My upgrade path.. | Forums

[Bearcat99]

Right now I am running a 939 socket AMD FX-60 with a NVGTX-265 and 4G of DDR400 RAM. I have been thinking of upgrading for a while and now that Mamabear's birthday is out of the way (got her a new laptop.. ) I am focusing in on me. I don't have a lot of $$ to play with and my plan is to keep my current GPU for a few months.. to just upgrade MOBO, CPU & RAM initially and then maybe in the fall to get a new GPU .. so what I am looking at (I am an AMD guy.. have been for the past decade +) is either an AMD FX-6100 orFX-8120 on one of these MOBOS : Gigabyte 990 Fx-A UD3 or ASUS M5A99X AM3+ 990X . I am leaning toward the Gigabyte as I had a very bad experience with an ASUS MOBO a while back as far as their customer service goes.. and I have a Gigabyte mobo now that has been absolutely flawless for the past 6 years.. but part of me is also looking at the bottom line as well and at the MC site the ASUS has a better price.. .. Still not sure of the RAM yet (PC3-10600 DDR3 1333,PC3-12800 DDR3 1600 or PC3-14900 DDR3 1866.. leaning toward the 12800 though ) but I know I would want to go with 8G sets.. No sense to me in getting say 4 4G sets .. or 2 4G sets .. since the MOBOs support up to 32G with a max of 8G per slot in my mind I am thinking even if I settle with 16G .. I'd be better off with 2 8s as opposed to 4 4s.. I did that back in thye day with the 256K & 512K bit.. I will be running this on W7U 64 which will handle the extra RAM..

So what do you guys think.. and I know the Intel stuff is looking good etc.. but I am an AMD guy.. and as I said I am limited on funds so don't take me there.. just give me your honest opinions

[Worf101]

Great minds and all that. I was forced to do a rebuild recently, This is what I did:

SAMSUNG Black Blu-ray Combo SATA Model SH-B123L LightScribe Support - OEM

COOLER MASTER Silent Pro Gold Series 800W ATX 12V v2.3

XFX Double D Black Edition FX-777A-ZDB4 Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB 128-bit GDDR5

G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+ AMD 990FX

AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Quad-Core Processor

Plextor 256 M3 256 MB SSD Hard Drive

Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Now I was able to same some bucks by reusing my case, monitor and other peripherals. AMD's coming out with new chips in August, so you might wanna wait. Or not, prices on the current FX line have been dropping quite fast. I love the FX chips even my "low end" 4100 allows me to play games I could only have sniffed at the old FX-60 I used to rock. Me I'd recommend the following:

1. Wait till the new chips are out. You can either go bleeding or lagging edge.
2. Get a modern mobo with USB 3.0 and the new pcie protocols.
3. Get a Solid State HD for your games and operating system.
4. 2 to 3 TB 7200 RPM drive for your data and old games.
5. Windows 7.
6. 16 Gigs of 1600 ram (it's getting cheaper every day).

Do these things and you'll be good to go today AND tomorrow.

Worf

[Bearcat99]

Thanks Worf. . I was thinking the same thing.. I just found out that Piledriver will be an AM3+ socket .. so that's a good thing.. I am leaning toward the 6100 for the price and figuring that if an upgrade is in the works in a year or so then since Piledriver will be the same socket I can do that .. but there is only a $30 difference between that and the 8120.. with a bit more performance and both should be cheaper come August so ... These chips have not benchmarked great against the Intel offereings but every review I have read across several forums and retailers from New Egg to TD have all been very good. The jury is stillout on the GPU but I have a little time there.. That will probably be the last thing I do.. My 265 is old and slow but with a new CPU it should perk up a bit considering what I am doing with it.. mostly IL2 with a little DCS tossed in.. I have a 1TB 7200 HD already & W7U I was thinking at least 16 on the RAM..

Plextor 256 M3 256 MB SSD Hard Drive

BTW.. is that a 256M SSD or 256G? Is that a typo?

[Worf101]

"256 M3" Is Plextor's model number or some such for it. It's 256 Gig. Lemme check yepper 256GB hard drive. Typo, my bad. With all these changes you'll have to call Microsoft and convince them you're not pirating your own software. Kinda sucks I know but such is what it is.

Worf

[MAXMHZ1959]

Great SSD for SATA/600 (SATA III) that Plextor. It does not have the troubled Sandforce controller but usues a Marvell controller instead.

If you plan to stay on SATA/300 (SATA II) definitely have a look at OCZ's Petrol series. They recently halved their prices for this series. Not as fast as the Plextor or the Crucial M4 series, but you can not handle those speeds on SATA II anyway.

I recently bought a Petrol 128GB for just under 70 Euro. avg read of 275 MB/s access time just under 0.1 ms.
And that is not even under AHCI, but just IDE UDMA mode-6 for compatibility reasons.
Using it for dual boot Ubuntu 10.04 - Win7 and applications.

128GB is plenty for that. Windows is just used for my NTFS data drives' maintenance and some low-level utilities.


You can still use the 7200RPM HD for data.

[Bearcat99]

Yeah I originally hadn't planned on getting an SSD but now it is factored into the upgrade.. I was looking at the OCZs on New Egg.. I found some 250G drives for under $200

[MAXMHZ1959]

You will not regret putting in a SSD for OS+Applications. Just leave at least 20% unassigned (not partitioned) to help the controller with wear-levelling and the drive should keep in top condition for years

Keep in mind SATA/600 USB 3.0 and PCIe and (E)PCI are all connected to the Southbridge chip. See Wikipedia. This means you can get into bandwidth problems if you use these newer devices all at once, meaning your throughput will suffer somewhere. ASRock M/Bs are the only one to address this problem at the moment as far as I know.

[fknox]

Bear,
I just got my new 3rd Gen i7 rig with a GTX 680 and it's great. But make sure the MoBo you get has two or more PCIe 3.0 X 16 slots so you can SLI or Cross fire at FULL Speed in the future. I bought a prebuilt CyberPowerPC from Newegg. It said it had two PCIe X 16 slots. It does, but one is PCIe 3.0 and the other is 2.0. I may be able to upgrade the bios on the MoBo but it's not important right now. For IL-2 the i7 with the 680 puts out 70+ FPS with 3 screens and Full Max setting planes etc. But for newer games like WoP or CoD or FSX the second card in SLI at X16 in PCIe 3.0 will rock. Check out this thread on 2.0 VS 3.0 with 4way SLI. Good Luck on your upgrade

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m...e=1&print=true

[Bearcat99]

I probably will not do SLI.. I will just get a good card.. I was thinking about trying to get another GTX 260 and SLI that but I am thinking that even then I'd be better off just spending a bit more and buying a newer card for a 1 card solution..

[fknox]

Bear,
I did allot of reading before I pulled the trigger and a single card of higher quality is definitely better than 2 of lesser card. I was just suggesting the PCIe 3.0 to futureproof your build. Newer cards like the Nvidia 600 series take advantage of it and it speeds things up between the GPU and the CPU whether you SLI or not.