Help me spend $1500 on my computer. (not going to spend it right away)

[Locut0s]

Ok so I'm going to put my 1500 tax return towards my computer. This thing is 3 years old and still doing fairly well but it's starting to show its age on a few corners here and there. Here are its current specs:

Stock HSF
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA2
1 x Iomega external 1TB drive
EVGA E-GEFORCE 8800GTS 500MHZ 320MB
OCZ Gold XTC PC2-6400 3GB 3X1GB DDR2-800
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-FI Xtreme Gamer 24BIT Sound Card 7.1
ASUS P5K DELUXE/WIFI-AP ATX LGA775 P35 DDR2
Corsair HX520 CMPSU-520HX 520W
Lian Li V Cool PC-V1000B-PLUS-II Black
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Quad Core Processor
Logitech MX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse
Generic Keyboard
Dell Monitor 3007WFP 30" LCD
Windows 7 64x Pro Media Centre Edition

This was actually the crazy $4000 PC on $13/hr job I posted about some years back. So looking at the above how would you distribute the $1500 in upgrades? 4+ Gigs of mem is a definite as is upgrading the video card but I'm not sure yet what else to upgrade and or what to get specifically. One thing I'm thinking about is a SDD.

Edit: I've decided to wait a while before spending this. I'll see what the new Geforce 400 series does to prices and maybe wait for SSD prices to drop more. Will also give me some time to salt away a little more for an ever nice upgrade later Thanks for the help though!!

 

[Absolution75]

Good luck spending that much money

What I'd do:

Very rough prices
i7 920 + x58 board of choice: $500
6GB DDR3 of your choice: $200
AMD HD 5850x2: $600 or HD 5970
Probably good on the PSU, but there is leftover

You could also drop one of the video cards and get an SSD, but I think the prices are still too high.

 

[Locut0s]

Good luck spending that much money

What I'd do:

Very rough prices
i7 920 + x58 board of choice: $500
6GB DDR3 of your choice: $200
AMD HD 5850x2: $600 or HD 5970
Probably good on the PSU, but there is leftover

You could also drop one of the video cards and get an SSD, but I think the prices are still too high.

Thanks for the suggestions! Yeah an SSD would make my day to day computing really zippy but the prices are still very hard to swallow.

 

[klocwerk]

Good luck spending that much money

What I'd do:

Very rough prices
i7 920 + x58 board of choice: $500
6GB DDR3 of your choice: $200
AMD HD 5850x2: $600 or HD 5970
Probably good on the PSU, but there is leftover

You could also drop one of the video cards and get an SSD, but I think the prices are still too high.

I second this list, with the following changes.

Drop the second video card (get a better single card maybe), and pick up a relatively small SSD for your OS and major programs/games. It makes a MAJOR difference in load times and overall zippyness of the system.

One good vid card should play any modern games, and will leave you space to upgrade to SLI/crossfire down the road.

 

[Axon]

Starting from scratch essentially? There's some stuff I'd certainly reuse, like that monitor. Even those HDDs are fine. Anyway, I put down more "modernized" parts. What I have here is the 1156 platform, but you strike me as the kind of guy who might want to crossfire, so maybe look into the 1366 socket. Just trying to save some cash for you

CPU: Intel i5 750 ($199)

Mobo/RAM combo: Gigabyte GA-P55A- UD3 & Corsair XMS3 4 GB DDR3 1600 kit http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.349202 ($214, great price)

PSU: Corsair 650 HX http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139012 ($119 before rebate, but that 12v rail will crush anything). Other guys may be able to point you towards a cheaper PSU, but it won't be by much.

Case: Whatever, find something you like...something like the Antec 300 will do the job quite nicely and not eviscerate your wallet. ($64) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129066

SSD : Kingston SSDNow V Series 128 GB ($250) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820139137 Awesome read/write speeds and price to performance ratio; with this one you'd need a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter bracket. There's a desktop set that is $280 that comes with the bracket, kind of a rip off for a $10 part.

HDD : WD 640 gig HD "Black" ($75). Kinda of hard to justify vs. 1 TB these days, but still the fastest WD platter iirc http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136319

GPU: ASUS 5850 ($320) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121361&cm_re=5850-_-14-121-361-_-Productld.

Total: $1249.

Just IMHO, can always tweak a build.

 

[MisterDonut]

If your needs don't need $1500, save that money man. No point in getting performance you'll never use. What are you planning to do with it?

 

[mfenn]

If your needs don't need $1500, save that money man. No point in getting performance you'll never use. What are you planning to do with it?

This.

OP, you can spend $300 on an i7 860, $150 on a good P55 board, $100 on 4GB of DDR3, and $300 on a 5850 and have a very nice bump over your Q6600 and 8800GTS. That's $850, so save the other $650 for a nice upgrade a year from now.

We'll see some exciting things in SSD-land Q4 this year, Q1 next year when the new 25nm flash production starts ramping up.

 

[Locut0s]

If your needs don't need $1500, save that money man. No point in getting performance you'll never use. What are you planning to do with it?

This.

OP, you can spend $300 on an i7 860, $150 on a good P55 board, $100 on 4GB of DDR3, and $300 on a 5850 and have a very nice bump over your Q6600 and 8800GTS. That's $850, so save the other $650 for a nice upgrade a year from now.

We'll see some exciting things in SSD-land Q4 this year, Q1 next year when the new 25nm flash production starts ramping up.

Yeah I may not spend all of it. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Locut0s]

One thing to note about the video card is that I'm running a 30" LCD so if I were to play games at its native rez that's 2560x1600. Now most of the top crop cards can do that for older gen games at 30 fps without too much of an issue but if I go for a lower end card I'll have to turn the rez down like I am doing now (just not as much )

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I'd stick with your current rig, OC that Q6600 or get a 9550 or something and OC that, replace the 8800GTS with a 5870 or 5970, get a bigger PSU and maybe some more RAM. Your rig is still pretty decent and with what I've said you could make it really great again.

 

[Locut0s]

What about waiting for the GeForce 400 series cards? Worth it? If not I'm most likely to go with a 5870 or x2 of something less powerful but in crossfire.

 

[Davidh373]

What about waiting for the GeForce 400 series cards? Worth it? If not I'm most likely to go with a 5870 or x2 of something less powerful but in crossfire.

Why?

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

What about waiting for the GeForce 400 series cards? Worth it? If not I'm most likely to go with a 5870 or x2 of something less powerful but in crossfire.

I don't think so. They'll probably be faster, but not by much. That said, if you really want to stay with NVidia, you should wait and at least see what they can do.

 

[Locut0s]

I don't think so. They'll probably be faster, but not by much. That said, if you really want to stay with NVidia, you should wait and at least see what they can do.

I'm curious what kind of performance the 400 series will be able to get and I love the fact that they are FINALLY starting to up the geometry hardware on cards instead of just shader shader shader performance. If tessellation catches on we could see some amazing things in games coming in the future. However I am very agnostic about which company to go with, not a fanboy of any one side.

 

[MisterDonut]

What about waiting for the GeForce 400 series cards? Worth it? If not I'm most likely to go with a 5870 or x2 of something less powerful but in crossfire.

Nvidia has never impressed my wallet. I probably would go with 1156 over 1366 just because the only reason my uses would ever need 1366 is for multiple GPU's, which you should keep in mind when selecting processors. The i7-860 has a more aggressive TurboBoost than the 920, so unless you want those full PCIE lanes, I would suggest that or the better value i5-750, which should still handle most needs just fine.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I'm curious what kind of performance the 400 series will be able to get and I love the fact that they are FINALLY starting to up the geometry hardware on cards instead of just shader shader shader performance. If tessellation catches on we could see some amazing things in games coming in the future. However I am very agnostic about which company to go with, not a fanboy of any one side.

Yes, I'm impressed with it too, and I think the architecture that Fermi uses is a pretty good idea. However, NVidia is also suffering from a plague of poor execution which I think will dampen Fermi's success greatly. If I were you I'd go for AMD right now and then jump back to NVidia when the architecture has matured with the manufacturing process, and clocks go up and heat and sound go down.

 

[Absolution75]

If you've got money to blow, I definitally would suggest going x58 or P55 aka don't upgrade your 775 CPU. That socket is dead - sell off your parts now and get a decent amount of cash (probably $50 for the MB, $50 for the ram, and $100+ for the CPU). If you wait another generation, you'll only get pocket change.

I thought you wanted to spend $1500 on parts, but if you're thinking that you want to keep some cash, then I'd definitally suggest P55+i7 860 + 4GB ram. I'd still get an AMD HD 5850x2 though. You have a really high resolution monitor that actually warrents such an investment in the GPU world. Though you can always just get one, see if its okay, and if not but another one.

For the P55 build, you can expect to pay:
$280 for the CPU ($200 if you have a microcenter nearby)
$130 for the MB - don't get anything > $150, its mostly worthless
$80 for the ram
$300 for the GPU (or $600)
-------
$790
-$200 parting out old pc
------
$590 (single GPU), which is quite the bargin IMO, I also didn't account for selling your 8800 GPU

 

[MisterDonut]

I don't wanna be the only one to think so, but if the main purpose of this rig is gaming, your Q6600 should have absolutely no problems running anything. It's the GPU you should be bumping up, especially with such a high resolution. Pick up a 5870 (or two), and wait a little. Prices on the 1366 aren't going anywhere, and I doubt many games you play will warrant a second 5870 as of now. Even if it did, a few adjustments with the settings should keep it playable and look decent, so you can pick up another 5870 later (or sell the 5870 and get a 5970/6xxx if you decide your upgrade is gonna be with a 1156 platform). If you really want to put useful upgrades on your machine, get an h20 setup, new GPU, and a new PSU to go with it. The rest of your rig is not the bottleneck for gaming. Stuff that money in a sock labeled "future computer upgrades", and then see how your needs go from then. Most people who are looking at i5/i7 as an upgrade option are coming from a dual-core, or they actually have the full need for a faster processor.

EDIT: This may be irrelevant, but it may also give you an idea on CPU's. I stole it from someone else's post . http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/athlon2_phenom2_2010/12.htm

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

I don't wanna be the only one to think so, but if the main purpose of this rig is gaming, your Q6600 should have absolutely no problems running anything. It's the GPU you should be bumping up. Pick up a 5870 (or two), and wait a little. Prices on the 1366 aren't going anywhere, and I doubt many games you play will warrant a second 5870 (as of now). Even if it did, a few adjustments with the settings should keep it playable and look decent. If you really want to put useful upgrades on your machine, get an h20 setup, new GPU, and a new PSU to go with it. Stuff that money in a sock labeled "future computer upgrades", and then see how your needs go from then. Most people who are looking at i5/i7 as an upgrade option are coming from a dual-core, or they actually have the full need for a faster processor.

This.

 

[MisterDonut]

They're coming from Athalon procezzors and can care less about old arkiteckture. Sorry I just had to throw this in after reading your sig.

 

[Locut0s]

Well....

Just for fun I've put together the following configuration on both NCIX (esentially Canadas version of Newegg) and also an almost identical setup over at NewEgg Canada.

Core i7 930 --------------------- ~$310
3x2GB ram ---------------------- ~$220
2x5850 in Crossfire -------------- ~$680
ASUS P6T X58 Mobo ------------- ~$250
http://detonator.dynamitedata.com/c...com/products/index.php?sku=26414&promoid=1115Corsair TX650W 650W ----------- ~$100

~ = roughly because they prices differ between NCIX and NewEgg.

All together this comes to 1663 at NCIX and 1567 at NewEgg WITH shipping. Now you need to add 12% sales tax onto those numbers. So NewEgg saves me about 100 bucks and ships it while I would pick up the NCIX order in town here. The brand names for the mem and vid card are different because the 2 companies had different stock but essentially they are identical systems. Not too bad

Question I threw in the power supply because I'd sort of be pushing the 520W supply with all that stuff a bit, though even under full load it should only be about 85-90%. Do you think the extra 130W is really necessary? I won't be OCing any of this. If not I could throw that money behind more memory and get a 12Gig kit.

 

[Locut0s]

I don't wanna be the only one to think so, but if the main purpose of this rig is gaming, your Q6600 should have absolutely no problems running anything. It's the GPU you should be bumping up, especially with such a high resolution. Pick up a 5870 (or two), and wait a little. Prices on the 1366 aren't going anywhere, and I doubt many games you play will warrant a second 5870 as of now. Even if it did, a few adjustments with the settings should keep it playable and look decent, so you can pick up another 5870 later (or sell the 5870 and get a 5970/6xxx if you decide your upgrade is gonna be with a 1156 platform). If you really want to put useful upgrades on your machine, get an h20 setup, new GPU, and a new PSU to go with it. The rest of your rig is not the bottleneck for gaming. Stuff that money in a sock labeled "future computer upgrades", and then see how your needs go from then. Most people who are looking at i5/i7 as an upgrade option are coming from a dual-core, or they actually have the full need for a faster processor.

EDIT: This may be irrelevant, but it may also give you an idea on CPU's. I stole it from someone else's post . http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/athlon2_phenom2_2010/12.htm

Thanks I'll keep that in mind. However gaming is only part of what I use my PC for. I do a lot of HD video watching, and some encoding, some photo editing (got a 14MP camera and intend to be doing a lot of RAW editing, and lots of everyday web browsing and more. I plan on learning to program soon and will be doing lots of that. I used to do a fair amount of ray tracing (Pov-Ray) as a hobby. I also run emulators and much else. However gaming IS becomming a larger and larger percentage of that. Thing is I'm not a FPS fan so high frame rates aren't as important to me as high resolution + really high quality settings. For example I'm perfectly happy playing Dragon Age origins right now on my current system at 1920x1200 even though the frame rate is about 25fps. It would be nice to bump that up to 2560x1600 with AA. The gaming I'll be doing will mostly be RPGs, adventure/strategy, action, maybe some few FPSs. But I like high rez!

 

[MisterDonut]

Thanks I'll keep that in mind. However gaming is only part of what I use my PC for. I do a lot of HD video watching, and some encoding, some photo editing (got a 14MP camera and intend to be doing a lot of RAW editing, and lots of everyday web browsing and more. I plan on learning to program soon and will be doing lots of that. I used to do a fair amount of ray tracing (Pov-Ray) as a hobby. I also run emulators and much else. However gaming IS becomming a larger and larger percentage of that. Thing is I'm not a FPS fan so high frame rates aren't as important to me as high resolution + really high quality settings. For example I'm perfectly happy playing Dragon Age origins right now on my current system at 1920x1200 even though the frame rate is about 25fps. It would be nice to bump that up to 2560x1600 with AA. The gaming I'll be doing will mostly be RPGs, adventure/strategy, action, maybe some few FPSs. But I like high rez!

It's all up to you. I'm just advising against upgrading, and even with what you have listed, in my books, it doesn't justify spending $1500 when your quad will do it just fine. Sure it's a faster chip, but again, the platform isn't going anywhere except down, so you can wait and see if the 6600 is going to hold you back (ask around). I don't know what Pov-Ray is, so I can't speak for that; but for the rest of your needs, your Q6600 should do it fine. Get a nice 5850 and overclock it. A lot of the more stressing games seem to fall in the FPS category and will require a more powerful card for the resolutions, but as far as the RPG's go, a 5850 will do you justice (I can't think of many RPG's off the top of my head as I am mostly an FPS player, so if somebody has information otherwise, please correct me). An OC'ed 5850 will come close to a 5870, and IMO, the price difference isn't justified by $100. Personally, I don't run an h20 as I still move my rig around and will definitely set one up when I'm more settled, but you will hands-down not be disappointed with the results. Quiet, cool CPU and GPU (You'll get nothing like what h20 offers with air cooling). The setup should also help with overclocking the 5850 without the fan attempting flight (The fan can get REALLY, REALLY loud above ~35&#37. I would even advise getting an SSD over a new processor as an upgrade, and I almost never recommend SSD's with the prices they're at.

As a second piece of advice, it's also not a bad route to pick up a cheap 4890 to satisfy your needs, wait until September when the 6xxx series might debut (rumors from friends, no source). Then perhaps you can also pick up a full i5/i7 upgrade.

Your increasing plans for gaming warrant that 5850! Intel's roadmap puts the 1366 at the top for a while, so I would just sit back and let the market do its thing. Meanwhile, ask around for some h20 advice .

 

[Axon]

I'm curious what kind of performance the 400 series will be able to get and I love the fact that they are FINALLY starting to up the geometry hardware on cards instead of just shader shader shader performance. If tessellation catches on we could see some amazing things in games coming in the future. However I am very agnostic about which company to go with, not a fanboy of any one side.

Nothing nvidia has done so far has impressed me. They've released prices and wattage requirements on their 400 series, but no benches are out there yet. If I had good benches I'd have them out there a month before release.

As to waiting: you can always wait to upgrade. If you wait now you'll have sandy bridge and whatever P55 refresh Intel is planning next year, or AMD's six core CPU, or the SSD upgrades do in Q4 2010. That's up to you, really. You can wait forever in this business, there's always an upgrade coming down the pipe in six months.

When I see good price/performance chips like the i7 920 and the i5 750, I usually move on them. That's just me. 775 remains viable but is dead end tech.

 

[Davidh373]

I don't wanna be the only one to think so, but if the main purpose of this rig is gaming, your Q6600 should have absolutely no problems running anything. It's the GPU you should be bumping up, especially with such a high resolution. Pick up a 5870 (or two), and wait a little. Prices on the 1366 aren't going anywhere, and I doubt many games you play will warrant a second 5870 as of now. Even if it did, a few adjustments with the settings should keep it playable and look decent, so you can pick up another 5870 later (or sell the 5870 and get a 5970/6xxx if you decide your upgrade is gonna be with a 1156 platform). If you really want to put useful upgrades on your machine, get an h20 setup, new GPU, and a new PSU to go with it. The rest of your rig is not the bottleneck for gaming. Stuff that money in a sock labeled "future computer upgrades", and then see how your needs go from then. Most people who are looking at i5/i7 as an upgrade option are coming from a dual-core, or they actually have the full need for a faster processor.

EDIT: This may be irrelevant, but it may also give you an idea on CPU's. I stole it from someone else's post . http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/athlon2_phenom2_2010/12.htm

I agree whole heartedly. This guy has a great amount of common sense!