
2500k + £40 cooler + £150 mobo = £350 don't bother with 2600k not worth the extra for gaming The next gen of SSD are coming out soon so might be worth delaying a month. but say £100 + A 580 or 6990 or 590 your choice all within your budget
A decent build & not that dissimilar to what i'll be replacing a machine with - though i don't instantly need even more SSDs... ...will start swapping them out later. Well, will the same mobo, will get the 2600K as my usage actually will benefit from it & ummming about either a 580 or 590/5... mucgoo is right that, for gaming, you're not going to see anything special by going for the 2600K over the 2500K, so you'd probably be better off saving a few quid. thetrashcanman's point about trim in raid on the SFs is really very irrelevant - the only thing that matters is that you're doubling the (tiny) risk of losing data d.t. drive failure... &, in a very heavy write environment (which you don't appear to be proposing), speeds are even better maintained on the V3s that V2s in non-trim environments (& i've happily been running 4 V2s in a single R0 array) & a simple reboot following a bit of idle time sorts things out 'if' you trigger a slowdown from extremely high writes. & are you sure that your memory has a sensible voltage for a SB setup? Just that most of the 775 memory used (comparatively) really high voltages.
I'm still not convinced to buy anything other than the 6990 to power the 30" monitor, but seeing as Scan don't have any in stock still, then I have a few days to think about it. I still think that if Nvidia had a 6990 beating card, we'd have heard leaked news about it. I reckon they've probably sent the 590 back to the labs to be overclocked and cooled to try and compete. You guys have convinced me to get the 2500K instead of the 2600K. After checking game benchmarks there didn't appear to be any benefit for getting the 2600K. A Good saving there, but do you think I'll still be able to overclock it to over 4ghz on an air cooler? I'm starting to go off the idea of SSD's as well. Maybe the next rig will get them. The storage is too low and I'm maxed out on my main drive with 700GB, I imagine SSD's will just be an annoyance if I did get them now. So should I stick with the Samsung F1's or is there much better HDD's that I could get? My 4 sticks of DRAM run on 1.8v on my current Asus P5E3 board. Do I need to buy new RAM? The saving from not buying SSD's will cover new RAM if needed, but even so if I can get the old stuff working would there be much of a noticeable difference in performance? Will I get much of a performance increase going from an Asus P8P67 Deluxe to a Pro? I'm not a fan of tweaking and overclocking so once the CPU is clocked and 100% stable I won't need fancy features. So, what started as pretty expensive has now come down to moderate and a new greenhouse. Nice!
go for the ssd's best money you will spend. got two c300 64gb in raid for my opp and steam games. getting read speeds of 720plus mb. was a better upgrade than my sanybridge.
Sandy Bridge is your obvious choice, and the 2500K should certainly do for now. Last I heard (via fudzilla for whatever that's worth) is that Ivy Bridge 22nm processors will drop into P67 motherboards with a BIOS update too. Aside from that I would focus on graphics and a single SSD. I do love SSDs for their snappiness, but really you can just have one for your OS and a small number of key games. I use Steam Mover to shift just whatever game I am playing most across from platter to SSD - then move it back afterwards. Raid is pretty pointless with the new round of drives since they are blindingly fast already. Graphics is a bit tricky. The 580 should really be fine, but 2560 is a BIG resolution if you want to push high quality settings + AA. The 6990 looks awesome, but there were so many bios and driver issues with the 5990 that I am just not convinced. I would dig around for further info on the 590 or Look at SLI 570 or 580. The 570s and 580s are significantly smaller cards to fit in your case.
On Sandy Bridge the ideal voltage for RAM I believe is 1.5v even 1.65 is beyond the recommended, so I would not put 1.8v RAM in the machine. Not sure about much better HDDs, but the Samsung F3 is the HDD most will recommend for its price and outstanding performance. The Pro board allows SLI so if you want two cards it is a good choice. I personally am not a fan of two cards in one like the 6990 and my personal recommendation would be to grabthe GTX580 and the Asus Pro board. The 580 has a lot of juice, you mentioned the 6990 killing it in reviews, but just curious, what FPS was the 580 getting at your resolution? Or the 6970 for that matter - either card is great and very powerful in Crossfire/SLI If you find any game in the future becomes unplayable to you then you can stick a second 580 in the machine which would be preferable to a dual card solution. Though by that point a whole new generation is likely out. If you really want a dual card solution then wait until the 590, regardless of your views on the card it will likely result in a price drop of the 6990 and given that t releases in just a week I would say it is worth waiting. You may even find the 590 surprises you - i fact I am sure it will, given that the 6990 is a horribly loud card that makes the GTX480 design look good, I would be very surprised if the GTX 590 was inferior to it. With only one monitor you are paying a lot of money for a card which for the most part will be underutilised. Add in the fact that you are heavily reliant on driver updates to actually get the card to run well on new games (that tends to be hit and miss with AMD at the best of times - course that is just personal opinion)
Mostly agree with this as you (the OP) will really notice the difference getting 1 or 2 SSDs - as has been said, they're not HDDs (re capacity) which is why most SSD users have one of more HDDs installed as well... ...well, i highly doubt that the 700GB you've actually got on the HDD simply the OS, programs & games? The C300 b/ms are a bit pointless as i wouldn't suggest you look at any of the current SSDs - well i could boast vastly faster r/ws than jizwizard's both as there's 4 V2s in my array & the raid card i use has 512MB of DDR2 on it (well the non-SFs rely on having a small DDR cache so why not count it?), but i wouldn't suggest you looked at buying V2s either... ...you really want to be looking at the latest tech as there are significant improvements beyond simple raw b/m speeds. Though there is a very good argument to hold off buying until the middle-end of May as there 'should' be significant price falls - assuming unfortunate events in Japan haven't altered this (though have heard nothing that suggests it has/will). Otherwise, yes buy new memory as what you've got isn't sensibly usable - just flog the current CPU, memory & mobo on eBay or something - it's what i'll be doing...
Sapphire Radeon HD 6990 4GB - $709.99 USD vs. 2x Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB in Crossfire - $276.99 each *2 = $553.98 USD Look at the Metro 2033 benchmarks here. Radeon HD 6970s in xfire perform slightly better than the 6990. Those 6950s are easily unlocked to 6970s. You save $150 for something else. Or if you wanted to spend the money, get a third card for a total of $830.97 USD. And all of those prices are without rebates or promos (which Newegg is currently running both).
Ok, after a few days of thinking, followed by a few nights of recovery time. I'm looking at 2 of these, unlocked to 6970's and put in to crossfire (although I'm still not entirely convinced. My 4870x2 has served me well and I've never had any issues with it. Dead simple to run as well): http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...dr5-gpu-830mhz-1408cores-2x-dvi-i-2x-mdp-hdmi Will I definitely be able to unlock them? I think I may wait for the Nvidia card to be announced because although I still don't think they can compete without overclocking their expected card, I would kick myself if I was wrong. I will have to buy the RAM to go with the new mobo. Am I right in thinking that the difference between RAM types is negligible and might have as little an effect of +/- 1 FPS at best? So it really comes down to volume of RAM instead of priority of speeds? SSD's are tempting but I don't think they'll make a huge difference to me at the moment. Maybe if I was doing intensive file shifting of some sort, but in gaming I am pretty satisfied with my F1's. The game loading times are a million times better than PS3 and gives enough time to grab another jelly baby before the levels load up. Where do you go these days to find HDD benchmarks? Needs more thought: HDD: 2x (raid) WD Caviar Blue 500GB, 6GBps, 7200rpm, 16MB - Is there any point in 6GBps for HDDs? or HDD: 2x (raid) Samsung F3 500GB, 3GBps, 7200rpm, 16MB GFX: ATi 6990 - for simplicity and ease of install or GFX: 2x ATi 6950, unlocked to 6970's and crossfired or GFX: Nvidia 590 or equivalent solution Finalised parts: CPU: Sandby Bridge 2500K MOBO: Asus P8P67 Pro RAM: Corsair 8GB (2x4GB) XMS3, DDR3, PC3-16000 (2000), CAS 9-10-9-27, 1.65v HDD: Samsung F3 1TB, 3GBps, 7200rpm, 32MB - for backup Plus the old parts: PSU: Tagan BZ1100 (1100W) SFX: Creative X-Fi Extreme Music CASE: Antec P182 Limited Ed OS: Windows 7 64bit Pro
Here is the link to the article about unlocking your Radeon 6950. And here are someone's test results of a locked 6950 vs unlocked. As for memory capacity vs speed, you're correct in that higher frequency memory only makes about a 1-4 fps difference. With that said, looking at G.SKILL Ripjaw Series 8GB (2x4GB), the DDR3 1600 kit runs for $99.99 USD and the DDR3 1333 kit runs for $84.99 USD. So not much difference in price at all, you might was well go for the higher frequency to get more headroom if you ever want to overclock. And if you can afford an SSD, definitely go for it. It speeds up everything.
Any reason for the change from the Deluxe to the Pro? As there is no 2000Mhz setting for memory on Sandy Bridge, you would either need to under-clock it to 1866 or over-clock it to 2133 - though with it running at 1.65V by default then you're probably looking at the former as you don't really want to go above that voltage... Though you could look at trying to tighten the timings as a trade off - & perhaps lowering the voltage. There is neither any real point in 6Gb/s HDDs atm nor sticking HDDs in R0 for a normal use - the latter is really useful for highly sequential r/ws (& some b/ms) but will have a very limited effect on a games machine & increases the chance of losing data if a drive fails. Much better to separate the 2 drives (though would probably suggest the 1TB F3s as they're slightly faster), & use the 2nd one for backing up to. Edit - or you 'could' under partition as an alt method of short-stroking with latter partitions on each drive running as the backup for the other... Though this is probably arsing around a bit too much. & then, as suggested, maybe rethink a SSD when the new 6Gb/s ones fall in price... & the general recommendation now is to look at the ASUS Xonar cards rather than the X-Fi ones... Though there's a range of them with different features & at different prices. sorry misread & thought you were buying a new card.
If I change my mind and get an Nvidia card at some point then I'll be able to SLI it And it's in stock. Definitely not looking to over-clock anything other than the CPU, so an under-clock is fine. I've decided to keep my existing pair of F1's and use those as main and backup. Have set aside the rest of budget for a new SSD but need to look into it all and work out which one at around 300GB to 500GB in size would be best, most affordable but also blazing fast. Finalised parts: CPU: Sandby Bridge 2500K MOBO: Asus P8P67 Pro RAM: Corsair 8GB (2x4GB) XMS3, DDR3, PC3-16000 (2000), CAS 9-10-9-27, 1.65v GFX: ATi 6990 or 2x 6950's unlocked to 6970's £968.00 Plus the old parts: HDD: 2x Samsung F1's PSU: Tagan BZ1100 (1100W) SFX: Creative X-Fi Extreme Music CASE: Antec P182 Limited Ed OS: Windows 7 64bit Pro
I got the RAM type from the compatible RAM with motherboards section on Corsairs website. Is it the wrong type? I will. Just waiting for the right moment.
