Computer question-advice for mobo and pcu.

[Gman]

If you're buying it, it's outdated. There's always something better coming. Don't get into analysis paralysis. Based on the age of your old system, you're in for a pleasant surprise.

You can usually find the 'sweet spot' on price/performance at sites like newegg.com. You'll see that big price jump for just a little more speeed. If you want to buy at the extreme top of performance threshold, you will pay a high premium for it. That level of performance is rarely needed. Most games these days use hardware acceleration built into the graphics chipset. You rarely need the latest and greatest CPU.

If you really want to speed things up, you might consider an SSD for your OS and games. You can use a conventional HDD for cheap storage capacity.

[zteknik]

If you're buying it, it's outdated. There's always something better coming. Don't get into analysis paralysis. Based on the age of your old system, you're in for a pleasant surprise.

You can usually find the 'sweet spot' on price/performance at sites like newegg.com. You'll see that big price jump for just a little more speeed. If you want to buy at the extreme top of performance threshold, you will pay a high premium for it. That level of performance is rarely needed. Most games these days use hardware acceleration built into the graphics chipset. You rarely need the latest and greatest CPU.

If you really want to speed things up, you might consider an SSD for your OS and games. You can use a conventional HDD for cheap storage capacity.

This is true.Trying to keep up with latest and greatest is foolish and quite costly.
I would be quite happy to build another machine that would last and keep up for 6 years again.Technology has vastly improved since then and came down in price-remember when a 500GB IDE drive was $150?Now their dirt cheap.
Definitly looks like the way to go would be to get a top notch graphics card and memory.
SSD? Please fill me in,I'm quite interested,I have no knowledge about them All I knew about were scussi and sata drives.

Is Pricewatch.com still around?They were a good source for hardware.

[streetglideok]

IDE drives are all but no longer supported. AMD may, but intel does not. They are up to SATAIII now. Conventional SATA(pick your speed of bus) offer low cost, large volume drives for the buck. Though they are quicker compared to years past, they don't hold a candle to SSD's. When my wife's western digital finally died(bought used off ebay, was 8 years old), I replaced it with an intel 120gb ssd for win7, and a 500gb wd. Both are sataIII. The speed is phenominal. I press the on button, and less than 20 seconds later its done booting, completely. There are some articles online about solid state drives, and how some makers inflate their benchmark scores to appear faster. There is also a couple of different controllers used on them, and again read up on them. Cheap ssd's have reliability issues from what I heard. Other than that, the only down side is cost.

[zteknik]

Excuse the noobish question,but could I do a RAID setup with the SSD's?
I would guess so if their a hard drive and you have a RAID controller and the array properly set up.

[gos]

Actually, you aren't correct. AMD's architecture is different from Intel. They go with shorter execution strings to cheat "faster" clock times. AMD is less expensive for a reason. Intel i5 is the way the go. Plan on about $300 for a good i5-3570K is the way to go for top end chip. You can get a good motherboard for about $200. I wouldn't bump the m/b up to $300 and would instead spend that on the better cpu, or better video card.

this is good advice

You can build very good systems for about $1000. Once you've spent $1000, the only worthwhile upgrade is the video card, in terms of gaming frames-per-second.

[gos]

Excuse the noobish question,but could I do a RAID setup with the SSD's?
I would guess so if their a hard drive and you have a RAID controller and the array properly set up.

You can, but SSDs are so much faster than hard drives that striping data across them or mirroring between them results in lousy performance due to the mismatch in speeds.

Most people install windows on the SSD along with a few of their most used applications, then put data like pictures and movies on a rotating hard drive to save money.

These days I wouldn't buy an SSD smaller than 256GB, since it will only cost about $250 for a top-of-the-line model, and it'll last you for several computers.

[gos]

this is good advice

You can build very good systems for about $1000. Once you've spent $1000, the only worthwhile upgrade is the video card, in terms of gaming frames-per-second.

Oh, and don't forget an SSD if you have the money.

Personally I'd stick with either the Intel SSD 520 or the Samsung 840 PRO, for best performance and quality. Both will cost roughly $1 per GB.

[zteknik]

Ah so it's probably not necessary to set up a raid then.

[buckshotbarlow]

this is an elcheapo setup that just works:


I like asus or msi, i've been having some issues with the gigabyte board. I have 3 of em, 2 run vmware with the 8 cores, and the 3rd is my lowend gaming system with the six core. 1 runs the asus board, no problems. 1 runs the msi boards, zero problems and the third (gaming system) runs the gigabyte board...issues are fail to boot, bios hangs. If i had to do it all over again, i would of got the asus instead of the gigabyte board...

the gaming system has a nvidia 660 TI in it. It runs D3/WOT/WOP/BF3 fine. 1080P Asus flatpanel x2. Decent setup, plays games fine...

[gos]

Ah so it's probably not necessary to set up a raid then.

Nope. Today's PCs have 4-8 SATA ports, so you can have a DVD drive plus a few hard drives. They simply show up as different drive letters in windows. (C: D: etc.)