Need help deciding what to upgrade

Leykis

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 9, 2005
Messages
415
First, answer to the questions....

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? Gaming
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included? $300
3) Which country do you live in? USA
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU & possibly RAM and MOBO
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model. Case(Antec 1200), WD Raptor 74gb, WD Caviar Black 1TB, DVD recorder, Corsair 750w PSU, MSI GTX 570 video card and possibly my Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R mobo and A-Data 8gb(2x4gb) ddr2 800 RAM
6) Will you be overclocking? Possibly
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it? Dell 23" 2048x1152
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? In the next two weeks
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID, USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s, audio
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? ?Yes, Windows 7 64bit

Ok so here's my dilemma and maybe you guys can point me in the right direction. My current foundation:

Intel C2D 8500 3.16ghz oc'd to 3.8ghz
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R mobo
A-Data 8gb ddr2 800 ram
MSI GTX 570

Would you swap out the CPU with a q9550 which would probably run around $150 used and call it good or sell those parts and get an i5-2500k or i5-3570k, new motherboard and ram, which would probably be around $400?

I want to make sure my PC can run Guild Wars 2 well and when I did the beta event this past weekend everything seemed to run well with settings maxed but when I did pvp and there were a large amount of players on the screen it was like a slide show. I don't want to have this sort of slowdown when the game launches. I know the resolution I'm trying to run it is fairly high and thats probably contributing to most of my performance issues. Probably wouldn't hurt to downgrade the monitor lol. Thanks for any assistance you can provide!
 
Having just upgraded my 4 year old Q9550 to a 3570K, I would advise you not to invest any money on S775 hardware.

People with new hardware have experienced performance issues with the GW2 beta. Supposedly ArenaNet has stated that the game is not optimized in its current state.

Finally...are you running your monitor at its native resolution?
 
Yes, I run all my games at 2048x1152 and generally have no issues. Games like Skyrim, Diablo III, Old Republic....all run flawlessly at max settings. It was GW2 I had issues with especially in world vs. world.

Since you're advising me not to get a Q9550 then maybe I'll just look into getting a used i5-2500k setup.
 
Yes, I run all my games at 2048x1152 and generally have no issues. Games like Skyrim, Diablo III, Old Republic....all run flawlessly at max settings. It was GW2 I had issues with especially in world vs. world.
Well GW2 is still under development so the performance issues may be resolved by the time of release.
Since you're advising me not to get a Q9550 then maybe I'll just look into getting a used i5-2500k setup.
That's a good plan. Oh and make sure that whatever RAM you get is rated at 1.5V or lower. Any higher and you risk CPU damage.
 
AsRock motherboards aren't praised around here, due to their lack of quality parts (for the most part) and shorter than average warranty.
 
AsRock motherboards aren't praised around here, due to their lack of quality parts (for the most part) and shorter than average warranty.

Pro boards have good capacitors (according to AsRock website). Warranty wise I'm not sure, have never bought new Asrock boards.
I have AsRock in my HTPC and it is going strong even under very heavy load though I use it only for 6 months.
 
Pro boards have good capacitors (according to AsRock website). Warranty wise I'm not sure, have never bought new Asrock boards.
I have AsRock in my HTPC and it is going strong even under very heavy load though I use it only for 6 months.

Despite what the web site says, only a couple AsRock motherboards reviewed here at [H] have been impressive. The rest are just meh. YMMV
 
Despite what the web site says, only a couple AsRock motherboards reviewed here at [H] have been impressive. The rest are just meh. YMMV


But the 300 budget ,probably, do not allow impressive MB :)
 
I'd rather sacrifice high overclocks for a better quality motherboard.
 
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