Impending birthday money means I can upgrade my rig at last!

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runo

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So it's my birthday in a little over a week and my parents have given me the option of purchasing one big gift. Being the gaming geek that I am I'm leaning towards one of two types PC parts. As indicated in my earlier thread, I'm likely going to be waiting for Bulldozer to launch and pick up a new mobo, RAM, and processor come Christmas.

For now, if you had the option of upgrading a single component with a budget of ~$400 (give or take a couple twenties), you'd choose?...:

  1. a. add a third storage unit, an SSD: NewEgg has the Crucial C300 128GB for almost 33% off at $200/shipped. Right now I have a Samsung 500GB SpinPoint F3 as my boot drive, and my data drive is an imaginably mediocre 320GB WD Caviar Blue. :| What I'd like to do is is reformat, transform the C300 128GB into my boot drive and install all my slowest-loading games (like MMOs) onto it and tack on my primary browser, and then leave about 25-30GB of space left over.

  • b. upgrade from a single EVGA GTX 460 to...
  • 2b. Crossfire Sapphire/XFX HD 6870s (OR) single Sapphire/XFX 6950 (OR) single EVGA GTX 570 1280MB?

  • c. Wait / save the money and upgrade something else later?

BTW: yes, I have SATA-III, and my power supply is more than beefy enough for the cards I was eying... at least for the 6950 and GTX 570. See my rig's specs in my signature and feel free to ask more if I can be of help.
 
1. SSD are luxuries... imho... not worth it.

2. that's a pretty good gpu you already have!

3. i'd go with this option. =]
 
Yup to the above.

SSD will not increase gaming performance, only decrease load times. Is your 460 the bottleneck? I can tell you going from a 1 GB 460 to a 6950 (BIOS flashed to 6970) was a huge upgrade.
 
I'd scratch the SSD drive and upgrade your main drive to a 1TB drive.

Then purchase 2x 1.5TB drives to store your "important" data on, and configure them in a RAID Mirror setup.

(That way your Operating System can crash/ get hacked/ get infected / coffee spilled on it, and anything that is important to you is perfectly safe and a duplicate copy in case one drive fails!)

(This will also let you re-format your Operating system drive every few months, making it VERY EASY to reduce clutter and bloatware that gets installed over time... and removing that junk, will keep your gaming experience at it's peak)

You should be able to do all this for WELL under your budget. If you're interested and want some help finding great prices, dont be afraid to PM me!
 
SSD is about the only thing that you can upgrade in your system with a noticeable impact on performance. As you can see, I actually have one and can therefore recommend it. Others who say it is not worth it obviously do not have one and therefore cannot offer valid advice to its worth. Do not get 570, it has weak vrms like the 590. I would leave the 460 atm if it suits you in the games you play or add another one for cheap sli atm.
 
I'd say no to the SSD or to RAID 1.

Again, SSDs are no gaming bottleneck. They only speed up load times and make Windows responsive.

RAID 1 is not backup, it is data redundancy. If drive 1 gets virus/OS corruption, then drive 2 gets virus/OS corruption. Outside corporate customers, very few people actually need RAID. Plus onboard RAID = crap.
 
I would buy a second monitor. Your rig looks fine. Either a quality IPS or a 120hz for 3d, depending on your preference.
 
reflex99 said:
SLI hack+second 460
Click to expand...

I have two 460s, but my mobo is the bottleneck here... my 790GX is one of the only motherboards that SLIP (the hack for SLI mode on almost every other AMD board) does not support.
 
Who said SSD will improve game performance? Raid 0 is useless. It does not sound like you need 8 gb of storage so I would ignore that. SSD is the only route that will give you some noticeable improvement. If you have 2 gtx 460s, I would hold on to those for now until you get a new mobo later so you can take advantage of it unless you are not satisfied with the performance of just the one by itself atm. It seems like a waste to "upgrade" to a 6950 from 2 gtx 460s though.
 
runo said:
I have two 460s, but my mobo is the bottleneck here... my 790GX is one of the only motherboards that SLIP (the hack for SLI mode on almost every other AMD board) does not support.
Click to expand...

How is your motherboard a bottleneck? SLI hack does work on 8 series chipsets too.
 
I picked up a C300 durring the $199 deal. Was originally looking at the Vertex 3, but seeing the 120GB AnandTech reviews, I couldn't justify the extra cash (or extra wait for them to get in stock). I figure I can always go RAID-0 if I need to down the line (at which point it would be a $300 Vertex3 @120GB, vs a $400 C300 RAID-0 @256GB... A no brainer if you're willing to deal with the headache of a SDD RAID).

An SSD won't help much in terms of gaming performance (it'll perhaps shave some time off of loads), but I was somewhat disappointed by my 2600k's desktop performance and realized my mechanical drives were truly holding me back. I'll let you know how it turns out (it should be in tomorrow), if you haven't already decided on what upgrade path you're going to take.
 
reflex99 said:
How is your motherboard a bottleneck? SLI hack does work on 8 series chipsets too.
Click to expand...

I checked the list of mobos that SLIP will work with. Mine, the 890GX, isn't on the list. :( Plus, I even tried it anyway and when I boot into "Windows 7 64-bit with SLI-enabled" it just doesn't load, it just gets stuck in a 'boot cycle' until I choose my default OS.

@Mastermind: Sure, please let us know!
 
You have a dual core cpu and the primary game you play is BC2. When I originally commented I didn't catch that. The best performance increase you can get would be to jump to a modern quad core cpu. I know everyone hates to hear that, but it's true. You should be able to get a 2500k and a motherboard for ~$400. That would not only allow you to use SLI w/o hacks, but also give you a huge performance boost in BC2. If you are waiting for bulldozer, save that money for the upgrade.
 
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Put your money in the bank for 2 or so months and see if bulldozer is the cherry on top of ice cream. If not then you can see what else there is at that time.

Also, you might get like .20 in interest. If your lucky.
 
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