Help Reviving my Intel I7 old school system

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spbk84

n00b
Joined
Dec 5, 2007
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60
Hello,

I am looking to get back into PC gaming and not sure where to start. My computer takes a really long time to start and something as simple as loading windows media player takes a while. Tonight I did a fresh install of Windows 7 and have to itch to update my system but If i can avoid buying a new system that would be ideal.

I will be playing word of warcraft, League of legends, and Doom or the most part and want to be able to Play music or twitch in the background.

Here are my Current Specs

Dell 24 inch monitor - I paid over $900 for this back in the day when they first came out, It sure has run its course, my brother has some $150 monitors that give it a run for its money lol
Intel I7 920
MSI x58 Platinum - board
BFG Geforce GTX 260 -- My Brother just threw a Sapphire Radion 6870 HD in tonight but i haven't been able to test it.
Corsair XMS3 DDR3 Platinum 2gb x 3
Corsair Tx 750w
HD - Western digital 500gb


Questions -

1. Display- $350 Max. I am looking to purchase a widescreen, i will be playing World of warcraft for the most part and i think that would be great for it.

2. Graphics Card - I am wiling to spend $250, Any suggestions?

3. Hard drive - I believe my biggest system downfall is my Hard drive. Any suggestions? I don't want to break the bank but i want to make this system as quick as possible.

4. Ram - Is this enough or do you suggest more?

Please let me know what you guys think.

Thanks!

 
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Radeon RX 480, cheap SSD, 6GB is enough RAM for general gaming, and whatever monitor you want in your price range.
 
I'll only speak to the hardware specs-

2. This is your limiting component for performance for sure. Just to give you perspective, the GTX 260 is half the performance of a 6870, and the 6870 is approximately 1/3 the performance of the 4GB GTX 970, a 2014 era video card you can typically buy used for $180-ish. So you stand to triple your potential performance just by replacing the video card with a GTX 970 or better. With $250 as your budget, you are right in line for a GTX 1060, which is probably the fastest you can get for that cash, with something like the used GTX 970 being a potential lower cost alternative.
3. Your hard drive is a limit, and moving to a SSD will definitely make the system feel much snappier and load into games much faster, but it won't affect the ingame performance for most games. I'd pick up an inexpensive 2TB 7200 RPM drive for less than $75, and a 250 GB SSD to install Windows/apps on for around $100.
4. 6GB is not enough. 8 is the minimum nowadays, with 16GB rapidly moving to the new-system standard.

Your platform - the x58 and i7 920 - is quite old, and in some games (looking at you WoW) you might end up CPU bound if you get a good enough GPU. That said, if you're CPU bound on performance, you'll likely be getting an acceptable framerate already.

If you have the money, buying used is a great way to go - the Hardforum for sale/trade boards could net you a used i5-3xxx or 4xxx CPU, mobo, and potentially memory for not a lot of cash, and move you to a much more modern platform.
 
Pretty much a +1 to SinisterDei.

Consider the GTX 1060 or RX 480 for that budget.
SSD is definitely on the tables, if you don't require extra storage, you can reformat your current drive as storage and just do a new fresh install on a new SSD (Consider the Samsung 850 Evo 250GB or something along those lines).

6GB is enough 'for now' but given your platform is triple channel, going to 8/16 will make it run in Dual Channel, so maybe try find a 3x4GB kit cheap on the used side somewhere online for 12GB of RAM, else try find your current RAM online as a kit so you can just add, rather than replace.

That said the X58 platform is aging, but still holds its own well enough if you don't quite have the moolah to spend on a new system just yet.
 
Thanks everyone. I appreciate the input. I am going to start my search for the upgrades.

I've always wanted a ssd but it was always so expensive, I can't believe how cheap they are now.
 
spbk84 said:
Thanks everyone. I appreciate the input. I am going to start my search for the upgrades.

I've always wanted a ssd but it was always so expensive, I can't believe how cheap they are now.
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Don't forget to update your Signature! :D.

Also you mention a Dell 27" if it's 2560x1440/1600 model it's still a very nice monitor, and if it works, I wouldn't yet look at replacing that. Is it the U2711H or something?
 
ReaperX22 said:
Don't forget to update your Signature! :D.

Also you mention a Dell 27" if it's 2560x1440/1600 model it's still a very nice monitor, and if it works, I wouldn't yet look at replacing that. Is it the U2711H or something?
Click to expand...

hey man, i was wrong. Its actually a 24 inch 2405FPW Nothing special. I would never pay that much for a monitor again, i was young and no bills lol

sig updated! thanks for the heads up
 
Ah. Well if you go for the ~200 dollar AMD RX 480, you could look at getting a nice Freesync monitor? Something like this maybe? Or maybe this? noting out of stock but you get the idea.
 
So here is the latest.

Samsung 850 EVO 500GB - i used my Credit card points and got it free from amazon lol
MSI Geforce GTX 1070 - I went off budget and purchased this.
Crucial Ballistix 8gb x 2

I am looking into the ultra wide screen monitors and need to save before i jump into one.
 
spbk84 said:
So here is the latest.

Samsung 850 EVO 500GB - i used my Credit card points and got it free from amazon lol
MSI Geforce GTX 1070 - I went off budget and purchased this.
Crucial Ballistix 8gb x 2

I am looking into the ultra wide screen monitors and need to save before i jump into one.
Click to expand...
Looks good! Haha I love the jump to the GTX 1070 :p. But you may find you won't quite get the FPS those using current gen CPUs will get, but it will still be a massive improvement either way.
 
Re
ReaperX22 said:
Looks good! Haha I love the jump to the GTX 1070 :p. But you may find you won't quite get the FPS those using current gen CPUs will get, but it will still be a massive improvement either way.
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ha! yes. i couldn't help myself. I am having trouble with installing windows. Its running extremely slow, my board doesn't support sata 3.. I am looking into just doing a complete upgrade in the next few days. It literally just goes out of control, a few updates turns into a new build lol
 
Sata 2 should still see an SSD be relatively solid for an install.

Also double check in your BIOS you're running in AHCI mode, rather than IDE. For your Sata Controller. Also change the cable if needed. (Sata Data Cable)
 
Thanks. I am going to check that now. I have been trying to get this to work for hours.
 
I installed a Samsung 850 EVO this morning and reinstalled windows on to it but it is literally running 10x slower.. The computer keeps freezing and i can't figure out whats going on.

I reset the bios and now i am going to try what Reaper just suggested.
 
With the new drive it should be 10x faster not slower XD. SSD makes a HUGE difference. The only explaination is a bad install or something else is 'faulty' in the system (perhaps a cable, perhaps you got a dud new drive? But the latter is unlikely given Samsungs rep, but does happen).
 
I had a cable that came with my motherboard and i swamped it out for a new one. I am going to have my dad take a look at it because he is more familiar.
 
While it is a long shot, looking into an issue with the sata cable might be next step. I had a brand new sata cable do nearly the exact same for me performance wise. It took a while to figure out.
 
One thing to note- the MSI X58 Platinum board you say you have has two different SATA2 controllers on it.
The six purple ports are done by the Intel chipset and support AHCI
The two reddish ports are supported by an add-on chip (Jmicron) and essentially should not be used.
 
Thanks! I will try this tonight. My dad has some new cables and I have to check what I used to install
 
You will want to get a 3rd stick of that RAM you ordered so you will be running triple channel instead of dual.
 
On 1366 dual vs triple makes a difference as does having at a bare minimum DDR3-1600 on that platform.

The newer memory controllers are a whole lot faster than the first gen 1366 was.

1066 and even 1333 triple channel was not fast enough for some games back then (BF2). Bumping up to 1600 made it buttery smooth.

That whole platform gets better the higher the RAM and uncore were at.
 
I'm gonna go with ReaperX22 here- the additional memory stick likely won't add much. For evidence, I'll link an article exploring the very issue of the performance impact of memory speed and channel configuration on the original i7 series CPUs.

Spoiler alert for the article - the *worst* case of a performance differential was comparing 1066 memory versus 1600 and the difference was 13% at most. Interestingly enough, in some of their gaming benchmarks the 1066 in only dual channel mode managed to best the 1066 in triple channel mode. In the end, it seemed that the speed of the memory was vastly more important than the channel configuration, since apparently there's a bit of a latency disadvantage to enabling the third channel that helped keep things a bit more even on that front.

And while a 13% difference is nothing to scoff at, I would argue they tailored their tests specifically to find and exploit the performance difference of the memory - as they should for this sort of article - but that it doesn't actually represent real world. I mean seriously, who runs your SLI GPU setup at 1024x768 for anything other than a CPU or memory benchmark? And in many of the games, the difference was far less. And much of the difference when it did exist came from the speed of the memory, and I'd wager your Ballistix memory is running higher than 1066.

It's not that another stick wouldn't help - I'm sure it would have a positive benefit. However, DDR3 is on the way out, not in. When you *do* replace the i7 920/X58 platform, it'll be with something running DDR4, so no need to further invest in DDR3. Save your pennies, upgrade another day!
 
Thanks Guys. I am way behind on the times! haha. I plan on upgrading in the coming months, hopefully I can catch a good deal during the coming sales. I finally made a trip to microcenter and it made me want to buy a new rig.
 
Just throwing it out there but you may be able to pickup a 6 core xeon on the cheap and overclock it nicely getting you closer to current gen chips.

Also for monitors for a cheap but good 4k check out the wasabi mango zen 40inchers
 
Even a modest overclock on your old 920 should yield some pretty good results.

I bumped my i5-750 from 2.66 to 3.4Ghz and it really did make a HUGE difference.

For reference, all I did was bump the bclk to 170x20, up the voltage to 1.2v, and lowered the ram multiplier from 10 to 8. (which did force the RAM speed to go from 1600 to 1360 but hey, I was on 1333 sticks for years until I picked up this new 1600mhz kit last November)

And obviously I disabled turbo boost, eist, and c-states etc.

I've never seen the CPU temp go higher than 56c using a Hyper 212+ cooler.

It's definitely something I would consider doing. (as long as you have a halfway decent cooler)
 
7 years on my i7-920 @ 3.8 Ghz. Still purring. Chips are just starting to come in that speed @ stock.
 
Definitely. I had an i7 930 to 4ghz for a long time. At a great voltage too. Makes a massive difference.
 
I wanted to push my 750 farther, but my motherboard is garbage.

(it makes cricket sounds when I try to hit 3.5+)

Still, a 600mhz gain is nothing to sneeze at..
 
The comparo is quite flawed I'm afraid.
You just benched Cards GTx 660 vs 260.
Considering the title of this article, you should have benched GTX 660 on BOTH old quad core C2Q and modern quads like A10 7700k.
Search for "Can old athlon still game" for a very good article of that sort.
 
I am so frustrated that i can't get that SSD working properly, my father is going to get it going for today

I have been researching the Ultra wide monitors and I am considering a LG and its around $650.
 
If your using an Intel SATA port, and have tried multiple actual cables etc

I'd RMA.
 
thanks all. my dad got it working. He did something in the bios and get it to read correctly.
 
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