Upgrading PC for 8 x accounts

[kaiverrettu]

F

SSDs are becoming much more reliable today than they ever were in the past. My Intel 510's have
a "Minimum Useful Life" of 20GB/day for 5 years (that's considered normal usage). That's 36.5TB of
total data that I can write to this drive before it will explode.

So far, in almost a year (10 months), I've written 1.9TB of data to my OS SSD and that includes
numerous reinstalls of Windows 7. 1.9TB / 10Months = 190GB/Month. 190GB / 30Days = ~6.3GB/day.
My other Intel 510 was used as my gaming drive and it had about 900GB of Host Writes before I
moved my games off of it. That's 50% less usage than the OS drive. Could these drives fail sooner
than 36.5TB of Host Writes? Sure, but I've got a nice 3 year warranty with these Intel 510's. After
3 years if they still work that would be great, and if not I'll just buy the next super fast model SSD.
I should be able to save up enough money in 3 years if the drive needs replacing after that.

Fair enough. I just didn't want my computer to end up failing in the midst of a gaming performance without the opportunity to backup. So after I heard about the nightmares some people had with the SSD's here(and elsewhere) I decided to skip it, but if it's really that good for multiboxing I might end up buying one someday.

[MiRai]

Fair enough. I just didn't want my computer to end up failing in the midst of a gaming performance without the opportunity to backup. So after I heard about the nightmares some people had with the SSD's here(and elsewhere) I decided to skip it, but if it's really that good for multiboxing I might end up buying one someday.

Your point is valid, though. I wouldn't keep anything on an SSD that I wouldn't be comfortable losing.
Game installs? Operating system? Neither of those things are a big deal to me if they're lost because
everything can just be reinstalled. If I was going to use SSDs as any type of back up they would have
to be enterprise-level SSDs in a large RAID array. Unfortunately, I don't have that much money to spend
on that and 1TB, 2TB, or even 3TB hard drives aren't hard to come by these days at a much lower price.

[jnorland]

MiRai what do you think would be the best way to determine if my video card is my limiting factor or if it's my CPU? Again I have a i7 920 2.66 Ghz; Overclocked to 4.0 Ghz and the AMD HD6870. The new RAM is installed and the Crucial M4 is up and running with both the OS and WOW. Everything is running pretty good but it's still a bit sketchy when I get all the accounts up. I may try running them in DX9 as you suggested earlier but I'm considering one more upgrade. Not sure if watching task manager is enough to determine the CPU performance with all 8 games up and running. I’m guessing the 1G card is still my limiting factor but I’m wondering how much room I would gain before capping the CPU by upgrading.

I'm looking at either getting a new video card right now that will increase my performance as much as my CPU will allow (also step one in a new system down the road) or waiting until I can build a new system all together. The determining factor being how much room can I theoretically gain with the video card. I'll keep in mind that I'll never get the most out of the newer video card until I've upgraded the motherboard to PCIe 3.0.

[MiRai]

MiRai what do you think would be the best way to determine if my video card is my limiting factor or if it's my CPU?

GPU-Z and Windows Task Manager. In GPU-Z check to see what your video RAM usage and load is at.
I believe with an ATI/AMD card you should be looking at Memory Usage (Dedicated).

I'll keep in mind that I'll never get the most out of the newer video card until I've upgraded the motherboard to PCIe 3.0.

I think maybe I put too much emphasis on PCIe 2.0/3.0 in my prior posts. Right now, with PCIe 2.0 we
cannot saturate all of the available lanes with data and PCIe 3.0 is currently overkill in a single card
setup. Reading this review, you'll see that an AMD 7970 was tested in both a PCIe 2.0 slot and a PCIe
3.0 slot. As you can see you won't actually be losing out on anything and you should be able to safely
upgrade your video card now if you wanted to get a new AMD model.

The only issue that may arise is when you're going to throw multiple 3.0 video cards at a system which
can only handle 2.0. From the article:

However there are a few caveats that should be mentioned. Even though a single HD 7970 may not
saturate a PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot, things could change drastically once two of these cards are installed into
a Z68 motherboard which uses a dual 8x setup for Crossfire and SLI. Things will likely get even more
complicated when AMD’s new dual GPU product is released in the first half of 2012. We’ll likely revisit
this topic throughout 2012 but for the time being, rest assured knowing that AMD’s HD 7970 is in no
way limited by current PCI-E certifications.

[jnorland]

Awesome, I'll pull up GPU-Z tonight and see what I get. I know we talked about the cards but I am really considering going for the 7950 and saving $80 to $100 bucks. I just dont' know if I'll use enough of the 7970 to pay for the upgrade.

This one is OC'd to 900MHZ XFX $470 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150601

These is the cheapest 7970 I can find:

HIS $550 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814161399

XFX $590 OC to 1000Mhz http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150591

I'm avoiding Sapphire based on your recommendation and ASUS because of a recall http://www.overclock.net/t/1220328/b...i-fault-report

Card Reviews:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5476/a...on-7950-review

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...ance,2932.html