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Planning staged upgrades, help appreciated

A

AshleyG

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 5, 2007
Messages
272
I'm trying to plan out a full system upgrade in stages - my wife freaks out less that way. I'm hoping to have pretty much a completely new system (sans video card) by next August when I plan to head back to school for a PhD and the finances get much tighter. When all is said and done, this system will need to be able to handle about 3 years of only minor upgrades/updates and repair maintenance before its next major refresh.

This computer sees mostly MS Office work and gaming, with some video and photo editing tossed in as well. I also do music composition on this system (Sibelius). Here is what I am currently running:

C2Q Q9300
Gigabyte EP35-DS3P
8GB (4x2GB) Corsair DDR2-800
Maxtor Maxline III 250GB
LiteOn DVDRW
EVGA GTX460 OC EE 1GB
Corsair HX650 PSU
Intel PCIe 10/100/1000 NIC
Cooler Master ATCS
Samsung 2433BW

I'd ultimately like to be able to go with SLI and add another GTX 460 around Christmas, but my board isn't SLI-compatible. I'm thinking that upgrading the motherboard and RAM first would be the best bet, that way I'd already have DDR3 come Taxmas next year (when I plan on buying a new CPU/MB combo).

Any thoughts on how I should set my upgrade plan? Am I going in the wrong direction by trying to go a DDR3 setup now in hopes that it will still be usable in a spring CPU/MB refresh? Or am I simply starting in the wrong place?
 
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The only socket 775 motherboard that supports DDR3 RAM and SLI are the 790i motherboards. However those are out of stock or overpriced for what they offer. In addition, DDR3 RAM offers zero performance increases over DDR2 RAM. So in other words, it would be a waste of money upgrading just the motherboard and RAM. Socket 775 is simply too old to keep continuing spending money on it.

Your best bet for a cost effective upgrade would be to upgrade the CPU + mobo + RAM all in one go. Probably Intel Core i5 750 + eVGA P55 Motherboard + 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

However, your first upgrade should be a new hard drive or SSD IMO. That 250GB drive is the slowest item in your PC. I recommend this hard drive as an upgrade:
$56 - Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

The above drive is simply one of the fastest and most bang for the buck consumer grades drives out there.

If the SSD route:
$115 - Intel SSDSA2MP040G2R5 2.5" 40GB SSD
$225 - Intel SSDSA2MH080G2R5 2.5" 80GB SSD
 
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