Upgrading my desktop.

S

Skyro

New Member
Hey guys,

I haven't upgraded my gaming desktop for a year or two now, and would like advice on what I should be upgrading. I have attached my part list below. Everything is still the same except the graphics card which was upgraded to a Asus Radeon R9 280X 3Gb and I added a Samsung 850 Pro SSD (128gb). I want to upgrade the case to the NZXT H440 Razer Matte Black Mid Tower, because my current case is damaged. Besides that I'm not sure what needs to be upgraded. Besides that I'm open to suggestion :) Maybe the Kraken X31 but I'm not sure if thats good for what I need.

PS. I live in Australia (for parts pricing etc.)
 

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Excellent choice of case, it's a great case. I love mine. :)

Your system is actually still very good - I still have an i7 3770 setup and there's been another thread recently about the same thing (upgrading an i7 3770 system). I'd just get the H440 you want and upgrade the graphics card to like a 390X if you like AMD or a 970 or a 980 if you like NVIDIA and leave it at that. Guess you could get a 250GB or 500GB SSD too if you are finding that you are running out of room on the 120GB SSD.
 
Get an 8GB Graphics Card, that will boost your gaming experience quite a bit. Also upgrading to DDR4 RAM can help. 16GB RAM is not too bad, if you want to stick with that go ahead. Water cooling I have noticed boosts up the performance in my PC rather than air cooling. And like Spirit said with a newer SSD if you need more space and have the money.
 
SG Ehren said:
Get an 8GB Graphics Card, that will boost your gaming experience quite a bit. Also upgrading to DDR4 RAM can help. 16GB RAM is not too bad, if you want to stick with that go ahead. Water cooling I have noticed boosts up the performance in my PC rather than air cooling. And like Spirit said with a newer SSD if you need more space and have the money.
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This is complete fail. Sorry mate, but 8GB VRAM will not provide any benefit whatsoever at 1080p and his motherboard does not support DDR4.
 
Upgrading to a faster card like the R9 390 will definitely be a big step up from the 280X and the 390 is very well-priced considering what it can do, but it just so happens to have 8GB GDDR5. Upgrading to the 390 *just* because it has 8GB of GDDR5 is not the reason to upgrade or the reason why it is faster than a 280X (at 1080p at least, maybe at 4K and higher resolutions it's one of the reasons, but certainly not for 1080p). Even if the 390 had 3GB or 4GB it'd be still a great upgrade because the 390 is a much faster GPU than the old 280X, which is really just a rebadged HD 7970 from 2012.

Here's the 285 vs the 390: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1512?vs=1594 (the 280X is around the same speed as the 285). You can see how much faster the 390 is.

And just adding water cooling doesn't help with anything unless you actually overclock your components to a high enough level that you can actually make use of it.
 
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