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View Full Version : Tax time blues: what part to buy next ?



ghonosyph
02-19-2011, 06:54 PM
Hey all, i'm in the same boat as many this time of year, looking to upgrade my system with a couple new parts.

My goal, spend 250 to 300 bucks on my pc to get a decent solid state hard drive and a couple new 120mm fans from antech, and possibly a new power supply with led lightage :D tho i know i dont have enough cash for it all

here's my current specs, I cannot afford new cpu + ram + mobo so please, keep that in mind when you bash my setup! lol

Processor: AMD phenom X4 9950 quad core 2.6 GHz
Mobo: M4A77D asus
Ram: 8 Gigs total... 4 sticks of 2 gig ram, ddr2 6400<- bought to match the mobo at the store i went to.
HDD: Velociraptor Harddrive 300GB 10,000 rpm
Graphics Card: PNY Nvidia gtx 470
Power Supply: 650 w bfg gs series atx12v 2.2
Zalman cpu cooler.
Antech 902 case.

The case itself had 4 fans in it, i added 3 more, it sounds like a turbo engine running but it stays pretty cool. It has a turbo button on it which overclocks it automatically to a certain degree, tho i dont know enough about Overclocking to really figure it out... :) but i want to learn.

The temps in my system never get over 44 degrees for the processor and never over 78 degrees on the gpu. Usual temps around 36 and 67 for internet browsing, spiking up to 44 /78 while boxing. I think theres room for improvement though.

So the idea is to upgrade the slowest part of my system and boost my windows experience index lol. Solid state HDD is the way to go imo, as the rest of the system works pretty well. I have been having some graphical issues but not sure if its isboxer related or wow cache folder related. I'll figure that out soon enough, as this gtx 470 is brand new, only a couple weeks old.



On to the point as it seems i'm rambling... OMFG WHAT SSD DO I BUY!?!!? keeping in mind 180 dollars or so would be the target price. I could go up to about 250 bucks, ideally getting 2 ssd's one for my windows 7 64 bit os and the other for my wow folder, keeping the raptor as my "data storage"

katsurahama
02-19-2011, 07:31 PM
I just recently bought a 60gb OCZ ssd. It was barely big enough to fit wow and windows 7 on it. I had to delete old wow patch files to get it all on there. While im not speaking from experience i doubt youd notice much of a difference between wow+win7 on one ssd and wow on ssdA and win7 on ssdB. Certainly not the kind of difference you get when moving from a hdd to an ssd.

An ssd should increase your windows score and one is probably enough. Id get one bigger than 60gb though - like 90 or 120. 120 is definitely more than enough for wow and windows.

I can safely say LED lighting wont improve your windows score.

angeldeelite
02-19-2011, 08:55 PM
I've gone for an OCZ 120GB Vertex II for £170 (around $270) Something similar or the same will greatly improve performance for relatively cheap :)
Fans and LED's Not going to help in that department :P
78 Degrees on your GPU? Wow... That's a bit toasty! Maybe some more intake fans would help!

ghonosyph
02-19-2011, 09:00 PM
not really, those cards run incredibly hot by nature :D And duh on the led's lol

Multibocks
02-20-2011, 12:18 PM
I can safely say LED lighting wont improve your windows score.


lol!

ghonosyph
02-20-2011, 02:29 PM
My pc looks like a raver :P go go more lightage! Multi!! buy me a new ssd! <3 lol

i think SSD is still nice and noticable. especially with the newer versions that have come out.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227578

is one of the newer pci slot ones, not too expensive and 500ish read and write. thats about double the speed of the SSDs that came out prior :D

Sam DeathWalker
02-21-2011, 12:27 AM
Although I have been recomending the revo drive I am not so sure anymore. You need to leave a lot of the drive unallocated for the garbage collection to work and some are saying that you should leave the computer on overnight twice a week:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?85029-Understanding-SF1200-drives-TRIM-OP-area-use-and-Life-write-throttle

It is still not clear to me if you can force garbage collection at any time ....

I just rewrote my entire wow folder to my drive (with 8 gig unallocated) and characters are loading in not much faster then my old 10K WD hard drives.

But my main computer with the revo has only 4G ram (I am only supposed to run one client on that computer) as compare to 8G on the other computers with the 10K WD drives.

I would do a bit more research or pick up a drive with trim.

But ya out of the box you do get the performance claimed, its just will you get it a month down the road. Even if I had to rewrite the drive onece a week or so that would be ok but ...

Keep in mind I THINK these have the older 1200 Sandforce chips and not the newer ones.

You might be in a better position then me if you leave like 30percent of the drive unallocated. I can only unallocate about 8G out of the 50G of my drive (after formating and all that). Also I ran it for months without any unallocated space. But it did just get slower and slower. I could be doing something wrong though, I am just not sure as of today.

Sam DeathWalker
02-25-2011, 04:53 AM
Ok testing the drive again a few days after replacing all of wow on the drive:

Read: 300 MB/s

Latency: .13 ms



Compare to my 10K Raptor:

Read: 73 MB/s

Latency: 8.5 ms


I do remember getting 480 MB/s "out of the box" .... still 4X speed of raptor.

ghonosyph
02-25-2011, 07:29 PM
I'm still unsure of what to buy next, i'll probably buy 2 more sticks of 4 gig ddr2, to bump up my ram to 10 gig, an ssd to round out the index score, and perhaps a new monitor. I'm wondering if i can run 3 monitors with my setup, one off the mobo, and 2 off the gpu>? that would be friggin sweet !

Sajuuk
02-25-2011, 08:29 PM
I'm still unsure of what to buy next, i'll probably buy 2 more sticks of 4 gig ddr2, to bump up my ram to 10 gig, an ssd to round out the index score, and perhaps a new monitor. I'm wondering if i can run 3 monitors with my setup, one off the mobo, and 2 off the gpu>? that would be friggin sweet !

Unsure of that...

Also, my thoughts:
SSD of your choice.
Drop a six core CPU in there. :D

ghonosyph
02-25-2011, 09:04 PM
unfortunately i cant really afford to upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram again. i've gotta build on this for now :) besides its barely been 4 months since i bought this one! lol

Sajuuk
02-25-2011, 09:31 PM
unfortunately i cant really afford to upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram again. i've gotta build on this for now :) besides its barely been 4 months since i bought this one! lol

It's an AM3 board right?

Plop this baby in.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103849

ghonosyph
02-26-2011, 12:46 AM
unfortunately i cant really afford to upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram again. i've gotta build on this for now :) besides its barely been 4 months since i bought this one! lol

^^ lolwut?

Sajuuk
02-26-2011, 07:23 PM
^^ lolwut?

wat. :p oic. Derp. don't keel me.