Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, JustAnEngineer
vidus wrote:Would the above be a good fit together and give a good upgrade for the money?
thegleek wrote:
I ended up going with:
case: Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced (full tower) link $139
mobo: ASUS P8P67LE (same one you listed above) link $129
ram: corsair XMS3 8gb (2x4gb) link $59
cpu: intel core i5-2500k (3.3ghz/4 core) link $219
video: gigabyte geforce gts 450 (1GB 128-bit GDDR5) link $114
power supply: corsair gaming series GS800 800W link $129
vidus wrote:After looking at the price of upgrading the video card and thinking about future use, I was wondering if this might be a good time just to throw down a bit more cash. </snip>
flip-mode wrote:vidus, if you're going to spend the money on an i5-2400 then I highly recommend you spend a few more percent of your total cost to jump to the i5-2500K. That'll give you insta-overclock and meaningfully extend the lifetime of your system.
arsenhazzard wrote:vidus wrote:After looking at the price of upgrading the video card and thinking about future use, I was wondering if this might be a good time just to throw down a bit more cash. </snip>
Given that Bulldozer and Southern Islands are supposed to be out in September (Bulldozer at least, SI is technically "this year" still), I wouldn't go for a full system upgrade just yet. You also won't see a huge benefit in games aside from the gfx upgrade.
Also got that i5-2500k for $179... Not to say I got the best deal that I could have, but I did enough research and sent in all the rebates for satisfaction.
emorgoch wrote:Given your time frame, you're looking at upgrading around the time that AMD will be launching their new GPUs.
Honestly, if you're budget constrained, I'd look at just upgrading the GPU to start, see how that works for you, and then go for the CPU/Mobo/RAM afterwards if needed. I waited until I knew my games were getting constrained by the CPU before I did the whole platform upgrade.
vidus wrote:I ended up looking at the locked chip since I have an unlocked SLACR variety of the Q6600 and never really got around to overclocking it much. Had some case circulation issues and generally just wanted it to run stable for what I was doing. (When you do graduate work on the machine, you don't want it to be unstable and since it just worked as is, I never really poked around into OC, even though I have monster heat sink I bought for such things).
vidus wrote:The GeForce GTS 450 is much less effective at gaming than the Radeon HD6870 in the deal that I linked. I would not recommend anything less than a Radeon HD6850 for a new gaming GPU.thegleek wrote:That video card is quite a bit cheaper (in my terms of budget). I may have to look into it as an alternative. As a graduate student with a 3 month old, my budget doesn't stretch far.video: gigabyte geforce gts 450 (1GB 128-bit GDDR5) link $114
JustAnEngineer wrote:The GeForce GTS 450 is much less effective at gaming than the Radeon HD6870 in the deal that I linked. I would not recommend anything less than a Radeon HD6850 for a new gaming GPU.
thegleek wrote:JustAnEngineer wrote:The GeForce GTS 450 is much less effective at gaming than the Radeon HD6870 in the deal that I linked. I would not recommend anything less than a Radeon HD6850 for a new gaming GPU.
I wasn't aiming to get the best video card for gaming. To help you understand the gaming I do is small stuff like Steam (TF2, Limbo, Terraria, Portal), and other games like Dawn of Discovery/1404, Minecraft, etc...
I also prefer the Nvidia cards over Radeon based on the linux friendlyness of the drivers. I'm sure linux has progressed immensely over the years with Radeon support, but I've had real bad luck in the past with any Radeon vidcard when it came to installing linux with it.
just brew it! wrote:I'm using ATI GPUs on both of my primary Linux systems (home and work). Granted these are older GPU tech, so I can't really speak to the driver quality for the current cards; but things are indeed better than they used to be on the ATI/Linux front.
just brew it! wrote:I'm using ATI GPUs on both of my primary Linux systems (home and work). Granted these are older GPU tech, so I can't really speak to the driver quality for the current cards; but things are indeed better than they used to be on the ATI/Linux front.
Work: Discrete Radeon HD 3600, using ATI's proprietary driver.
Home: Integrated Radeon HD 3300, using the stock Open Source driver.
Both are running dual displays on Ubuntu 10.04. IIRC I had some problems early on with one of them sometimes forgetting which monitor was the primary display, but I don't recall what I did to fix that. Aside from this minor glitch, they've both been fine.
Edit: The issue where the system would sometimes forget which monitor was the primary display was on the system running the ATI proprietary driver. The fix was to configure my desktop session to automatically run the command "xrandr --output DVI-0 --primary" on login.
vidus wrote:I built and use an Ubuntu box in my office at the university (which was a process in itself...had to order the parts separate so campus IT wouldn't have a cow...and had to call them spare parts apparently).
JustAnEngineer wrote:If you're dead-set on supporting NVidia's proprietary features, then a GeForce GTX560Ti or GTX560 would provide adequate gaming performance. I still wouldn't bother with the GeForce GTS450.