PC buying advice

CD82

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In the last couple of weeks I thought about buying a new pc, since my current gaming machine breaks a little sweat when it comes to newer games. Sadly I'm a bit out of touch with what systems offer good value for money, so any advice would be appreciated. I plan to buy something like this:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 4x3.2 ghz - overclock to ~3.7 ghz (177 ?)

Asus Crosshair III Formula 790FX (170 ?)

2x 2 GB 1333 MHz CL7 (90 ?)

Noctua NH-C12P 120 mm CPU cooler (65 ?)

total: 502 ?


Now for the graphics card:
I currently own an Asus 8800 GTS G92 with 512 MB and some overclocking potential. I could either try to sell it on ebay for 50-80 ? and buy a new card for ~200 ? or buy another used card of the same type for ~100 ? and run them in sli mode. Either way I can't spend more than 600 ? on the whole package (psu, case, drives and all that stuff is present, so it's really just the cpu, mb, ram, cooler and graphics card I need to buy). Am I going over the top here with some of the components? And would you rather buy one new graphics card for 200 ? or run two older cards with sli? The 8800 GTS still seems to be pretty ok, on my current system (X2 Black Edition @ 2x 3.2 GHz) it's more and more the cpu that can't keep up, overclocking the graphics card doesn't do anything for the performance and sadly I can't put that phenom II on by current board (asus m2n32sli deluxe, am2 / am2+ only). Or perhaps I should just put one of the bigger supported quadcores like the Phenom X4 9950 with 4x 2.6 ghz on my current board without changing any of the other components? Any advice would be very appreciated!
 
Based on your list of components the greatest saving potential is the mainboard (unless you need a specific feature that only this board has) and the cpu cooler. Both parts don't really help the performance. Without the oc nonsense a cooler for half the money will suffice, similar story with the mainboard.
Especially if cost is an issue, oc will consume more power aka money.
Same thing with the graphics card, if you have similar theoretical performance and similar initial cost then non-sli should be preferred.

Judging by the overpriced mainboard and cpu cooler I assume your current psu will be oversized as well and handle double the cpu and gpu core count?
 
I was under the impression that AM2/AM2+ boards could take AM3 CPUs with a BIOS update, but I could be wrong.
 
They do - depending on the age even without your own updating - but then there's no DDR3 RAM, and you may just shift the bottleneck without solving it.
 
Based on your list of components the greatest saving potential is the mainboard (unless you need a specific feature that only this board has) and the cpu cooler. Both parts don't really help the performance. Without the oc nonsense a cooler for half the money will suffice, similar story with the mainboard.
Especially if cost is an issue, oc will consume more power aka money.
Same thing with the graphics card, if you have similar theoretical performance and similar initial cost then non-sli should be preferred.

Judging by the overpriced mainboard and cpu cooler I assume your current psu will be oversized as well and handle double the cpu and gpu core count?

Yes indeed my current psu is a bit oversized for my system (had to replace it a couple months back so I decided to buy one with more power than I currently need in case I upgrade some time soon...)

Any good ideas for a reliable mainboard? I know 170 ? is a bit steep for an AMD mainboard... The additional cost due to overclocking consuming more power is not an issue though.

I was under the impression that AM2/AM2+ boards could take AM3 CPUs with a BIOS update, but I could be wrong.

Some newer boards can, but mine can't. The BIOS support stops with the first Phenom quadcores. Apparently there are people who tried running Phenom II cpus on the m2n32 but either didn't get it to boot or got post boot with turning every enhanced cpu feature off but most of them wheren't able to get a stable system, and those who did reported performance loss in comparison to running the same cpu on a newer board. And spending almost the same money on an already second-generation quadcore to put on my third-generation board doesn't sound too attractive to me. :(
 
Any good ideas for a reliable mainboard?

That depends on what you need.

For example, exceptionally high drive count? eSATA? SLi/CrossFire? Specific expansion slot types/count? Intend to stick additional RAM sticks in later? yada yada yada :lol:
 
I honestly don't see DDR2 RAM as a bottleneck on anything but the highest-end systems, but too bad about your motherboard. Phenom IIs are supposed to be great.

Also, with DDR3 RAM you have triple channel, so its best to get it in multiples of 3 IIRC. I don't know how much of a difference this makes.

As for the video card, What you've got is decent, and if you have an SLI board and you can get another one cheap that wouldn't be a horrible idea. But you could also wait a bit and prices might go down when the next generation of cards comes out soon.
 
That depends on what you need.

What I need:
5x SATA with Raid controller
2x fullspeed PciE
4x DDR3 slots
decent performance

I honestly don't see DDR2 RAM as a bottleneck on anything but the highest-end systems, but too bad about your motherboard. Phenom IIs are supposed to be great.

Also, with DDR3 RAM you have triple channel, so its best to get it in multiples of 3 IIRC. I don't know how much of a difference this makes.

As for the video card, What you've got is decent, and if you have an SLI board and you can get another one cheap that wouldn't be a horrible idea. But you could also wait a bit and prices might go down when the next generation of cards comes out soon.

I don't see DDR2 as a bottleneck either. The ram frequency goes up but so does the latency and as a result the bandwidth stays the same.

Triple channel doesn't seem to do anything (yet). I saw it yesterday for the first time and read some things about it but it doesn't seem to improve performance and anyway most of the AMD boards have dual channel support and four banks.

The thing is, I once bought another 8800 GTS (when I still had an original G80 with 320 MB), and operating two 8800 GTS 320 MB with an X2 5000 @ 2x 2.6 ghz didn't change a single thing, the best scenario was similar fps to only using one card, the worst case was several fps less than with only one card, although the cpu was always a bit slow and perhaps even one card alone was already a bit bored. I'm just afraid of needlessly buying another card and not gaining any performance whatsoever. Granted, the cards are quite cheap, you can get a "new" one for 100 ? or a used one for about half that. But still, it's either selling my current card and buying one new, mid-range card, or trying sli again, with hopefully better results than last time.
 
I don't see DDR2 as a bottleneck either. The ram frequency goes up but so does the latency and as a result the bandwidth stays the same.

Nah, the bandwidth (for requesting larger bits) does go up. The only thing not improving noticeably is requesting really small stuff.

The thing is, I once bought another 8800 GTS (when I still had an original G80 with 320 MB), and operating two 8800 GTS 320 MB with an X2 5000 @ 2x 2.6 ghz didn't change a single thing, the best scenario was similar fps to only using one card, the worst case was several fps less than with only one card, although the cpu was always a bit slow and perhaps even one card alone was already a bit bored. I'm just afraid of needlessly buying another card and not gaining any performance whatsoever.

The advantages of SLI/CrossFire largely depend on the game. If the game can't utilize the parallelness, then it won't go any faster. Similar to shoving more and more cores into a cpu to speed up a single thread... that's not going to go well.



What I need:
5x SATA with Raid controller
2x fullspeed PciE
4x DDR3 slots
decent performance

Ok, if you really want to be SLI-able with 2xPCIe 16x, then how about this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130235

In a nutshell: $100, AM3, 4x DDR3 1600, 5x SATA with 0/1/0+1/5/JBOD RAID, 2x PCIx 2.0 16x with SLI.
 
Get an ATI HD4870, and a good 600W PSU for yourself.

Don't bother SLI the 8800, not worth the trouble.
 
I just found out that the am3 boards only support crossfire, which I guess is a byproduct of the amd-ati-fusion... so sli is out of the question.
 
yeah AM3 and SLI should be possible just as long as you get a board with nvidia chipset...
 
Go for a 4870. They are a fantastic buy for the price, and perform similarly (Worse, but not too much worse) than a GTX260
 
I'm not promoting SLI (or CrossFire), but http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130235 is AM3 and SLI.

Thanks, I guess I wasn't looking hard enough. The shop I checked for am3 boards only had ~20 and they all had the new 790fx northbridge.

Go for a 4870. They are a fantastic buy for the price, and perform similarly (Worse, but not too much worse) than a GTX260

I'll probably try one of these when I find out that my current card won't cut it anymore after I bought the new system ;)
 
If you intend to either use your old card or buy an entirely new one, as in no SLI, then you might as well save the SLI-/dual-16xPCIe-able board. Depends on how sure you are about your future plans ;)
 
A couple of days ago my new hardware arrived. More or less it was the hardware I initially planned to buy, but it was cheaper than expected.

The memory is a bit strange though (OCZ 4 gb 1600 mhz 7-7-7-24 @ 1.9 V), it tells the bios to run at 1.5 V with much more latency (12-12-12), you have to manually overwrite the standard settings and even at 1.85 V it's a bit unstable.
The cpu (phenom II 955) runs nicely, when idling it's barely warm (30 ?C, fan at 950 rpm), playing a game takes it up to 44 ?C and running prime increases the temperature to 54 ?C with all four cores at 100%. So far I pushed it to 3.7 ghz (3.2 standard) without raising the core voltage (47 ?C game, 61 ?C prime).
The board is great, it's quite a looker and has tons of settings and options to tweak almost every frequency, voltage and timing. It comes with a handy lcd screen that is attached to the board with a 4 pin connector and can be programmed to display various system stats like temperatures, fan speeds and voltages.
Of course now my graphics card is the weak spot, but it's nice to see how powerful the 8800 gts g92 actually is. I'm going to keep the card for a few months and then I'll swap it for something new.
 
Feel free to let Santa bring me a gift when you don't need the card anymore :)


I'd say the bios was using some default one-fits-all setting for the memory, was the same thing here when I first powered it up - wanted to be 400 instead of 800MHz.
 
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