Best Upgrade for my money?

D

Darylrese

New Member
Hello all,

I currently have the following hardware and i am looking to upgrade.

Asus M2N32SLI-DELUXE
Phenom 9850 Quad @ 2.9ghz
Corsair 6GB DDR2 800mhz
Samsung F1 1TB HDD
Jeantec 700W Storm PSU
23" Samsung Monitor @ 1650 x 1050
Zotac GTX 275


I was looking at buying a new graphics card such as the GTX 570 / GTX 470 or GTX 460 in SLI. My question here is wqill the rest of my system bottleneck any of the cards? Which is the best card for the money?

If it is going to bottleneck..is it worth me upgrading to the I7 950 @ 3.06ghz, DDR3 1600mhz 4GB and a H50 corsair water cooling kit and keeping the GTX 275 until i can afford to upgrade that?

Obviously i dont want to buy a new mobo / cpu / memory if its not much of an upgrade as its going to cost around £450 as apposed to £200 - £300 for a graphics card.

I play games such as GTA4, Hot persuit 2010, F1 2010, COD Black Ops, FSX, Photoshop CS4 etc Currently i get around 30 - 40fps in each game on high settings but cant max it out.


Any help welcome.
 
If you're fairly happy with the way your current rig runs, I'd wait until sometime in Q2 next year...that'll give time for all of the new platforms to come out and prices to stabilize on everything, and you can save up a bit more.

(If you didn't know, Intel is releasing a new socket/platform in January, and AMD is supposedly releasing two of them sometime in Q2)
 
Drenlin said:
If you're fairly happy with the way your current rig runs, I'd wait until sometime in Q2 next year...that'll give time for all of the new platforms to come out and prices to stabilize on everything, and you can save up a bit more.

(If you didn't know, Intel is releasing a new socket/platform in January, and AMD is supposedly releasing two of them sometime in Q2)
Click to expand...

Hi,

thanks for your info. I didn't know that! Would i see much of a performance increase just upgrading my GPU then or do you think i won't see much of a difference?
 
That'd probably be the safest bet right now, since most all of the high end next gen cards are out. I believe the GTX 270 is somewhere between a Radeon HD5770 and a Geforce GTX 460SE in performance, so you'd have to spend a fair bit of cash to see a notable performance improvement other than adding DirectX 11.

If you do buy a graphics card, I'd go with AMD(the bought ATI) if you plan on sticking with an AMD processor, since Nvidia doesn't allow SLI on AMD chipsets and they aren't making any new nForce ones. (nForce AMD boards were kind of bad anyway...)

Here's a good review showing how they perform. (keep in ming, the 69xx cards are new and will get better with more refined driver releases...AMD/ATI has a habit of doing that)
http://news.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_radeon_6950_6970_performance/
 
Darylrese said:
Hello all,

I currently have the following hardware and i am looking to upgrade.

Asus M2N32SLI-DELUXE
Phenom 9850 Quad @ 2.9ghz
Corsair 6GB DDR2 800mhz
Samsung F1 1TB HDD
Jeantec 700W Storm PSU
23" Samsung Monitor @ 1650 x 1050
Zotac GTX 275


I was looking at buying a new graphics card such as the GTX 570 / GTX 470 or GTX 460 in SLI. My question here is wqill the rest of my system bottleneck any of the cards? Which is the best card for the money?

If it is going to bottleneck..is it worth me upgrading to the I7 950 @ 3.06ghz, DDR3 1600mhz 4GB and a H50 corsair water cooling kit and keeping the GTX 275 until i can afford to upgrade that?

Obviously i dont want to buy a new mobo / cpu / memory if its not much of an upgrade as its going to cost around £450 as apposed to £200 - £300 for a graphics card.

I play games such as GTA4, Hot persuit 2010, F1 2010, COD Black Ops, FSX, Photoshop CS4 etc Currently i get around 30 - 40fps in each game on high settings but cant max it out.


Any help welcome.
Click to expand...

1600 MHz RAM? :o
 
Drenlin said:
That'd probably be the safest bet right now, since most all of the high end next gen cards are out. I believe the GTX 270 is somewhere between a Radeon HD5770 and a Geforce GTX 460SE in performance, so you'd have to spend a fair bit of cash to see a notable performance improvement other than adding DirectX 11.

If you do buy a graphics card, I'd go with AMD(the bought ATI) if you plan on sticking with an AMD processor, since Nvidia doesn't allow SLI on AMD chipsets and they aren't making any new nForce ones. (nForce AMD boards were kind of bad anyway...)

Here's a good review showing how they perform. (keep in ming, the 69xx cards are new and will get better with more refined driver releases...AMD/ATI has a habit of doing that)
http://news.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_radeon_6950_6970_performance/
Click to expand...

I hate ATI graphics cards...had nothing but trouble with them and drivers are terrible. I'm sticking to NVidia :)

Yes i know what you mean..AM3 with full SLI is almost impossible to get a hold of. I was looking at the I7 950. Otherwise i could get the 1090T black edition AM3 and just buy a decent single GPU card later on
 
If you say so :/

The quality of the card is completely up to the manufacturer, but they do take a while to fine-tune their drivers. It isn't ATI anymore, though...

As for the processor, an i7 2600K might be the better choice. It's better than the current i7's in most respects, though socket 1155 lacks tri-channel memory. (won't make any difference in games)
 
Update your hard drive to SSD. That will provide the largest improvement. Plus you need a new PSU as that one is a POS.
 
^ It could be worse...it's a Sirtec-built unit, I believe, so the quality is about like an OCZ.

I agree though, a higher quality one would be in order for a new build.
 
Drenlin said:
(nForce AMD boards were kind of bad anyway...)
Click to expand...

can i ask why i've heard of this before but couldnt find any definative response, i read something about how the chipset organized pci-ex 2.0 lanes but thats it, is there any other reason?

even when i looked at the reviews of the various chipset there was no real adavantage over the amd sli and amd 790 chipsets.
sometimes they were equal sometimes one or the other was the winner but overall no clear performance winner.
 
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Hi, I didn't think my PSU was that bad tbh. It has a digital readout on the back to say how many Watts its using and it never goes about 350 at the moment in my current system. Never had a problem with it.

Building a 1090T system would be cheaper but i'm not sure what they are like compared to my Phenom 9850?
 
Hello,

In england where i live they no longer sell the above board. It has been discontinued.

I'm not so sure i need SLI but i would just like the option to have it should i wish to upgrade in the future. No point in spending all that money if its not what i want.
 
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