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Looking for upgrade advice.

M

Mongo

only pawn... in game of life.
Joined
Oct 15, 2001
Messages
361
Ok currently I have the Sig Rig. And I want to upgrade Just the CPU/Motherboard/Ram.

Right now I have the EVGA 780i motherboard, A Intel Q9650, And 4gb (2x2) OCZ Reaper DDR2 800. I want to go as highend as I can for the budget of around $1,500.00 I do run watercooled so I will want to water cool the CPU and Motherboard as I have them now. Please if you make a suggestion Provide links to the items so I know what your talking about. Also all parts have to be at known online stores, And no Frys/Microcenter deals I dont have them near me. Also the Motherboard has to be SLI because I have 2 EVGA GTX 480s I also have a GTS 250 for a physx card. Please any help you can give on this.


PS: I would like to stay with Intel and as high end as I can go at this time for the money, This is for Gaming. It will be 2 years or more before I upgrade again. (I think)
 
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to be honest you are not going to see much performance boost from moving to i7 930...

otherwise Evga x58 LE (has great waterblock options), i7 930 and 6 GB of DDR3 (Corsair, G.Skill, etc) for $800

p.s. what psu are you using?
 
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I don't see any reason why you need to upgrade the CPU, mobo and RAM you have now. No way that a Core i7 930 setup + X58 motheboard + 6GB of RAM would worth the costs of upgrade. Even if you got all three for $500, still wouldn't be worth it let alone a $1500 CPU + mobo + RAM upgrade.

You're better off getting SSDs.
 
Jesus dude! Thats a monster rig youve got now! 480's in SLI?! 4.2 GHz on a Q9650?!

Im not sure anything you added would do anything at all that you would notice unless youre running 6 monitors. Youd just be spending money. If youre just gonna do that, you could buy me some stuff. I really need a video card upgrade.....and a nice quad core proc too. :D
 
Got a Enermax Galaxy 1000w PSU. Well heck now I got some thinking to do. I cant believe no one put the 980x out there. Well thanks guys not sure what to do now.
 
Unfortunately the 980X is not going to give you much improvement. I doubt any of the games you play make use of any more than 4 cores, especially not more than 8. That being said, I really do think you should just grab an SSD and possibly another 4gb of ram if you are a super heavy multitasker. Otherwise I would say your Q9650 @ 4.2 is really damn good for gaming right now. You have the best single card (two of them haha) and you have an extremely high clock on a really great (albeit slightly older) cpu. I would say you are set for atleast another year.
 
And you guys dont think that the jump from DDR2 to DDR3 Triple channel and a Quad to a i7 Quad with hyperthreading is going to be any improvement? And my SLI 480s are not bottlenecked by the Q9650?
 
Not for the amount of money you would spend to upgrade. Unless you just really need to buy a new mobo/cpu/ram I would just hold what you got and get an SSD.
 
Fpr the cost of that upgrade a good SSD is a good suggestion.. & if your not already go NV Surround & you will get allot more of a noticeable difference & wow factor then you would moving to an i7 setup..
 
A Q9650 with 12MB cache and running at 4.2 GHz a bottleneck? Dude your rig could single handedly run NASA......while playing Crysis at 70 fps.......and burning a DVD! You've reached the pinncale of PC gaming for at least another couple years. Going DDR3 might increase some speed slightly but I guarantee the only place you'd see it is in benchmarks.

Spend that money on a big ass 30" monitor, kick ass 5.1 audio rig and a big comfy chair. Hell you might as well buy one of those $200 gaming keyboards too. That would be money better spent on a better gaming experience.
 
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Mongo said:
And you guys dont think that the jump from DDR2 to DDR3 Triple channel and a Quad to a i7 Quad with hyperthreading is going to be any improvement? And my SLI 480s are not bottlenecked by the Q9650?
Click to expand...

Normally, not for the money that the upgrade costs. But if you are having stability issues with your current setup, then you might consider upgrading. NVIDIA's motherboard core-logic chipsets have been notorious for having a lot of bugs and compatibility issues.
 
No stability issues at all. As a matter of fact I run the Q9650 @ 4.35 in the winter. Just dont like to do it in the summer it gets up to 80f in this room in the summer and I dont want the chip to go over 60c so I drop it from 4.3 @ 1.34 to 4.2 @ 1.32 to keep the temps under 60c in games.
 
The only upgrades I could possibly suggest, as I've said like 4 times, are an SSD and possibly upping to 8gb of ram (although not really needed for gaming).

You really do have an insanely powerful setup and I don't see how going with any other setup would net you much more in anything unless it is insanely multi-core aware.
 
Mongo said:
And you guys dont think that the jump from DDR2 to DDR3 Triple channel and a Quad to a i7 Quad with hyperthreading is going to be any improvement? And my SLI 480s are not bottlenecked by the Q9650?
Click to expand...

Well there's very very little real world performance difference between DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. Yes a Core i7 is faster than a Q9550 clock for clock but, as Shadowssong said, not high enough of a performance difference/improvement to justify the $600 minimum.
 
I just cant bring myself to pay that much for a SSD. I mean I got two 1tb and one 2tb already. I just bought the 2tb and it was $110. Thats 1/4th the price of the one you showed me and its 13 times the size of it. So do they really help that much in games or does it just load window in half the time it does now. Im in windows and ready to go in less than 60sec never really timed it but I would say closer to 45 really. So I guess what Im asking is why would you say I need a SSD right now what would it do for me.
 
A SSD improves load times for both Windows and most apps out there. System responsiveness would also improve as well.

Another way to look at things: You were about to spend $600 to $1500 on a CPU + Mobo + RAM upgrade that would have provided significantly less system performance improvement than a $330 to $430 SSD. Hell a $225 SSD would still have been a better buy than a $600 to $1500 CPU + mobo + RAM upgrade:
$225 - Intel SSDSA2MH080G2R5 2.5" 80GB SSD

Besides the SSD, there's really nothing at all you can upgrade. You can easily hold off another two years before upgrading with your current setup. Though maybe you can get a larger monitor or even multiple monitors for Nvidia Vision.
 
Man I understand your hesitation in paying that much for a drive that small.. But after you do you wont question it again.. The overall computing experience is different in ways that you will see & feel.. Everything is just plain Faster.. Now as far as the Intel SSD's.. well yea there kinda pricey for a part that you don't know you need.. I would try a cheaper small drive 1st to see how you like it & then when the hook is set you can make your own decision about it later. Just look for something that has enough capacity to hold your OS & a game or 2 that you play the most & make sure its of decent quality (most likely a Sandforce or barefoot controller if you dont go with that 80gb Danny Linked)
 
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