Advice on a system upgrade

[MarcC]

Hi,

First of all apologies for the first post asking for advice, Been a long time customer of scan and just stumbled across these forums.

I have been thinking of upgrading my PC for a while and was going to go for one of the pre-built Scan overclocked bundles, but I decided to ask in here first to see what advice I could get.

I use my PC for gaming 90% of the time.

My current spec at the moment is:-

Proc
Intel Core i7 950 3.06G s1366 + ANTEC Kuhler H2O 620

Motherboard
ASUS SABERTOOTH X58 MoBo

Memory
MS3 — 12GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMX12GX3M3A2000C9)

GFX Card
1536MB PALIT GTX580 PCI-E + VF3000F-580 580/70 VGA COOLER

I am more than happy with my:- monitors,headset,mouse and keyboard just now so I wont be looking at alternatives just yet!

I have been building my own systems for years, but in the past 5 years I have lost interest in keeping up to date with all the technology so not really great with putting certain components together to get the best out of them.

I believe the processor is holding me back due to it being a first gen i7 proc.

I was thinking about upgrading the Motherboard and Processor and hoping it would make a difference?

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Your CPU is fine and if anything you could get another 1GHZ out of it. The only real advantage IMHO of the newer CPUs is reduced power consumption.

[MarcC]

Thanks for the Reply Cat,

That then leads on to the next question, how to get a decent clock out of it....

Any advice on that?

My GFX card is clocked as its easy but CPU im not too sure about what to do

[kalniel]

I have the same CPU and memory. Overclocking the 950 is pretty easy - I run at ~3.8ghz with a mild undervolt. The full process is basically finding out the limit of your memory, the limit of your CPU base clock, and the absolute limit of your CPU frequency. Depending on the motherboard you can go up to a x24 multiplier for the CPU, so you can use either a high multiplier and only increase the base clock a small amount, or you can use a lower multiplier and increase the base clock a larger amount. You'll have RAM multipliers as well that work off this base clock, which ones exactly will depend on the motherboard again.

For starters, try something like a x23 CPU multiplier, base clock speed 160mhz, and x10 RAM multiplier. That'll give you 3.7ghz (leaving room to turbo to 3.86 with the x24th multiplier) and keep the RAM in a very easy 1600mhz range. Voltages just set to normal for the CPU, and 1.65V on the RAM (if it's the 1.65v version of the ram). That should allow all the power saving on idle modes etc.

[MarcC]

kalniel,

Thanks - my Mobo had a setting for "crazy overclock setting 3.7" so I picked that and it done everything and I set the memory to the value nearest to 1600mhz.

Seems to be working fine, I played some BF3 for about 30 - 40 mins and nothing bad happened.

I haven't touched any of the voltages as of yet.

[kalniel]

The crazy overclock setting will probably have bumped voltage a bit for stability and may have disabled power saving modes, but with your cooler that's no issues in the slightest heat-wise, and the leccy bill impact wouldn't be significant. So if you're happy, enjoy it

[TeaTimeRebel]

You didn't mention what HDD you have. If it's mechanical, you definitely want to consider switching to an SSD. This had a huge impact on the performance of my system as it generally improves the loading times of games and applications as well as system boot times.

[MarcC]

TeaTimeRebel,

I have a SSD and 2 mechanical drives.

the SSD is a tad small in size though so what I do is I generally just move the game that I am playing alot to it.

The O/S also boots off the SSD.

Thanks

[big_hairy_rob]

I have to agree with the others. Sure it's one generation behind, but with the next generation (Haswell) looming, I would put off any upgrades at this time, unless you feel it is absolutely essential.

[MarcC]

Thanks for all the advice, I will hang off just now then

Marc