Hello! o/ I'm New and Need of Guidance

[NDLT]

Hello there!

My birthday just past recently and my best friend got me a custom made computer for gaming. Told me he got it for $900 which is awesome! Load times are super fast and gaming with it has been great but what I want to know is if it's capable of more? I want to be able to I guess add or upgrade this pc to the best that it can be for what I have. I see I have room for some ram and stuff but I'm not knowledgeable about what's inside my motherboard.

I'll try my best to provide what is needed to see if I can add more to what I have.

The information I have currently from looking at the properties are

Windows 7 Home Premium

AMD FX(tm)-8320 Eight-Core Processor 3.50 GHz

64-bit Operating System

It came with 2x 4GB RipjawsX RAM

MSi GEFORCE GTX 970 4GB GDDR5 3.0 PCI-E OC Edition (Guessing it's Nvidia since I have the control panel here)

It also has some cooling mechanism that has these 2 tubes connected to a big fan inside the tower which has Corsair on it.


Let me know if more info is needed. I'll try my best to get it if I need to open up the tower and see.


Thank you very much!

 

[MustISO]

At this point there's nothing you should add/change. Save your money for the future when the PC isn't performing as you'd like. You don't mention what type of hard drive is installed, if it's not an SSD that would be the only thing I would change.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sounds great! Before you think about upgrading it, consider, is there anything that you are trying to run with that rig, that won't run acceptably to you?

It's a pretty stout system, as-is, although the AMD CPU isn't as good for gaming as a modern Intel CPU. (But the AMD is less expensive, so it's no surprise that paying more for a rig, would get you a faster rig, with Intel.)

It sounds like your friend installed a closed-loop water-cooling system for you. (The two "tubes", connected the CPU waterblock, to the radiator.)

Did your friend overclock the system for you too? That's one way to improve performance, and is likely possible without damaging things too much. (The water-cooling helps there. It depends on your motherboard and the quality of the VRMs too.)

That's a pretty awesome rig, as-is, though, so unless there's something that won't run on it, I probably wouldn't change much.

 

[NDLT]

At this point there's nothing you should add/change. Save your money for the future when the PC isn't performing as you'd like. You don't mention what type of hard drive is installed, if it's not an SSD that would be the only thing I would change.

What's a SSD?

Sounds great! Before you think about upgrading it, consider, is there anything that you are trying to run with that rig, that won't run acceptably to you?

hmm...not really. I suppose it's fine I just want to be prepared for later in time I guess. I've also tried streaming which from what I hear, it's been fine while running OBS.

It's a pretty stout system, as-is, although the AMD CPU isn't as good for gaming as a modern Intel CPU. (But the AMD is less expensive, so it's no surprise that paying more for a rig, would get you a faster rig, with Intel.)

Is it a drastic difference for gaming? Just out of curiosity. I know I wont be able to change it if I wanted to anytime soon anyways. In no rush.

It sounds like your friend installed a closed-loop water-cooling system for you. (The two "tubes", connected the CPU waterblock, to the radiator.)

That sounds about right. He explained it like that.


Did your friend overclock the system for you too? That's one way to improve performance, and is likely possible without damaging things too much. (The water-cooling helps there. It depends on your motherboard and the quality of the VRMs too.)

I don't know. Is there anyway to find out and what information to provide with that can help? Can I also find out the temperature too?

That's a pretty awesome rig, as-is, though, so unless there's something that won't run on it, I probably wouldn't change much.

Thank you! I'm really excited about it! I want it to perform the best it can possibly be! I imagine I have more room for ram cause I am running only 8GBs of it. Don't know if these RipjawX ones are ok for this comp so I can buy more of them to add.

Answers in the quote.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you are streaming PC games, then the 8-core FX series is actually good for that (even if it doesn't have as high a single-threaded performance as Intel, so game frame-rates may be slightly lower), because of the extra cores.

You may well want 16GB of RAM though, too. Just try to find out the specs of the RAM, and get two more sticks of the same type. (Assuming that your motherboard has four DIMM slots.)

An SSD will also make your rig perform better in everyday tasks. An SSD is a hard drive, without any moving parts, essentially. It's all just chips. (It's a controller, sometimes DRAM, and an array of NAND chips.) They are more expensive than a HDD, by a factor of like 8-10x, per unit of storage.

I would recommend getting a 240 or 480GB SSD.

 

[NDLT]

If you are streaming PC games, then the 8-core FX series is actually good for that (even if it doesn't have as high a single-threaded performance as Intel, so game frame-rates may be slightly lower), because of the extra cores.

You may well want 16GB of RAM though, too. Just try to find out the specs of the RAM, and get two more sticks of the same type. (Assuming that your motherboard has four DIMM slots.)

An SSD will also make your rig perform better in everyday tasks. An SSD is a hard drive, without any moving parts, essentially. It's all just chips. (It's a controller, sometimes DRAM, and an array of NAND chips.) They are more expensive than a HDD, by a factor of like 8-10x, per unit of storage.

I would recommend getting a 240 or 480GB SSD.

Ahh I got it. I downloaded something while browsing called Speccy. It shows the stuff I have on the computer. It shows this.

Hard drives
Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250G SATA Disk Device
Manufacturer SAMSUNG
Heads 16
Cylinders 30,401
Tracks 7,752,255
Sectors 488,392,065
SATA type SATA-III 6.0Gb/s
Device type Fixed
ATA Standard ACS2
Serial Number S1DBNSAFA66019H
Firmware Version Number EXT0CB6Q
LBA Size 48-bit LBA
Power On Count 228 times
Power On Time 22.0 days
Speed Not used (SSD Drive)
Features S.M.A.R.T., NCQ, TRIM, SSD
Max. Transfer Mode SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Used Transfer Mode SATA III 6.0Gb/s
Interface SATA
Capacity 232 GB
Real size 250,059,350,016 bytes
RAID Type None
S.M.A.R.T
Status Good
Temperature 29 °C
Temperature Range OK (less than 50 °C)
S.M.A.R.T attributes
Partition 0
Partition ID Disk #0, Partition #0
File System NTFS
Volume Serial Number E4C168CE
Size 99 MB
Used Space 38.1 MB (38%)
Free Space 61 MB (62%)
Partition 1
Partition ID Disk #0, Partition #1
Disk Letter C:
File System NTFS
Volume Serial Number D0CFF614
Size 232 GB
Used Space 63 GB (27%)
Free Space 168 GB (73%)


This helped?


Edit: This is what I got for the RAM

RAM
Memory slots
Total memory slots 4
Used memory slots 2
Free memory slots 2
Memory
Type DDR3
Size 8192 MBytes
Channels # Dual
DRAM Frequency 800.0 MHz
CAS# Latency (CL) 11 clocks
RAS# to CAS# Delay (tRCD) 11 clocks
RAS# Precharge (tRP) 11 clocks
Cycle Time (tRAS) 28 clocks
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 39 clocks
Physical Memory
Memory Usage 25 %
Total Physical 7.90 GB
Available Physical 5.89 GB
Total Virtual 16 GB
Available Virtual 14 GB
SPD
Number Of SPD Modules 2
Slot #1
Slot #2

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ahh I got it. I downloaded something while browsing called Speccy. It shows the stuff I have on the computer. It shows this.

Hard drives
Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250G SATA Disk Device

Memory slots
Total memory slots 4
Used memory slots 2
Free memory slots 2
Memory
Type DDR3
Size 8192 MBytes
Channels # Dual
DRAM Frequency 800.0 MHz
CAS# Latency (CL) 11 clocks
RAS# to CAS# Delay (tRCD) 11 clocks
RAS# Precharge (tRP) 11 clocks
Cycle Time (tRAS) 28 clocks
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 39 clocks

Well, that's good news. Your friend hooked you up good, that Samsung 250GB IS an SSD. You're set. (And your friend appears to be pretty-well versed in technology.)

The RAM, well, it says that there are two more slots available, and your specs are DDR3-1600 11-11-11-28. Get two more sticks of that same brand RAM with the same specs, and you should be good.

 

[NDLT]

Well, that's good news. Your friend hooked you up good, that Samsung 250GB IS an SSD. You're set. (And your friend appears to be pretty-well versed in technology.)

The RAM, well, it says that there are two more slots available, and your specs are DDR3-1600 11-11-11-28. Get two more sticks of that same brand RAM with the same specs, and you should be good.

Thank you for the advice.

I have now 1 question regarding overclocking. How can I tell if my friend did it or not? And does overclocking increase fps?

 

[Cerb]

Easiest way is to go into the overclocking section of the setup and see if anything's changed. It would be unreasonable, IMO, to do that for someone else's PC, but yours is definitely set up to handle some overclocking.

Most games will at some point be limited by a single thread, meaning a single CPU core's performance (IoW, even if it uses all 8, the 1 of those 8 that takes the longest determines the resulting performance). That's not too speedy on the FX-8320 (but, it is a $900 PC with a GTX 970 and CLC), though the actual speed varies by load. Some overclocking can improve minimum FPS in games that aren't primarily limited by the GPU.