Should I Upgrade?

[Gooner5]

Hi all, would it be worth it to upgrade my current system as I am considering maybe getting a new Samsung 1Tb Hard Drive and using the ones I have for storage. Then maybe upgrading the GPU to a Sapphire HD 4670 Graphics card would this be a good investment?

My Current system is:
Antec Sonata III case and psu
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750
ASUS P5K Motherboard
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit
Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 512MB Graphics card
2 Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ Hard Drives
Samsung SH-S203/B DVDRW
Arctic Cooling AC-FRZ-7P CPU Cooler

Any advice will be greatly appreciated

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I assume that your case has an Antec 500w PSU??

If you do any gaming a £90 HD4830 would be the best bet:

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=hd4830&x=0&y=0

With a bit of overclocking it can even have similiar performance to an HD4850!!

The Sapphire HD4830 has got good reviews:

http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/ind...&limitstart=10

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/641/11

You could also try overclocking your E6750 to around 3.0ghz to 3.2ghz.

Another 1gb to 2gb of RAM may be useful for some applications.

With these modifications your computer will be fine for the rest of the year unless your are gaming at ultra high resolutions!!

[Gooner5]

The PSU is the Antec one that came with the case. I overclocked my E6750 to 3.2Ghz yesterday. What temps are good for this overclock? As it reached 55/56 degrees when running orthos is this to high and it sits at around 22 to 25 degrees when idle this is with the case fan and Arctic Cooling fan on low.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Try using IntelBurnTest too - 20 iterations should be enough. This programme will heat up your CPU more than any other application I know. Anything over 65C to 70C would be a slight concern.

IMHO since a HD4670 costs around £65 it is worth spending the extra money on an HD4830.

[Gooner5]

I just gave that IntelBurnTest App a run for 25 iterations and I passed The highest temp reached was 62°C and it is now back down to 24/25°C so does that now mean that it is stable.

[Hawker1986]

I would say that means its fine, a good temp for burn test, and since it completed I would say its definately stable, as people have said get a 4830 and a little more ram and should should be sorted, HDD if you need more then the samsung is an excellent drive.

Hawker

[Gooner5]

Is it better just to buy another pack of the GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit or would it be better to get the 4gig corsair pack on ebuyer: product id 130429.
Which would be the quicker option? As the Geil has lower timings or does it not make a noticeable difference anyway.

[scaryjim]

Is it better just to buy another pack of the GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit or would it be better to get the 4gig corsair pack on ebuyer: product id 130429.

Are you using a 32bit or a 64bit OS? 32bit OS wouldn't recognise more than 4GB of RAM anyway, and you don't want to just replace perfectly good memory, so unless you're running a 64bit OS and planning to go with 6GB of RAM I'd just buy another 2GB kit. If you have existing CL4 memory then you'll probably be fine with this 2x1GB CL4 Crucial Ballistics set from ebuyer which is currently only £25.

[Pob255]

As scaryjim just said it's not worth buying more than 4 in total without a 64bit os (vista 64bit for preference as xp 64bit has driver issues)

However there's really not a great deal of need for 4gb instead of 2gb, you'd see some improvement but not a lot and only when running 2 or 3 memory hungery things at once.

Replaceing the graphics card will give you the biggest improvement, I'd look at a 4830 or 9800gt+ (esp if you have a 17" to 19" screen)
or a 4850 or 9800gtx+ if you have a larger screen (24" or more)
If you have a 20"-22" screen you're in the crossover point of thoes cards, at this res a 4850 or 9800gtx+ should happly cope with everything turned up to max, a 4830 or 9800gt still will on all but some of the very latest/demanding games

[Gooner5]

I'll just leave the RAM for now. So for a 20" screen on which the resolution is usually 1440x900 then would a 4830 would be the best choice for now.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'll just leave the RAM for now. So for a 20" screen on which the resolution is usually 1440x900 then would a 4830 would be the best choice for now.

20" LCD screens usually have a resolution of 1680x1050. At this resolution a HD4850 is probably better. However a HD4830 would suffice if you drop the resolution a bit.

[Gooner5]

I usually change the resolution depending on what I am doing although I seem to prefer 1360x768 on xp and use higher resolutions i.e 1440x900 and 1680x1050 on windows 7. So I'm probably going to go for the 4830.

[Pob255]

Ok . . . I'll keep him talking you call the men in white coats

I'm kidding, I know some people who use 19" screens but run them 1024x768 because it's all too small for there eyes at 1280x1024 (yes I have pointed out they can increase windows font sizes and such, but no they insist )

but the main issue here is scaling, lcd monitors don't scale well so in native resolution they are sharp and pixel perfict but lower the res and things get fuzzy as it divers the pixels to try to show the lower res, but of course it only divers some so you get a mess of divered and sharp that can be bad on the old eyeballs.

At 1440x900 a 4830 will be fine and handle near enough everything you can throw at it and still keep good frame rates (50-60ish on most games)
At 1680x1050 a 4830 will still cope but you may have to turn settings down from max (AA tends to be a big offender here) a 4850 will be better but costs more.

If you were a FPSphile like some on here then a 4850 is bare minimum even for 1440x900 but if you were an FPSphile then you'd never of survived this long on a x1900pro, so I'm pritty safe to say you're not (FPS = Frames Per Second not First Person Shooter in this case, ie someone who chases a minimum of 60fps at all times and 120fps for preference)




when are the men in white coats coming? I'm not sure how much longer I can keep him talking

[Gooner5]

I use 1360x768 as it is closer to 16:9 aspect ratio so my video files, TV shows in particular play with little or no black bars which I prefer. Whilst on higher resolutions they have black bars top and bottom,So I prefer to watch them full screen at the correct aspect ratio instead of zooming in on the video to fill the screen at higher resolutions.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some monitors do scale better than others though. My Philips 200W6CS looks fine at 1280x800 for example. It is obviously sharpest at 1680x1050 but at lower resolutions it is still fine.

I would rather have the game quality settings higher and at a lower resolution than lower settings and a higher resolution IMHO.

[Gooner5]

Just have a quick question. Is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 compatible with 1.3 HDMI ports? As I'm not sure on this.