Upgrade or wait?

[Slim Reaper]

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. Gaming

2. What YOUR budget is. $700

3. What country YOU will be buying YOUR parts from. US. I have a newegg will-call in my city.

4. N/A

5. IF YOU have a brand preference. Prefer intel.

6. If YOU intend on using any of YOUR current parts, and if so, what those parts are. Keeping case, dvd drive, keyboard, monitor, and hdds.

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.
I can overclock but isn't necessary.

8. What resolution, not monitor size, will you be using? 1080P

9. WHEN do you plan to build it? Now, if necessary.

My current system specs are i5 750 overclocked to 3.6GHZ, 8GB ram, no ssds, and a GTX 460. Should I upgrade the whole thing or just the video card. Also would adding a ssd make a difference.

 

[Burpo]

Of course adding an SSD would help, but the whole system's getting pretty old..

 

[Blain]

Upgrade or wait?

wait

 

[jime1]

wait

LOL

 

[Ken g6]

It would be nice to have details on your case and your PSU. But something that can power a GTX 460 should also work on a GTX 970. So here's a suggestion:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($226.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: *Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($59.99 @ Micro Center)
Storage: *Crucial BX100 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($89.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: *Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card ($309.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $686.96
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-03-31 10:12 EDT-0400

Keep your RAM as well.

 

[Oyeve]

I recently put new life in my 8 year old PC. It has a gigabyte mobo, P35-Ds3, put a q9550 in it, added a 1TB ssd, swapped out the 5770 and put in a 4GB r9-290 in it, added 4GB of ram and this sucker plays everything. Got the SSD, CPU and r9-290 for free from work. I am waiting for GTAV now.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I recently put new life in my 8 year old PC. It has a gigabyte mobo, P35-Ds3, put a q9550 in it, added a 1TB ssd, swapped out the 5770 and put in a 4GB r9-290 in it, added 4GB of ram and this sucker plays everything. Got the SSD, CPU and r9-290 for free from work. I am waiting for GTAV now.

Was the mobo SATA controller SATA-III? If not (likely not for a P35 mobo), you're cutting your sustained throughput potential for the 1TB SSD in half.

If the board has PCI-E 2.0 slots, you could get a $75 PCI-E x2 SATA-III controller. And it still might be "better," even with PCI-E 1.0 slots. [Somebody challenge that if you need to.]

Nothing "wrong" with an SSD that tops out at 300 MB/s. I did it to a C2D laptop, added more RAM, and used some of it to RAM-cache the MX100 SSD I threw in as boot-system-everything disk. The MX100 cost me ~$200, the RAM added another $100 and the Primo-Cache software cost me ~$20 per PC -- a 3PC license. I could've bought a new laptop -- but -- the project was fun.

The old laptop is "fast," but the CPU usage meter can run up to 100% momentarily for certain things.

 

[Oyeve]

Was the mobo SATA controller SATA-III? If not (likely not for a P35 mobo), you're cutting your sustained throughput potential for the 1TB SSD in half.

If the board has PCI-E 2.0 slots, you could get a $75 PCI-E x2 SATA-III controller. And it still might be "better," even with PCI-E 1.0 slots. [Somebody challenge that if you need to.]

Nothing "wrong" with an SSD that tops out at 300 MB/s. I did it to a C2D laptop, added more RAM, and used some of it to RAM-cache the MX100 SSD I threw in as boot-system-everything disk. The MX100 cost me ~$200, the RAM added another $100 and the Primo-Cache software cost me ~$20 per PC -- a 3PC license. I could've bought a new laptop -- but -- the project was fun.

The old laptop is "fast," but the CPU usage meter can run up to 100% momentarily for certain things.

My mobo has sata 3gb. In real world there is barely a difference between 3gb and 6gs. Only in synthetic benchmarks do you see the speed.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

My mobo has sata 3gb. In real world there is barely a difference between 3gb and 6gs. Only in synthetic benchmarks do you see the speed.

Maybe you're right . . . maybe I can't really "say" for the implications of your assertion. Me old Mom's system has SATA-II->Elm-Crest-SSD, and -- it's fast enough for what she does.

I just try to get the most-est. Human perceptions may only see fractions of a second in difference -- thousands or millionths -- maybe not. People say the RAM-caching just yields "benchmark" performance, but I think I can tell the difference . . .

But your argument is what I always cite for the futility of RAID0 SSDs. As in the Eastwood movie: "A man's got to know his limitations . . . "

 

[mfenn]

My mobo has sata 3gb. In real world there is barely a difference between 3gb and 6gs. Only in synthetic benchmarks do you see the speed.

:thumbsup::thumbsup: Synthetics and of course the good ole' "but it feels faster" placebo test.

A typical desktop workload simply does not require sequentially reading/writing multi-gigabyte files on a regular basis.

 

[mfenn]

It would be nice to have details on your case and your PSU. But something that can power a GTX 460 should also work on a GTX 970. So here's a suggestion:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($226.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: *Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($59.99 @ Micro Center)
Storage: *Crucial BX100 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($89.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: *Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card ($309.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $686.96
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-03-31 10:12 EDT-0400

Keep your RAM as well.

:thumbsup: This looks nice. OP, if you decided to spend less, I think I would drop the CPU/mobo first and then the GPU. In other words, the SSD is the best bang for the buck upgrade, and the CPU/mobo is the least (but all three are good).

 

[Slim Reaper]

Thanks for the advice. I'll order a ssd tonight and look for a gpu tomorrow.