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elkodust

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 9, 2008
Messages
78
Hey everyone. I feel like I constantly make threads searching for advice, but you guys have yet to lead me astray...

So Ive run into some money, and I also recently upgraded up to dual monitors. I am not doing eyefinity or surround or anything, but one of the monitors I have is 120hz, and at 1920 x 1080 it is a solid step up from my old resolution. SO Im thinking about upgrading the rest of my computer. These are my current specs

E7200 @ 3.18 (Bringing it up from 2.53 has definitely netted me some performance gains, but I cannot manage to get it past 3.18. Maybe Im just bad at this or something. Stock cooling btw)
4GB DDR2 800 Ram
XFX 1GB 5770
Asus p5e-vm DO
NZXT Vulcan
700w ABS Modular psu

My budget is around $300 I would say. That is in no way firm. If you can come up with a good reason to spend more, but still keep it reasonably close to 300, I will. A few questions:

Will stepping up to an i7 really net me the performance gains I am imagining here?
Should I just go with better cooling, maybe OC a little more and call it a day?
Are the new 6000 series cards where its at? Or am I correct in thinking that my cpu is bottlenecking me here? If not, is nVidia 3D as amazing as it sounds? (I just got back from Jackass 3D, as disgustiong as it was at parts, it peaked my interest.)
Am I just looking for excuses to spend money?

I dont expect to run crysis perfectly, but I do play a bunch of games, and would like to be able to take advantage of my new monitor and the new refresh rate.

Honestly, I just came into some money, and since I built this computer about 2 years ago, I figure I might as well do any upgrades now since I am in the position to.

For example, how worth it would it be for me to replace my 5770 with this?
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearc...TX465F1002 GeForce GTX 465 1024MB GDDR5 pci-e
 
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Since you do play games you need to consider what is currently limiting you.

5770 is a mainstream GPU, should do most games fine up to 1080p on medium-to-high settings. On the other hand an e7200 is not a top notch CPU but it's fast enough to feed your GPU shouldn't really be a limiting factor unless you are playing BFBC2 or GTAIV (those come to my mind as games that really benefit from getting a quad core CPU)

That being said. Socket 775 is a dead end. AM3 based CPUs could be tempting since they are relatively cheap but any 1156 quad with a mild overclock blows anything AMD can offer out of the water.

If you want a complete step up from you old PC you can go to:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128405&Tpk=gigabyte micro p55
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...5067&cm_re=core_i5_760-_-19-115-067-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=ddr3_8gb_2_x_4gb-_-20-231-403-_-Product

That's $500 though and no GPU included. Only CPU/MOBO/RAM

As for a GPU. Step away from the GTX465 it's a bad choice unless you unlock it to a GTX470 which is never a guarantee. It's hot, noisy and just average in the shadow of a GTX460 (yes 460 is better in most cases than 465) or a good GTX470.

This would be my current mainstream GPU:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130581

The GPU alone should bring new life to your system. If you can get it to 3.5Ghz it should be no problem, at least you;re not running SLI :D SLI really benefits from a higher CPU frequency

Hope I've been helpful
 
fr500 said:
Since you do play games you need to consider what is currently limiting you.

5770 is a mainstream GPU, should do most games fine up to 1080p on medium-to-high settings. On the other hand an e7200 is not a top notch CPU but it's fast enough to feed your GPU shouldn't really be a limiting factor unless you are playing BFBC2 or GTAIV (those come to my mind as games that really benefit from getting a quad core CPU)

That being said. Socket 775 is a dead end. AM3 based CPUs could be tempting since they are relatively cheap but any 1156 quad with a mild overclock blows anything AMD can offer out of the water.

If you want a complete step up from you old PC you can go to:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128405&Tpk=gigabyte micro p55
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...5067&cm_re=core_i5_760-_-19-115-067-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=ddr3_8gb_2_x_4gb-_-20-231-403-_-Product

That's $500 though and no GPU included. Only CPU/MOBO/RAM

As for a GPU. Step away from the GTX465 it's a bad choice unless you unlock it to a GTX470 which is never a guarantee. It's hot, noisy and just average in the shadow of a GTX460 (yes 460 is better in most cases than 465) or a good GTX470.

This would be my current mainstream GPU:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130581

The GPU alone should bring new life to your system. If you can get it to 3.5Ghz it should be no problem, at least you;re not running SLI :D SLI really benefits from a higher CPU frequency

Hope I've been helpful
Click to expand...

Very helpful infact. I was about to move this because I thought I had posted in the wrong section too. Thank you very much for the suggestions.

Hmm, 500 is steep, but it does seem worth it. I dont know what to do here. Maybe Ill just get that stuff and hold off on the gpu for a while. I was sort of planning to repurose my current parts if I did upgrade. I know this is somewhat off topic, but how effective would it be to use some of my old parts to make a htpc/fileserver? What could I keep and what could I sell?

Also, If I were to do it the other way around, and buy the gpu first, would that be worthwhile? Im having a hard time pushing my CPU past 3.18, but I am fairly new to OCing, and I am running on stock. Should I get new cooling If I do decide to go this route? Sorry for so many questions.
 
Maybe overkill for an HTPC but you already have the parts so no big deal, if you can keep it silent it should work.

Yes buying the GPU could be a good decision and should boost your performance quite a bit, maybe you can hold on the other parts some time till sandy bridge arrives.

As far as I know your mobo is a good overclocker, maybe raise voltage a bit and get a good CPU cooler unless you have bad luck you should be able to push 3.5Ghz
 
fr500 said:
Maybe overkill for an HTPC but you already have the parts so no big deal, if you can keep it silent it should work.

Yes buying the GPU could be a good decision and should boost your performance quite a bit, maybe you can hold on the other parts some time till sandy bridge arrives.

As far as I know your mobo is a good overclocker, maybe raise voltage a bit and get a good CPU cooler unless you have bad luck you should be able to push 3.5Ghz
Click to expand...

I am the KING of bad luck, so we'll see. I heard someone made it to 3.325 on stock, So Ill look into it. Also, whats this sandy bridge stuff?
 
fr500 said:
It's intel's next gen architecture coming soon
Click to expand...

Yeah, I did a little bit of research, and it seems like that is just around the corner. I guess I might as well wait on that then. So, GPU upgrade it is. Now I will have to look for more help about this whole overclocking business, because it just not want to budge. Im probably just missing a step here. Now, with this whole new sandy bridge buisness, I dont want to buy a cpu cooler to use it for 3 months and then not have it fit my new one. Should I just work off of stock cooling for now or what? I did more reading, and now I saw numbers like 3.4 on stock cooling. Im keeping my fingers crossed.
 
You don't have to go for 8GB. 4GB is one way to reduce the cost of upgrade. There are plenty of very decent kits under $90.

Another option for a GPU is a 6850. Sure the EVGA 460 FTW is mighty impressive, but is also more expensive and will draw a lot more power...
 
I like the Corsair H50, it's a good heatsink compatible with all current sockets, I think 1155 will be the same layout as 1156 so shouldn't matter.

Maybe overkill for a 45nm wolfdale but later you could get a nice quad and enjoy cool and quiet.
 
If he sticks with his E7200, cheap and effective options to cool the CPU include for example the Big Shuriken, the CM Hyper TX3, etc...
 
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