Upgrading, do I need to replace mobo/cpu?

[tren001]

Hi:

I'm planning to upgrade my 3 year old pc, hopefully to mid range level so I can play some games. Although a lot of the games I'm interested in are older stuff (2-4 years old) from steam sales that I've not gotten to yet. Although I just picked up Skyrim on amazon's lightning deal, and probably will move into EVE online, and I've always had a fondness for newer FPShooters, all of which will need some decent hardware to run on my 24" 1920x1200 monitor.

Here's the comp I built 3 years ago:
Lynnfield i5-750 on P55 LGA1156 mobo
2 x 2 GB DDR3 RAM
Radeon 5770 gfx card
64 gb SSD + 1 Tb and 2 Tb disk based HDs

I plan to start with:
1. 120 or 240 gb SSD as primary disk (for Windows 7), will dual boot XP onto the 64 gb SSD
2. modern gfx card, something around a Radeon 5870 or equivalent
I DON'T plan on crossfire/SLI (though ostensibly the old mobo supports it)

So here are my questions:

1. Should I spend more to upgrade the mobo and cpu? What I have is more than enough for snappy application performance, and will spending $$$ on modern cpu get me much better gaming performance, or just better energy use/heat profiles?

2. Alternatively, since I have to open up the tower to replace the video card and SSD, should I keep the mobo and see if I can buy a used Lynnfield core i7 as a cheap upgrade?

3. With my planned addition of another SSD, is there any problem my existing mobo would have issue running 2 SSDs, 2 disk HDs, and a DVD burner?

4. Any reason to upgrade to Windows 8 in terms of gaming performance?

5. Any reason to upgrade to 8 gb of RAM? I would have to buy 2 new sticks of 4 gb RAM.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me! I'm most interested in hearing people's opinions on whether it is worth it to spend all the extra money on a new mobo/cpu/ram, then having to spend more time to sell off the old mobo/cpu/ram on ebay.

 

[lehtv]

1. IMO yes, if you can afford it, a new CPU would help with gaming performance when using a more powerful graphics card.

2. No, don't spend any money on 4-year old hardware

3. No problem.

4. Not really

5. Not really. 8GB is nice but purely for gaming, 4GB is fine almost all of the time.

It would help if you listed answers to the questions in the stickied thread on top of this forum... http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=80121

I plan to start with:
1. 120 or 240 gb SSD as primary disk (for Windows 7), will dual boot XP onto the 64 gb SSD
2. modern gfx card, something around a Radeon 5870 or equivalent
I DON'T plan on crossfire/SLI (though ostensibly the old mobo supports it)

I'd rather use the new SSD to dual boot Win 7 + XP (can you elaborate what you need XP for?), and then use the old 64GB SSD for caching one of your hard drives.
5870 isn't that fast anymore, but let's hear your budget first.

 

[tren001]

It would help if you listed answers to the questions in the stickied thread on top of this forum... http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=80121



I'd rather use the new SSD to dual boot Win 7 + XP (can you elaborate what you need XP for?), and then use the old 64GB SSD for caching one of your hard drives.
5870 isn't that fast anymore, but let's hear your budget first.

Thanks for your advice, didn't read carefully enough to see the questionaire!

Here would be my answers:

1. PC use: gaming and maybe some photo editing, with responsive (hence the SSD) performance and value as the goal rather than outright performance

2. Budget: ~$150 for the SSD, between $120 and maybe $200 for the video card. I consider those my must-do upgrades. In terms of possible mobo/cpu/ram upgrade, I guess if I'm going to upgrade, it would be the 2013 equivalent of what I had back in 2010, so whatever the current core i5 level equipment would be

3. Country: US, most likely sourced from newegg, tigerdirect, and/or amazon (tho would prefer to avoid amazon and favor newegg due to sales tax concerns)

5. Brand preference: I lean towards ATI rather than nVidia, maybe because eyeFinity seems better done compared to nVidia's multi-screen solution (although I'm not really willing to spend enough on video card on this upgrade cycle to do any serious multi-monitor gaming)

6. Current parts: I wonder if I can get by this upgrade cycle by using my old mobo/cpu combo. Any rule of thumb estimate on how much the old Lynnfield setup will be holding back my entire system with a modern SSD and video card?

7. Overclocking: maybe some mild video card OCing if the card I get is known to respond well to overclocking

8. Resolution: 1920x1200 IPS primary monitor. When I fully update/upgrade the rig next time, may get 2 more such monitors, flip them into portrait and go triple monitor.

9. Time frame: over the next month. Maybe get some nice cyber Monday deals, although waiting for them has cost me some decent SSD deals it looks like!

Also:

1. Regarding your advice to use the 64 gb SSD as a cache to the disk based HDs, why? The disc based HDs only hold data (music, movies, pics, etc), why would they need caching? All my programs would be installed on the primary SSD drives.

2. Regarding WinXP, I do have some older games that I enjoy playing now and again, which do not do well on Win7, like the first Test Drive Unlimited. Although on second thought, a lot of my games got re-bought on the cheap on steam, making them optimized (or at least runnable) on Win7, so maybe I can just do pure windows 7 setup.

3. 8 gb RAM vs 4 gb, would the extra 4 gb only show benefit in the newer games?

Finally, regarding my reluctance to keep the old mobo/cpu. I think for the next 1 to 2 years, I won't be playing too many brand new games. For instance I will be spending a good amount of time catching up on such games as Fallout 3, TES Oblivion, Mass Effect 1/2/3, Shogun Total War 2, which are from a good 3-4 years ago. The only truly "modern" games I might spend extended time playing would be EVE online, some of the later CoD shooters, and maybe some Skyrim. So with that in mind, I was thinking a smaller overhaul with a newer video card would be sufficient.

 

[mfenn]

Finally, regarding my reluctance to keep the old mobo/cpu. I think for the next 1 to 2 years, I won't be playing too many brand new games. For instance I will be spending a good amount of time catching up on such games as Fallout 3, TES Oblivion, Mass Effect 1/2/3, Shogun Total War 2, which are from a good 3-4 years ago. The only truly "modern" games I might spend extended time playing would be EVE online, some of the later CoD shooters, and maybe some Skyrim. So with that in mind, I was thinking a smaller overhaul with a newer video card would be sufficient.

The SSD is kind of orthogonal to the rest of this and is something that you should get if you're running out of space.

Really only game on that just that warrants an upgrade of either the CPU or the GPU is Shogun 2. The rest are 2010-era games or at least run on 2010-era engines and will perform totally fine on your existing machine.

Shogun 2, however, is a beast of a game and requires a CPU and GPU upgrade to run it at anything other than low settings. $200 doesn't really even get you the ideal Shogun 2 card, but you can certainly get something that will make it playable. With Shogun 2 in mind:

Crucial M500 240GB $145
PowerColor 7870 2GB $130 AR - I haven't seen anything <$200 that comes close to this deal
i5 4570 $200 - non-overclocking because you didn't mention CPU overclocking
ASRock H87 Pro4 $88
Team DDR3 1600 8GB $50
Total: $613 AR

 

[tren001]

okay, so I bit the bullet and bought upgrades to cpu/mobo as well, trying to pick up some cyber monday deals:

HD : Samsung 840 EVO 250gb @ $150 + $20 rebate
CPU: Intel Haswell i5-4670K @ $210 + crappy Final Fantasy game code
Mobo: MSI Z87-G41 LGA 1150 @ $75 + $15 rebate
RAM: Team Vulcan 2x4GB DDR3 2133 @ $63
Newegg Promo: was supposed to get $17 off, but they only gave me $7!

Missed out on the sweet Powercolor 7870 deal though. Maybe it will come back into stock over the next few days.

I guess that comes to a total of $456 for a total rebuild of my computer, plus another ~$150 for a gfx card, so around $600 total. I wonder how much I can get for my old components on ebay, maybe $200?

Now that I've spent the dough, I am wondering if I can just plug the 2133 speed RAM in the new motherboard and have it work at that speed. I've never played with RAM speed, but according to the newegg product page of the MSI motherboard, it supports 2133, so does that mean it will go in "plug and play," or is 2133 only for a faster CPU?

 

[sm625]

Do you not want that final fantasy game code?

 

[lehtv]

Nice choices all around :thumbsup:

At the $150 mark, there's practically nothing worthwhile. Either you should get a faster 7850 for less - there are still some in stock - or pay another $50 for a 270X.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131472 $110 AR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127761 $200

I would definitely pick the 270X for longevity.

What's your current PSU by the way?

Regarding your advice to use the 64 gb SSD as a cache to the disk based HDs, why? The disc based HDs only hold data (music, movies, pics, etc), why would they need caching? All my programs would be installed on the primary SSD drives.

The point was that by caching one of your hard drives, you could install all your games there. Games tend to eat up a lot of space, so if you wanted to install ALL games on the same SSD, you'd need at least a 240GB SSD, which you did get. But since caching gets you most of the SSD's performance benefits, you could've just gotten a less expensive 120GB SSD for dual booting and main program files, then installed games on the SSD-boosted hard disk.

 

[tren001]

My PSU is a Corsair TX Series CMPSU-650TX 650W model sitting in my current rig right now. I figure it is powerful enough to power one 7870 or 7950.

Pretty happy with the deals I got on the components, but I'm still kicking myself for not seeing the $150 AR 7950 on Newegg's black Friday sale, then not picking up the $130 AR 7870 on their cyber Monday sale. Now they are all oos I've never seen graphic card prices stay this stagnant and so many out of stock cards. Are there really that many bitcoin miners buying up GPUs all over the place and keeping the prices up?

I will have to keep my eyes peeled for a nice deal on a video card. I'm also open to switching to an nVidia card, but there seems to be even fewer good deals on nVidia cards!

Maybe I can sell the FF game code for a few bucks on ebay. It is for their new MMO game, which doesn't appear very appealing. I'm pretty stoked about starting up a subscription for EVE once my new rig is put together though. It should be nice looking on my freshly upgraded system!

 

[lehtv]

Well the only reason the 7870's and the 7950's were priced so low was they were on sale to finally clear the stock and let the R9's take over. The litecoin (not so much bitcoin) mining boom doesn't really affect the prices of available cards, rather the availability of said cards, mostly the R9 280X which is the best bang for buck high performance LTC mining card at the moment.

 

[tren001]

Buying completed. Newegg had an XFX 7870 2GB for $140 AR, so I got it. $10 more than the sold out Powercolor 7870, but still not a bad price to grab one of the last few 7870s left on sale. And it is still $40 less than the new R9 270.

Briefly considered getting the $90 AR XFX 7850 1 GB, which is super cheap, but I wanted the additional performance of the 7870.

I've heard the new R9's are so similar that you can crossfire a 7870 to a R9 270, it might be interesting to give that a try in a years time!

 

[mfenn]

Good catch on the 7870, you're right that they won't be around for much longer.

 

[tren001]

Well all the stuff has arrived and I just assembled it together.

Ended up getting a bluray burner and another HD as well from newegg because of a post Black Friday sale, which delayed my assembly because somehow it took FedEx 10 DAYS !?! to deliver this single bluray drive from Edison New Jersey to upstate New York. Mystifying to say the least.

So now I realize I have to put in some orders for little things I missed like extra SATA cable and 3.5 to 2.5 mounting bracket, etc.

My question is, since I need to place another order, should I buy some thermal paste? I don't plan to overclock the CPU (i5 Haswell), and I don't plan to stick on an aftermarket cooler. So in this case, is the preapplied paste on the stock cooler all I need?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

It should be ok. I would watch temps though as the stock coolers tend to not fair well. Mine needs a bump from 900rpm to 1200rpm to keep it from throttling during gaming.

 

[tren001]

It should be ok. I would watch temps though as the stock coolers tend to not fair well. Mine needs a bump from 900rpm to 1200rpm to keep it from throttling during gaming.

Sounds like a plan. The haswell CPUs are supposed to generate less heat anyways, right? I think I was mostly wanting to try something I've not done before, since I've always used the stock cooler on my previous PCs and never overclocked the CPU, only the GPU.

In any case, apparently I need to use that ~$20-30 towards a sound card. Unlike my previous mobo, the new MSI apparently only has stereo audio out (one plug) unlike my previous board, which has the center/rear outputs for my 5.1 logitech speakers.

With the advent of onboard audio and video (the MSI even has DVI and displayport video outputs onboard, but just the one audio output!), I never though I had to go out and put an audio card into my new system. It's like I've time warped back to 1995 or something. I'm tempted to get an actual Sound Blaster card for nostalgia's sake, but am too cheap to drop more than $50 on a sound card!

 

[mfenn]

The Xonar DG is a good deal at $20 AR. It's an old school conventional PCI card though, so it might not carry forward for too much longer. The DGX is PCIe, but costs twice as much.

 

[tren001]

The Xonar DG is a good deal at $20 AR. It's an old school conventional PCI card though, so it might not carry forward for too much longer. The DGX is PCIe, but costs twice as much.

Well this motherboard actually has 2 (!?) old school PCI slots that I will never in a million years find a use for, so a sub $20 card taking up on of them won't be a big deal. The creative Audigy 7.1 card is on sale right now for $17 without rebate so that might be a good deal.

The stupid thing is that the mobo's onboard audio is supposed to be "7.1" with a "Sound Blaster Cinema" chipset, but how am I suppose to use it with the one single analog output on the back of the card?

Can I reconfigure the three analog output/inputs (for mic in, line in, and line out) into Front L/R, Rear L/R, and Center/Sub output via some sort of driver tweak?

Alternatively, if I have a spare receiver/speaker setup, can I tell the motherboard to output audio via the onboard HDMI output directly to receiver for 5.1 sound?

 

[mfenn]

Well this motherboard actually has 2 (!?) old school PCI slots that I will never in a million years find a use for, so a sub $20 card taking up on of them won't be a big deal. The creative Audigy 7.1 card is on sale right now for $17 without rebate so that might be a good deal.

$3 plus a rebate is well worth it to not have to deal with Creative's drivers IMHO.

The stupid thing is that the mobo's onboard audio is supposed to be "7.1" with a "Sound Blaster Cinema" chipset, but how am I suppose to use it with the one single analog output on the back of the card?

Can I reconfigure the three analog output/inputs (for mic in, line in, and line out) into Front L/R, Rear L/R, and Center/Sub output via some sort of driver tweak?

If you download the full Realtek driver bundle, you should be able to reassign the jacks. I've done it before, though not on that particular chipset.

Alternatively, if I have a spare receiver/speaker setup, can I tell the motherboard to output audio via the onboard HDMI output directly to receiver for 5.1 sound?

I'm not sure about the motherboard's HDMI, but it should be possible. It's definitely doable out of the GPU's HDMI, assuming you picked up that 7870.

 

[tren001]

Hmm ... I've heard about the crappy Creative drivers, so some food for thought there.

Maybe I'll start with trying to re-map the analog outputs. I just want to be able to fully hook up my old set of Logitech X-540s. They are decent but certainly not great qualities. If I am able to remap those ports, should I even get a dedicated sound card? I would think the quality of the onboard audio is more than acceptable. I see some posts regarding this so called "hissing" from onboard audio while you can get total silence if the speakers are hooked up to a discrete sound card. Is there any truth to that?

Thanks for the info about using the GPU HDMI for audio output. If I ever upgrade my main home theater setup and free up my Onkyo receiver and its speakers, I will definitely consider hooking it up to the PC via the 7870 hdmi port.

 

[mfenn]

Maybe I'll start with trying to re-map the analog outputs. I just want to be able to fully hook up my old set of Logitech X-540s. They are decent but certainly not great qualities. If I am able to remap those ports, should I even get a dedicated sound card? I would think the quality of the onboard audio is more than acceptable. I see some posts regarding this so called "hissing" from onboard audio while you can get total silence if the speakers are hooked up to a discrete sound card. Is there any truth to that?

It's easy enough to test whether or not the SnR of the onboard audio is good enough for you. Just hook up the front L/R connection and use the X-540's like a pair of stereo speakers.