Upgrade advice please

N

ninja007

New Member
I want to upgrade my system and thought I would start with the video card, and would like your advice on a couple of cards im considering.

My gaming activities at the moment consist of WOW, which isnt too gps demanding, but I would like to have enough guts in the card in case I decide to start playing the more graphic demanding games.

My budget is in the $400 range. Im looking at the GTX 670 or HD7950. Of course other suggestions would be appreciated.

Im trying to approach this upgrade piece by piece, but if my current system is out of date please say so so I can rethink this upgrading to the complete system.

Thank you

i7 -950 3.06 ghz
X58A-UD3R
4GB DDR3
HD 5870
800w PS
 
What's the make and model of power supply?

I'd say a 670 is a great card at $400. And it wouldn't hurt going to 8GB of RAM. BF3 on ultra uses more than 4 GB.
 
I would upgrade the GPU. Get yourself the GTX 670, and with just a touch of overclocking you will get near the GTX 680 performance. Your processor is just fine, and will be more then adequate for some time to come. And as mentioned before, upgrade your RAM, it's so cheap nowadays.
 
Thanks for the comments. Im guessing 16g of ram will do the trick. Im a noob, so based on my motherboard listed above, can someone suggest a brand / model # of ram sticks that has worked well for them? I could be wrong but dont think i should skimp on memory quality so above avg suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks again..
 
ninja007 said:
Thanks for the comments. Im guessing 16g of ram will do the trick. Im a noob, so based on my motherboard listed above, can someone suggest a brand / model # of ram sticks that has worked well for them? I could be wrong but dont think i should skimp on memory quality so above avg suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks again..
Click to expand...

I never had any problems with Corsair RAM. Get some tripple channel kit (as your board is 1366 socket) and grab yourself 12GB kit (3x4GB). Dominator series is quite very good and stable. As for the speed, get yourself 1600MHz, but you will have to change it in your mobo's Bios (set it to X.M.P. profile). Don't pay extra for better CL, you will not see any difference between CL9 and CL8. 12GB is most likely more than you will ever need.
 
I'd actually recommend replacing the power supply, also. Its not that great quality, and I've found other threads that had problems playing games that got fixed by replacing the power supply with a more quality unit. And added to the fact that its an older one and may not be working like it used to.

Not a necessity, just something to think about. Maybe the next thing on the list to replace.
 
claptonman said:
What's the make and model of power supply?

I'd say a 670 is a great card at $400. And it wouldn't hurt going to 8GB of RAM. BF3 on ultra uses more than 4 GB.
Click to expand...

Not on my computer it doesnt. I havent seen it use much more than 1GB of RAM. 1.2GB is the most Iv seen it use on ultra at 1080p.
 
G80FTW said:
Both. I see 1GB of system memory usage and between 900-1.2GB of video memory usage. So maybe 2.2GB-2.4GB total.
Click to expand...

The GPU ram and regular RAM are two separate entities and shouldn't be added up. I believe I should ask, how much system RAM does the Battlefield uses on your PC?
 
mr.doom said:
The GPU ram and regular RAM are two separate entities and shouldn't be added up. I believe I should ask, how much system RAM does the Battlefield uses on your PC?
Click to expand...

They can be added up as total resource usage. Because if you do not have enough VRAM on your graphics card that will also be stored in your system memory to compensate, thus if you are using a 512MB video card and the game needs 1.2GB of graphics memory it will use 768MB (or whatever it needs) of your system memory to store the rest of what the graphics card wont let it thus your system memory usage will go up from 1GB to 1.7-2GB.

Since I have plenty of RAM available on my card, its only using 1-1.2GB of system memory.


 
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