Help - Upgrade advice

mattchapman

mattchapman

Gawd
Joined
Dec 30, 2005
Messages
572
Hello
I bought a custom built PC through AVADirect exactly 2 years ago. You can see my specs below. I mainly use my PC for gaming (mostly FPS-COD, L4D, Crysis...) and HD-video playback (my PC pipes to my HDTV for watching movies). Anyhow, I haven't been much in touch with the 'scene' over the last couple of years and I'm wondering if its time for a brand new PC or whether there are some simple upgrades I could do to bring me a little up to date. Any comments appreciated.

Thanks guys!


CASE=Antec P182
MOBO=ABIT IP35 Pro
CPU=Intel Q6600 G0 Stepping, overclocked to 3.0GHz
CPU HEATSINK =Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme
POWER=Corsair 620HX
VIDEO=eVGA 8800GT KO 675Mhz
AUDIO=BlueGears b-enspirer
MEMORY=G.Skill 2x2GB DDR800 CL5 Kit
HARD DRIVE1=Western Digital WD Caviar WD5000AAKS 500GB
HARD DRIVE2=SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB
HARD DRIVE3=SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB
HARD DRIVE4=SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB
OS=MICROSOFT, Windows Vista Home Premium Edition 64-bit
 
You don't really say what you do with the computer besides gaming and some HD video content.

Do you do photo editing, video editing, etc, etc. ?

I see you have a LG L246WP LCD listed in your sig. Are you playing games on that at 1920x1200?

Are you seeing lag in any of your current games? I don't think you'll see much of an improvement in HD video with a newer video card/processor etc. as you have enough power to decode H264 stuff.

Based upon what little information you have given on what you do with your system, the only thing I could recommend is maybe a video card upgrade.

Your Q6600 overclocked shouldn't leave you CPU bound in games, so if you go with an Nvidia GT* 200 series or ATI 5000 series, you should see some improvement in games.

Other than that maybe a SSD as well.

Honestly though you have a pretty solid rig right now.
 
Thanks for the reply.

Other than games/HD video I do mostly less-power intensive things like website design and Office apps (word, excel, ppt). Sometimes play around with a bit of video editing but not much. I do encode some video (DVD to MKV) on a regular basis too.

I'm playing some games at 1920x1200 but most at 1600x1050 as its smoother/faster. So I guess a better video card would help there.

I've heard a lot about SSD's but I'm not sure what the fuss is about. I assumed they were simply "faster" hard drives with less risk of breaking. Maybe I'm missing something.

Would more RAM (or faster RAM, DDR3?) help much?

thanks
 
More or faster RAM won't help much in your situation. Besides, C2Q based setups do not take advantage of DDR3 RAM at all. So it would be a waste of money to get DDR3 RAM for your setup. Not to mention that you would have to upgrade the mobo to use DDR3 RAM.

SSD are ridiculously fast. They're based on different technology from hard drives. Granted their prices are high at the moment but there's no denying that they offer phenomenal performance. A good SSD makes the Raptors and Velociraptor drives look like slow turtles in terms of sheer performance.

What PSU do you have? Very important to know if your PSU can handle a GPU upgrade. Also, what's your budget for this upgrade?
 
Then an upgrade to the HD 5850 or HD 5870 is all that you need to do.
 
I'd say that the hard drive is the bottleneck in your system, more so than the video card. Maybe a SSD?
 
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