Upgrade components and recommendations

B

bensonthetiger

New Member
Hello,

I'm interested in upgrading a few components to my PC over the course of the next 6-8 months or so. I wanted to post my specs and see what the community recommends. I realize new components will be coming available between now and 8 months from now, but I don't want to buy the most expensive product. I'm mainly interested in upgrading my graphics card and memory though I'm open to suggestions.

I'm thinking to jump up to a 2 or 3gb GPU so I don't have to upgrade again for at least another year or two. (I'm a casual gamer.) Then I was going to get 2 more memory cards (8gb/each) to bring my total ram up to 24gb.

I don't overclock though if I learned more about it and felt comfortable with the risk involved, I'd definitely do it.

Current specs:
Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155
Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB
Motherboard: GIGABYTE x68 GA-Z68XP-UD3P
RAM: G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4G) 240-Pin, DDR3 1333
Power Supply: COOLER MASTER Silent Pro M600 600W ATX12V V2.3 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready
HDD: 1TB 7200RPM
SSD: SAMSUNG 830 128GB SSD
Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 912
Windows 7 64-bit

Questions:

What GPUs do you recommend? (~$200-$400 range)

What memory do I need to get to be compatible with my current Sniper 8gb? (Anything that is 1333 and 240-pin?) Should I replace the Sniper with something at 1600+ for better performance?

Is there any point in me using two GPUs? (If I buy one, I'll have two. I think I read that even if you have two it only works at the pace of the slower one or at least it wouldn't be utilizing the full memory of the larger GPU.)

Do I overclock? Where should I go for the best intro to this?

Anything that I didn't ask, but should have? Mostly, I don't know what to do with my old parts when I buy new ones. Do I incorporate them in still (SLI or 4 memory chips) or try to sell them/recycle them? I'm open to ideas.

Games that I have or will be playing in the future: XCOM: Enemy Unknown & Enemy Within, Batman: Arkam City & Origins, Star Wars: Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Watch Dogs, Star Citizen. I also use the PC for work/school/entertainment.

Thanks and look forward to seeing your comments.
 
You have a very good CPU, and you would only see a 10-30% increase clock for clock if you upgraded to the newest available, so I would stick with your 2500k.
I would however recommend that you bought a good CPU cooler (Like the Corsair H100i) and overclocked your CPU. Should be able to take it from 3.5GHz to 4.6GHz with ease.
As for memory, I would buy 2x8GB 1600MHz from either Corsair or Kingston, leaving you the possibility to upgrade to 32GB in the future (16GB is an overkill for gaming today).
I wouldn't mix RAM speeds and brands. It's possible, but I would say always use the exact same dimms.
I always recycle old hardware, no reason to throw away good, working stuff. I still have my old AM2 Athlon X2 6400+ deployed in a PC, I used that in my own rig about 6 years ago.
You can only add another GPU if it's the same one as you already have. In your example it would be a GTX 460. You could use a 768MB RAM version, but then your 1GB would only be able to use 768MB of its RAM. (They share the RAM, so the two cards would both only have 768MB/1GB available)
So I would definitily recommend getting a brand new GPU and recycling the old along with your old 8GB 1333 RAM kit.
The AMD HD 7950 3GB or NVIDIA GTX 760 2GB would be good cards in your price range, and would increase the performance of your PC a lot in games.
You could buy a low-end B85 motherboard and a Haswell i3, put in the 8GB and the GTX 460 and you would have a decent gamer.
But if you are sure about waiting, AMD will be releasing new GPUs in the end of 2013/the start of 2014, so you would look at something like the HD 8950 then.

There are plenty of overclocking guides available on the intertubes, and if you're interested (I would recommend it, it's free performance (not really, you need to buy a CPU cooler :D)) I can link some of the better guides specific to your platform. Overclocking depends a lot on your chipset and CPU, but with newer stuff it's really simple.
You have an FSB, which will be 100MHz in your case. Then you have a multiplier, which is 33-37 in your case. The clock speed is calculated by saying FSB*Multiplier, which is 3.3-3.7GHz on your CPU.
Simply change the multipler to 46 and increase the voltage to match (the trick of overclocking is finding the correct voltage without overvolting the CPU).
My 2600k (very similar to your 2500k) will use around 1.15v at stock speeds. It needs 1.275v for 4.4GHz and around 1.385-1.4v for 4.8Ghz, so you can see it's a matter of small differences.
Feel free to use my volts as a reference, should be similar, but not exactly the same. All chips needs different voltages. I've been fortunate enough to be able to cherry-pick out of six different 2600k's, so I would expect a minor volt increase for yours. Unless you are lucky of course, it's not a joke it's called the 'sillicone lottery'. I would, for example, try and increase the multiplier to 44 and set the volt to 1.3v, then run Prime95 to check if it's stable. If it's stable for 1-6 hours, I would switch to OCCT and enable 'AVX' in the Linpack test. If it's stable for 24-48 hours using Linpack, it's stable.
All of this is done the your BIOS, which can be accessed by pressing the delete button when starting the PC.
My friend has a P67 chipset Gigabyte board, which is older than yours, and his has options for various clock speeds where it'll then automatically overclock your CPU to that speed.
It's taken his 2600k to 4.4GHz using 1.275v as well (automatically! I tested six different chips for at least 24 hours each before I chose the one I use today)
 
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Wow that's really good info on overclocking. It seems like a little hard work upfront for some really good payoffs down the road. Thank you for explaining it for me. You mentioned overclocking guides specific to my platform; can you point me in that direction because I'm pretty convinced right now to do this once I get a GPU, ram and cooler. (Although I could go ahead and overclock as soon as I get a cooler if I wanted, right?)

Thanks for the GPU/Ram recommendations. Do you recycle all of your old hardware by putting it in other builds, or do you give away/sell it? At the moment I don't need another build, but I could reach out to some friends. It would please me greatly if my gf would be interested in gaming because I could set her up with a lower-end build as you suggest. If I can't find someone I know to use the parts, I'd either hold on to the parts or sell them if possible though I find it unlikely people would want to buy used computer parts unless it was on the cheap and cheap. Then last case scenario is turn the parts over to Best Buy for 'recycling.' I guess something is better than nothing, but if you care to discuss your experiences with recycling/pawning of component parts, I'm all ears.

Thanks again for the response and info.
 
A HD 7950 3GB or a GTX 760 2GB (they cost around the same) would absolutely smash a GTX 460 SLI configuration.
I just never throw anything away unless it's near useless (I've thrown away quite a few DDR2 555MHz 512MB RAM dimms)
I work at one of Europe's largest hardware distributors, as well as building and installing the machines for a few small companies of where I know the owners personally. So I have a lot of hardware lying around. For a normal mortal person, they don't have multiple cases, PSUs, RAM dimms, mobo+CPU combos and HDDs available.
For example, I'm using 4 of my best DDR2 dimms in a build. If I got hold of some better DDR2 dimms, I would swap it out and use the 4 dimms in two builds á 2 dimms each.
People often ask if I want their old builds or laptops before they throw them away, which is quite nice.
But enough about me.

LinusTechTips: Ivy Bridge overclocking
Now, one thing to mention, you have a Sandy Bridge CPU. This guide is for Ivy Bridge, but it's exactly the same.
 
Excellent. Your job sounds pretty sweet. I can't imagine being able to work around tech components everyday.

I noticed that you have a 1000W power supply. Should I be worried about my 600W?
 
No, not at all. I could get by with a good quality 500W PSU, but I get a discount on hardware through work, so I just bought a power supply that would be powerful enough for everything I could throw at it as long as the warranty would last. I just haven't upgraded my PC since then, because it was far beyond what I expected.
If I ever rebuild my PC, in a different case or for any other reason, I'll swap it out for a SilverPower 750W Silver PSU. It's better quality and still has way too many watts.
I have one of those lying around that I use on a ghetto test bench, which is just a motherboard box.
 
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