Upgrade or not..... that is the question

[chavo]

I am in turmoil!!!

Basically i have £170 to upgrade. I currently have a asus p5k-e board and a q6600 the 170 is for RAM.

If i sell the Q6600 (say i get (90) and i sell the board (40) i will have 300. i could add a further 50 to it maybe a bit more.

i could probably get the i5, board and 2 gig of ddr 3 for 350, will it be any better than the current q6600?

PC is used for games only. i have a 4890 graphics card, but i think in order to keep up with current standards i need to move in to the ddr 3 market.

Thoughts?

[Domestic_Ginger]

Hang in there I reckon. Sandybridge and bulldozer next year. Not exactly sure I know anything about sandybridge...

Unless you are noticing slowdown or need things done faster I can't see any reason to upgrade. Maybe DDR3 will come down in price too (fingers crossed).

BTW is your HDD manufactured in the south west?

[scaryjim]

... the 170 is for RAM.

Per your sig, you have 4GB of OCZ Reaper 8500? ANy reason you'd want to upgrade that? I can't see you needing more, or getting much faster, RAM than that really.

If I was you I'd stick the £170 in an ISA, add to it whenever possible, and blow the whole lot in about a year when Bulldozer, Sandy Bridge et al. finally appear

Also, if your Q6600 is under water I'd've thought it should clock well above 3.15 safely - have you tried just clocking it up further...?

[chavo]

Hang in there I reckon. Sandybridge and bulldozer next year. Not exactly sure I know anything about sandybridge...


BTW is your HDD manufactured in the south west?

My attitude is and always has been, " wait till next year cos this that and the other" their will always be something better on the horizon, i dont want to wait a whole year!!

sorry i dont know what you mean about the south west.

[chavo]

Per your sig, you have 4GB of OCZ Reaper 8500? ANy reason you'd want to upgrade that? I can't see you needing more, or getting much faster, RAM than that really.

If I was you I'd stick the £170 in an ISA, add to it whenever possible, and blow the whole lot in about a year when Bulldozer, Sandy Bridge et al. finally appear

Also, if your Q6600 is under water I'd've thought it should clock well above 3.15 safely - have you tried just clocking it up further...?

2 gig broke and went back to ebuyer, so down to 2 gig again.

[scaryjim]

sorry i dont know what you mean about the south west.

It's an accent joke, I wouldn't worry about it!

2 gig broke and went back to ebuyer, so down to 2 gig again.

Ah right.

One of the good reasons for waiting at the minute is that there isn't much competition in the enthusiast end of the market. Intel has CPUs sewn up and, until Fermi launches, ATI have GPUs sewn up. What that means is that most top-end components are probably slightly over-priced. It'd be well worth waiting a bit longer to see if ATI can bring something to the table to unsettle Intel's performance dominance. If they do, not only do they become a viable option for a high end gaming machine, but also it should force prices down in the enthusiast market, so you'll get more for your money anyway.

If your current rig is only used for gaming I don't think you'll see any significant performance increase from a complete upgrade right now: a Q6600 @3.15 is not going to bottlenecking your gaming experience, and low latency DDR2 @ 1066 is pretty much comparable to DDR3 @ 1333, performance wise: if you're overclocking high end DDR2 RAM you're not going to see any real improvement moving to DDR3. So I'd stick with what you have, get the best 2x2GB DDR2 kit you can lay your hands on (I believe a 2x 2GB kit tends to be more stable during overclocking than 4x 1GB?), sell your 2x 1GB Reaper for ~ £30 to help finance it, then put anything you have left over in a big upgrade kitty for this time next year, when we'll have ATI 6-series GPUs and new processor architectures from AMD and Intel (all of which will push ATI 5series cards and Intel's current Core i7 / i5 down in price).

[Saracen]

My view is that the time to upgrade is when the kit you have won't do what you need it to do, or won't give you acceptable performance. If you chase spec, you're going to spend a lot of money keeping up, and will gain little or no real world benefit.

For instance, I have one machine I use as a logging system taking data from inputs and recording. It's based on a Pentium 550, and spends about 90% of the time idle, and never ever gets near not being able to keep up with demands. I could upgrade it, say to a Q6600, but all that happen is that instead of spending 90% idle, it'll be spending 99.99% idle. What have I gained?

So .... if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, or can afford it without batting an eyelid and want to upgrade, then upgrade. But if, as seems likely, the upgrade to "keep up with current standards" will achieve little or nothing in terms of the machine's ability to play the games you want at the detail setting you want, then what you're really doing is chasing fashion.

That being the case, put the money aside, add to it periodically and bide you time. Then, when the technology has moved on a fair bit and there are real gains to be had, you'll have the funding for it.

So here, in my opinion, is the question to ask yourself ..... am I doing this because I just want it, or because I expect to get a better machine from it? If it's because you just want it, and you can afford it, then go right ahead - it's your money. But personally, I'm not convinced that there's any performance gains to be had to justify it.

[Zak33]

If you have £170 to burn... (and that's nice) I'd not change that cpu or ram/mobo cos they're more than up to the job.

I'd look at a nice fast Solid State Drive for your Operating System

That money will buy 60gb of rapidness and it'll go into your next system too

[chavo]

Well, i suppose i am doing it just because i want to. i have sold the last 2 gig of ram on fleabay i got 35 for it. so Ram is on the agenda, but that is another thread.

as for the solid state drive, how much of a gain in OS speeds can i expect, real life apps and games installed on it?

I was told a while ago that solid state should not be used for data that would be accessed on a regular basis, (something to do with the gates, lifespan etc

[mikemikemi]

SSD is the single best upgrade for noticeable performance gain (not gaming) I have done recently.

[chavo]

SSD is the single best upgrade for noticeable performance gain (not gaming) I have done recently.

Can you explain this a little better? for example, i download a lot so things that i find wishing where a bit faster are unzipping large files, i wish windows would boot quicker also. everything else like loading apps, (IE, Dreamweaver, etc) i find to be off acceptabl speed.

What did you specifically notice was quicker?

[mikemikemi]

Can you explain this a little better? for example, i download a lot so things that i find wishing where a bit faster are unzipping large files, i wish windows would boot quicker also. everything else like loading apps, (IE, Dreamweaver, etc) i find to be off acceptabl speed.

What did you specifically notice was quicker?

Boot time came down noticeably, more importantly was how quickly windows became usable once the desktop appeared. What I mean is from booting when loading windows, once the desktop appears you normally can't do much until background loading finishes, this wait time is much shorter on an SSD. Overall, loading anything is quicker, the size dictates how much you notice it.

Unzipping can be faster as write speeds on an SSD is higher than mechanical drives, but I don't do much unzipping so can't tell you if I've noticed anything.