Upgrade Advice

xammot

New Member
Hi Guys,

Nice to meet everyone.

I built my current build around 7 years ago and I haven't been gaming or actively using my PC for around 2 years now. I can still play a lot of games on fairly high settings but I have a spare £500 and wanted to get back into Rust & some other more dependant games.

Operating System
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i5 3570K @ 3.40GHz 36 °C
Ivy Bridge 22nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
MSI Z77A-G45 (MS-7752) (SOCKET 0) 28 °C
Graphics
Acer P235H (1680x1050@59Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 (EVGA) 34 °C
Storage
931GB Seagate ST1000DM003-9YN162 ATA Device (SATA ) 29 °C
Optical Drives
ATAPI iHAS124 D ATA Device
Audio
NVIDIA Virtual Audio Device (Wave Extensible) (WDM)


I was thinking to start with I should get another 8GB RAM? and also maybe another GTX680 to run in SLI?

If anyone could give me advice or feedback I would be very greatful! thanks.
 

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
FYI, the free upgrade to windows 10 is still an option as well. Definitely get another 8gb of ram. However, I would actually get a single card rather than getting another old car to run sli. Even a single 2060 outperforms the 680, the 680 is 8 years old at this point. I would also invest in an SSD to run windows from.
 

jevery

Active Member
I've run SLI once and wouldn't do it again. It's hard to keep the top card from overheating at max load and some of my games didn't benefit. I'd get the SSD, RAM, and probably an RX 5700xt.
 

OmniDyne

Active Member
SLI is pretty much dead. If I remember correctly no modern titles support it and/ or it runs poorly. The 680 is quite slow by this point. The biggest improvement would be had from a new graphics card; anything NVIDIA GTX 1660 or AMD RX 5700 and up would provide huge performance gains in games.

I'd clone your hard disk to an SSD before anything else and then upgrade to Windows 10. As was stated, this is still free to do. An SSD would be the biggest overall performance upgrade. They're really almost necessary anymore.

RAM would be of benefit, but since you're still on a DDR3 platform I'd be more hesitant to do this.
 
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Intel_man

VIP Member
SLI is pretty much dead. If I remember correctly no modern titles support it and/ or it runs poorly.
Ehhh... most AAA titles still do. I wouldn't expect indie games to though. Performance varies from title to title but it's not a poor gain. It's just not as simple as double the card, double the performance.

As a general rule of thumb, I'd only consider SLI only on the flagship card if the performance from one isn't enough. So as of today, 2080 Ti in SLI would make sense if certain games still don't run to your satisfaction and SLI is supported for that title.
 

Cisco001

Well-Known Member
Your CPU is old, I would say search for RX580/590, used 8GB RAM and new SSD.

High end GPU likely bottleneck.
Used RAM at CEX usually cheap
 
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