1. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.

Build Advice Upgrade time is here

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Pointy, 14 Oct 2012.

  1. Pointy

    Pointy What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    15 Nov 2008
    Posts:
    49
    Likes Received:
    2
    I can't believe my current system is 4 years old. Still running OK but having just built a nice gaming system for a customer it has given me the urge to upgrade. Last time I bottled out when it came to SSD but now I think it's time to change.

    The RIG is mainly used for gaming.

    I am going to keep...

    LIAN LI X2000 Case (Would like to get one of these for it, but not sure if it will fit or where to get them in UK)
    Corsair HX1000 PSU
    ASUS Xonar D2X Audio Card
    2 x Asus GTX580's (I upgraded from teh GTX280's last year)
    HP LP2475W Monitor
    Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

    What I have in mind is this...

    Noctua NH-D14 Dual Radiator and Fan
    Intel Core i5 3570K CPU
    Asus Sabertooth Z77 motherboard
    Corsair 16GB DDR3 1866MHz Vengeance Low Profile (Low profile might be needed because of the size of the Noctua)
    2 x OCZ Vertex 4 256GB SSD (RAID 0)

    Budget is no more than £1000

    Would like to get the CPU up to 4.5ghz if poss but would be happy with anything over 4. (Current i7 920 is running at 3.4ghz)

    Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.

    Regards,

    Les
     
  2. rollo

    rollo Modder

    Joined:
    16 May 2008
    Posts:
    7,887
    Likes Received:
    131
    Buy the ssd and save yourself the cash there is little to no difference between i7920 and the 37 series in games unless the game is CPU dependent. You could easily hit 4ghz on your i7 as well.
     
  3. bagman

    bagman Minimodder

    Joined:
    18 Apr 2009
    Posts:
    3,658
    Likes Received:
    79
    This is not true. There is actually quite a significant difference in games due to PCI 3.0.

    Everything that you picked out for yourself is fine.
     
  4. aNuclearPidgeon

    aNuclearPidgeon Minimodder

    Joined:
    3 Mar 2011
    Posts:
    208
    Likes Received:
    7
    Doesn't matter since he's keeping his GTX 580s (PCI-E 2.0)
    Also from what I've read the PCI-E lane version makes very little difference in gaming.
     
  5. bagman

    bagman Minimodder

    Joined:
    18 Apr 2009
    Posts:
    3,658
    Likes Received:
    79
  6. rollo

    rollo Modder

    Joined:
    16 May 2008
    Posts:
    7,887
    Likes Received:
    131
    His 580s cant use pci-e 3.0 bandwidth so its irelivent ( niether can the 590 ). Only 6 series gpus from nvidia and 7 series from AMD are pci-e 3.0 comp.

    Its not the pcie the reason its got faster fps the 3570k is a faster chip but the difference is small and if they used bf3 to test with at the time instead of 2 cpu games then you would of seen 0 difference as bf3 is gpu bound. ( bielieve anandtech showed the difference using bf3 to be within the law of averages aka 1 fps either side)( resolutions tested with 1920x1080, 2560 and multi monitor )

    In any GPU bound game the difference between a i7920 at 4ghz and 3570k at 4ghz will be close enough to 0.
     
    aNuclearPidgeon likes this.
  7. narwen

    narwen narwen

    Joined:
    6 Aug 2010
    Posts:
    387
    Likes Received:
    12
    overclockers do the io port kit
     
  8. javaman

    javaman May irritate Eyes

    Joined:
    10 May 2009
    Posts:
    3,984
    Likes Received:
    186
  9. bagman

    bagman Minimodder

    Joined:
    18 Apr 2009
    Posts:
    3,658
    Likes Received:
    79
    He will be running the 3570K at 5ghz because it is easy to overclock it to that level just like a 920 will easily do 4.0ghz. Looking at the shogun 2 benchmark it has roughly a 45% increase in performance which is massive. So even if he does only overclock to 4.6ghz+ it will be a large performance gain.

    Arma II benchmark not as relevant as it is such a old game, devs and manufactures don't code as efficiently for the old games as they do the new ones.
     
  10. GoodBytes

    GoodBytes How many wifi's does it have?

    Joined:
    20 Jan 2007
    Posts:
    12,300
    Likes Received:
    710
    The GeFroce 600 series doesn't use enough bandwidth to reach PCI-E 3.0.
    You'll just get a slight bump of 2-3 fps due to the faster CPU, if anything.
    Waist of money. Your CPU is good for another 3-4 years.

    However, for your SSD of course, you will be on SATA-2. Not that it really maters, as small files (which is what we work with the most) performance isn't reaching the max speed of SATA-2. Only sequential read/write will be limited. So basically, you'll be bottleneck if you start working or movies large files, like movies or videos files. Just letting you know, in the case you wonder.

    You may say: "But I have SATA-3 no?". Well unless you are incredibly lucky, and got a late i7 900 series motherboard with a proper SATA-3, you don't have it. You see because some genius at Marvel, which did the SATA-3 chip, thought. "Hey, let's save some money, probably, and lets make our awesome chip, on PCI-E 2x instead of 4x". Sadly PCI-E 2x doesn't have the bandwidth of SATA-3.. but rather SATA-2. And as there was not any SSD or HDD to test such speed at the time, no one new until it was too late. So now you SATA-3 chip is really SATA-2, and because its further away form the CPU, as its an independent chip, its actually slower than Intel SATA-2. You can't ask for a bigger fail.

    So, yes you'll enjoy your col RAID 0 very much, but if you run some benchmark, don't expect to get crazy speeds on sequential read and write, but the rest will be nicely boosted, and you should see a performance increase.

    I am just saying this so that you don't freak out.



    The only thing I see that its worth upgrading, is your RAM (get at least 6GB, 3GB isn't enough) and getting an SSD. The rest, you are just wasting your money.
     
  11. theshadow2001

    theshadow2001 [DELETE] means [DELETE]

    Joined:
    3 May 2012
    Posts:
    5,284
    Likes Received:
    183
    They use both of those games on cpu reviews because they are particularly cpu dependant. It has nothing to do with pci express 3. These games are not reflective of most games which are gpu dependant. They don't use the same games as gpu reviews because the cpu has very little impact on the vast majority of games.

    [​IMG]

    http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=29402&all=1
     
    Last edited: 14 Oct 2012
  12. Pointy

    Pointy What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    15 Nov 2008
    Posts:
    49
    Likes Received:
    2
    Thanks for the replies guys.

    I think upon reflection that it is probably a waste of money going the whole hog. I think that I will go for the SSD upgrade for now and maybe overclock the 920 a tad more.

    My motherboard is the original P6T Deluxe so only has SATA 2 and PCI-E 2. I already have 6GB RAM and to be honest it does everything I want at the moment, just seems a bit slow starting up.

    I am not interested in benchmarks for the SSD'S as long as I see a noticeable difference I will be happy.

    Regards,

    Les
     
  13. David

    David μoʍ ɼouმ qᴉq λon ƨbԍuq ϝʁλᴉuმ ϝo ʁԍɑq ϝμᴉƨ

    Joined:
    7 Apr 2009
    Posts:
    17,419
    Likes Received:
    5,791
    Keep the i7 920 and clock it up - you'll see more of a benefit from the SSD than ANYTHING else you can do. If you're still hankering for more then, fair enough, upgrade your CPU/mobo; but as others have quite rightly pointed out, most games won't see the benefit (not including heavily CPU-centric titles).

    Have you considered a Corsair H100? clicky - it looks like the X2000 can accommodate one very easily.
     
    N17 dizzi likes this.
  14. GoodBytes

    GoodBytes How many wifi's does it have?

    Joined:
    20 Jan 2007
    Posts:
    12,300
    Likes Received:
    710
    I had one of the fastest HDD, and I got the Vertex 4, the difference is night and day. Honest.
    It's been a while I have it, and I am still amazed how everything is super fast.

    I got the 256GB version, with the latest firmware 1.5, I made my usually dual partitions of C:\ for Windows, and D:\ all the rest, including games and programs. I still have my HDD, as I keep my larger contents, like ISO backups, music, and stuff. But the everything is on my SSD. Super duper fast. Windows 7 64-bit boots in no time (19 sec last I check (that is AFTER the BIOS does all its thing, and the boot process of Windows starts and I stop once rechead the desktop).

    Once you have your SSD, before you do anything, be sure to set your SATA controller to AHCI if its not already set to that mode. AHCI give you the full potential of your SATA controller, and provides you: NCQ support, which boost nicely HDD performance when multitasking, TRIM support, which you need for your SSD, and as well as hot swappable, and eSATA support.

    Once that is set, you are ready to install Windows 7 (or 8) on it. Please, please, please, don't follow any "SSD optimization" crap. I did tests, and I know how everything mentioned works in Windows. They don't. So I can tell you they are all 100% CRAP. The otehr tweaks suggested where is to move a lot of the writing to an HDD, doesn't concern you, and is idiotic. Because first of all, you'll limit your computer experience as when a program or Windows writes stuff on some files, like page file, or cache in the case of a web browser, it will be limited by your HDD. So you are hammering down your computer experience. Also, you have a synchronous SSD, these support a significantly more amount of writes than the cheaper SSD's which are asynchronous. That is why the warranty of the Vertex 4 is 5 years, and not 3 years or even 1 years like the cheaper SSD's.

    So sit back, enjoy, do nothing special, and you'll get the best experience possible. Windows takes care of everything, you don't even need to worry about Windows auto-defrag as it knows that you have an SSD, and just skips it. In Windows 8, they renamed "disk defrag" to "disk optimize", as for SSDs, it manually executes TRIM, and defrags for HDD's.
     
  15. mm vr

    mm vr The cheesecake is a lie

    Joined:
    18 Nov 2007
    Posts:
    2,968
    Likes Received:
    84
    I get 10 seconds from power button to Windows desktop. Seriously fast stuff. UEFI, Windows 8, and Samsung 830 128GB.
     
  16. GoodBytes

    GoodBytes How many wifi's does it have?

    Joined:
    20 Jan 2007
    Posts:
    12,300
    Likes Received:
    710
    Yes, UEFI makes things faster, as Windows doesn't need to re-detect the hardware a second time after the BIOS did. Plus, EUFI uses new standard to detect hardware so it not only it does it faster, it doesn't need to go one by one, and just get everything together, and gives all that info to the OS.

    My motherboard on my desktop has a BIOS update out some time ago, which I recently applied. which provide EFI support. I didn't see Windows boot any faster, I don't need know if I need to re-install it. In any case, I am putting Windows 8 on my desky.

    On m laptop, with a bit slower SSD, and slower everything (Core 2 Duo P8400 2.2GHz, 4GB of RAM DDR2, Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M, Corsair Force GT 120GB), boots (after the BIOS does it detection: in 11sec Windows 8 64-bit).
     
  17. Pointy

    Pointy What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    15 Nov 2008
    Posts:
    49
    Likes Received:
    2
    Having slept on it, I am now veering back towards the full upgrade.

    The 2 x Vertex are about 40% of the upgrade cost. I would be buying these either way.

    The rest come to just shy of £500, I have a buyer for my old parts @ £200. Which means technically the rest is costing me £300ish.

    What do I get for that £300?

    More than double my current RAM, PCI-E 3, SATA 3, UEFI BIOS and a great looking motherboard. Is it worth it? Most of you will probably say no, but I think so.

    Regards,

    Les
     
  18. David

    David μoʍ ɼouმ qᴉq λon ƨbԍuq ϝʁλᴉuმ ϝo ʁԍɑq ϝμᴉƨ

    Joined:
    7 Apr 2009
    Posts:
    17,419
    Likes Received:
    5,791
    Getting a decent amount for your old bits certainly makes an upgrade more attractive. Personally, I wouldn't do a full upgrade unless my rig was really struggling with something critical for me. However, shiny things are nice. ;)

    I'm not sure just how much more benefit RAID0 will offer on the SSDs, versus a single SSD, especially for the outlay; but there's no reason why you can't - Z77 supports TRIM on RAID setups I believe.
     
  19. Parge

    Parge the worst Super Moderator

    Joined:
    16 Jul 2010
    Posts:
    13,022
    Likes Received:
    618
    VERY nice case by the way.

    Not sure if anyone else has mentioned it, but I probably wouldn't bother spending £56 on that Noctua cooler.

    Something half the price like this, this or this, will do the same job.
     
  20. Pointy

    Pointy What's a Dremel?

    Joined:
    15 Nov 2008
    Posts:
    49
    Likes Received:
    2
    I love the LIAN LI X2000, it just fits perfectly in my study, is quiet, looks good and keeps everything cool.

    I am going for the Noctua because the current one has served my well and I am hoping to get a reasonable overclock with it. While I did contemplate a WC solution, I still don't like the idea of liquid inside my PC.

    I will post some pics/reports of the upgrade as it progresses.

    Regards,

    Les
     

Share This Page