[Upgrade Advice] Foreseeable PC Upgrade

It's been a while since I last properly followed the PC hardware scene (2008/09) so I'm a little bit behind on the market and the latest recommended bits. Got a lot of catching up to do but while I procrastinate I thought I'd pay a visit to my favorite enthusiast forum on "teh interwebs", for some friendly advice on a potential overhaul of my current system sometime this year.

I currently have this setup in an Antec 902.

PSU: Coolermaster 850W RealPower Modular PSU
Motherboard: ASUS x46 Rampage Formula
CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q9450 (3.4ghz OC)
GFX: 1GB MSI GTX560Ti TwinFrozr2/OC
RAM: 4x1gb Corsair XMS2 DDR2 (running at 1066mhz)
HDD: 1xSamsung Spinpoint 750gb & 1xSamsung Eco 1.5tb
DVD: Pioneer DVD DVR-215

My immediate presumption is that I can keep the case and psu for a good part of the forseeable future. I barely use my DVD Drive in this day and age of 50mb bandwidths and downloadable clients, so I believe that can stay as well.

The rest is fair game (unless hardware these days needs more than 850w and the antec 902 is seriously uncool) but as I said earlier I'm in no rush to upgrade straight away and would much rather wait if it meant cheaper, decent hardware. I'm looking for a faster (Will definitely need an SSD, are these set to drop in price anytime soon?) machine that will hopefully be secure against upgrades for several years to come, much like my current rig has served but not massively expensive (mid-range -> high end). I play pretty much all genre of games from Minecraft to BF3, X-COM to SC2 so will no doubt need to be able to power some serious gameage at some point in the future.

If you're also super bored and wish to help even more, if you're able to calculate how much my current rig is worth (the whole machine) that would also be much appreciated.

Many Thanks,
Kev

Your system is actaully still quite good, and I bet it still plays battlefield 3 nicely. (The benchmark these days).

An SSD would really speed your windows loads up.

I think you've got a case of just wanting to upgrade and not actually needing to upgrade. Your PC is still very fine for at least a year or two. Depending on what resolution you play, you may want to upgrade your graphics card if you want to last a few years. Perhaps the Nvidia GTX680? It's rather expensive but it is pretty good.

850W is still a large amount of power in today's world, you won't be running anywhere near that amount unless you run something like triple SLI/Crossfire.

An SSD would also be very viable as you've both suggested and the low access times will really help you see a noticeably increase in general performance. If you game a lot then it may be worth getting a cache SSD instead as you probably won't want to spend a lot on a big SSD; but if you don't mind the game loading times then you could just keep them on the HDD and only have smaller games on the SSD.

I completely agree it's still a very fine rig, only quam is that in a few games I'm beginning to notice annoying slowdowns (BF3, SC2). I contribute this to my CPU and RAM, unless it could be HDD related? FPS is usually great throughout except at random intervals where it may drop for a brief couple of seconds.

I'll take a look at some SSD's, I'd be interested in getting something between 80-120 which can facilitate Windows and a few of my favs (Skyrim, BF3, SC2 and Diablo 3 in the not too distant future).

When it drops for a few seconds is usually due to HDD or GPU I'd think, not RAM or CPU AFAIK. I remember on the PS3 Skyrim would lag a tiny bit with HDDs whereas there was less lagging with SSDs. However, future patches made the difference between HDDs and SSDs very small. However, that's for a PS3, I'm not sure if the same applies to PCs in those situations.

Generally a GPU puts out frames without a boundary, hence some reviews measure lowest FPS as well as average as some scenes require more GPU processing than others, causing some slight slowdowns.

120/128GB SSDs have come down a bit so it's a good idea to keep an eye out on them.

Perhaps a good idea would be to grab an SSD now and up the graphics and see how things run for a year or so? If you do grab an SSD and up the graphics card, you could easily run another 2-4 years I imagine. At that time you could then perhaps do a complete overhaul and go for whatever platform is out then.

At the end of the day, gaming won't use 100% CPU load nor will it use 4GB+ RAM. Not even all games use 4 cores yet and you've even got your CPU OCed to 3.4Ghz so I really think you'll be fine on the CPU and RAM front.

EDIT: Crucial M4 128GB on Amazon for just under £110: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004W2JKZI/

Does seem to be following a trend though so I'm not sure whether you'd want to wait or not:
http://charts.camelcamelcamel.com/uk...=1&tp=all&fo=0