Upgrading or Rebuilding PC

[PiXxX]

Hey guys.

This is my current home-pc spec, and im thinking of upgrading it for the new 2011 games.
Now last time i upgrades my PC it was fairly old and had a 7800GTX in it, so i built everythingt from sratch, however this time i have slightly better gear so need some advice.


CPU: Q5500
GPU's: 2x 280GTX
Mobo: Asus Striker II
RAM: 4GB
PSU: 1500W Thermltake PSU (my 1200 gave up on me at one point so i thought the 1500 would last me muhahaha)
HD: 1x 300GB 1x 1TB
Case: Thermaltake SwordM

Now what im deciding is whether to upgrade or replace the whole build.
Please suggest.

I was personally thinkining of upgrading to an i7 (or i9 - when are they out??)
Maybe upgrade the mobo to an Asus Striker III as well, and add 4 more gigs of ram.

Are the HD's good? Or should i add a SSD?
What about the GPU's? Upgrade to 400 series - or wait for new series? (when is it out??)

thanks.

[scaryjim]

Assuming Q5500 is a typo for Q6600 (either that or you have ultra-rare cpu ), I wouldn't bother upgrading anything in your actual rig. I'd buy a really good after market cooler, and clock the Q6600 up - aim for the 3.6GHz mark*. That should do you for at least another couple of years, by which point both Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge will be mature technology and AMD will have pushed out another couple of generations of graphics cards, so when you do upgrade you'll actually get a really noticable difference in performance, not just 2% in a few games (2 GTX280s is still competitive against most modern cards, allowing for the occasional vagueries of SLI...).

SSDs is another matter: if you're jonesing to spend cash now buy yourself a decent 120GB SSD for around £200 and watch the responsiveness of your system skyrocket. There's been a few SSD threads recently: just have a read of those and pick the one you like the sound of (current faves seem to be the OCZ Vertex 2E and the Corsair Force F120).

*OK, now I'm confused: according to the system spec in your profile you have an "Intel i7 3.2GHz" processor? Are you running a Q6600 overclocked to 3.2GHz already? If so, then I don't think you'll see any noticable day to day improvements from any current processor unless you do any *very* heavily threaded tasks...

[Ulti]

I'd follow what scaryjim says, go for a big SSD and save your cash for newer stuff later, you won't notice that much difference moving to the GTX4 series so it'll be a waste of money. Also, you've already got a "good" quad core so I wouldn't move to a whole new architecture as it simply ain't worth it, no need for 8GB RAM for gaming either.

Although an SSD won't improve gaming performance, it will allow faster loading times if you decide to install the games to the SSD. Your whole system will be much faster though!

[PiXxX]

Nah, the i7 3.2 GHz is my brothers PC (youll notice it has 3 280's not 2)

My one is currently running at 2.83 i think (well whatever it did at retail anyway)
So ill probably get an SSD to put the OS on - however ive always been really scared to overclock and just destroy everythng

Oh and type was 9550 instead of 5500

[scaryjim]

Ooooh, Q9550! That's even better than a Q6600. Yeah, definitely don't bother upgrading that yet.

I can understand your concern about overclocking, but it's been a few years since the Northwood P4 debacle (they had a design issue where, if you used higher than standard voltages to overclock them, they'd suddenly die without warning due to running out of electrons or something!); overclocking socket 775 CPUs is pretty safe, and they tend to overclock quite well. You should have a read of Clunk's Core 2 overclocking guide (it's written for Core 2 Duos but applies equally to the quads) - you should be able to get a moderate performance boost out of your processor if you decide to give overclocking a go!

[nibbler]

I'd say that that is a pretty damn nice rig and definitely doesn't need an upgrade. Maybe an SSD?

[Behemoth]

Swap my rig for yours ?

[PiXxX]

Will take your guys words for it

So whats a pretty sefe GHz to overlock my 9550 to? You said 3.6 for the 6600, im curious what the 9550 can do

[Ulti]

It could probably do around 3.8ghz, 4.0ghz if you have good cooling, 4.0ghz+ with a good chip and good cooling but to be honest you don't need it much above 3.6ghz anyway.

[Pob255]

Cooling will be a factor here, what cpu cooler are you using?

[scaryjim]

It will also be motherboard dependant, although the Striker II is a good start in that respect

The difference between overclocking the 9550 compared to the 6600 is that you're starting your base clock from a higher point: iirc the 9550 runs at 333MHz x 8.5 to acheive its stock speed of 2.83GHz, while the Q6600 runs at 266MHz x 9 == 2.4GHz. To overclock you basically increase the base clock (which is 1/4 of the FSB), so when you get to a base clock of 400MHz the Q6600 is doing 3.6GHz while the Q9550 is only doing 3.4GHz. However, don't let that worry you because the architectural tweaks between the generations give the Q9x50 around a 5% performance advantage at the same clock speed as the Q6x00, so it will make up most of the difference of the lower multipler anyway