Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
AoC Rebuild Advice
Hi there,
So im pretty tech savy guy but just wanted to get some other opionions for a overhaul.
Basiclly I want to try and get the most intense graphical experience from age of conan i can with the budget i have(the cheapest solutions possible). and not some extreme computer that is the "best of the best" for every purpose.
Current build:
Amd PhenomII x6 1090T
AM2+ GA-MA790GP-UD4H
2TB Seagate Raid0
Crossfire ATI HD5770
The Problem: Choppy and Lower than desired framerates, Slower than desired Instance and general load times,
upgrade paths im thinking along..
1. Due to a nessasary bios update my crossfire no longer works, Framerates have been around 30~ with alot of choppyness. looking into getting Nvida GTX560 / 550TI to replace the 2 cards (nvida prefered)
2. Or I could upgrade my motherboard to AM3 restoring the Crossfire+ goodies. but would invole buying DDR3 ram also.
3. Purchase a SSD drive to try and reduce the loading times Im not a big fan of SSD's because of the "longevity" issues that comes with them. (would love to hear from anyone playing conan on a SSD)
What i hope to acheive...
A flat, 60fps with max settings (this includes all the draw distances at max) and "minimal" load times.(im a realist, i dont expect instant loading)
Thanks to anyone that cares to comment 
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Comments
I have played AoC on an SSD. Longevity issues... your looking at like 5 years before you start to see lower capacity due to load wear: which is about the typical lifespan of a traditional hard drive in the first place. A ~good~ SSD can make a dramatic different in load times (OCZ Vertex2/Vertex3, Crucial C300/M4, etc). A run of the mill SSD will be faster, but not jaw-droppingly faster. Also keep in mind, the SSD won't do anything for your frame rate really, just loading times.
As far as the rest of your upgrades go.
"The cheapest possible" is not a budget, sadly. The cheapest possible would be to live with what you got, or try to juggle BIOS revisions until you can get something acceptable with Crossfire enabled again (fwiw I can't find anything about the GA-MA790GP-UD4H breaking crossfire with updates). You need to set a number, and then we can see if we can get you improved performance for at or under that number.
Thanks for the reply mate,
Probably about $200~AUD per part i could manage,(i usually do all my upgrades as modular stages).
Edit: lets just say $500~ total
As for the bios, its the new 7c (i think) which apparently breaks it, well...it was working perfectly before i upgraded..
If i dont use the lasest, The board wont support the 6 core.
Was looking at kingston or Patriot SSD's... any good?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Either you bought a really wacky system, or else you've already given it a mid-life upgrade (both processor and video cards) long after the original purchase and have basically exhausted what you can do with an aging platform. Actually, if you've got two Radeon HD 5770s, then both options are likely true.
A GeForce GTX 550 Ti isn't any faster than a Radeon HD 5770. A GeForce GTX 560 Ti is, but the only real advantage it offers over two Radeon HD 5770s in CrossFire is that you skip any issues with multi-GPU scaling. It sounds like CrossFire not working is your entire problem, and I'm not sure that you'd want to spend $200+ to get something not really any better than getting CrossFire to work.
If you haven't already tried uninstalling the video drivers, running driver sweeper, and then installing the latest video drivers and CrossFire Application Profiles, then I'd try that first.
If you want faster loading times, then an SSD is the only option. For typical consumer use, running out of write cycles won't be a meaningful concern in the useful lifetime of the machine. If you're worried about random failures early on, then they're not really any worse than hard drives. If you're worried about random failures after several years of use, then we don't really know, as there haven't been good SSDs out for long enough to gauge the long-term reliability.
If you're worried about reliability, then you might want to go with Intel, Crucial, or Samsung, all of which build their own NAND flash, so they won't bounce around between whichever flash vendor is cheapest that day and pick up a bad batch that way. Samsung does its own SSD controller, too, and Intel does some of its own. Crucial and Intel both buy an SSD controller from Marvell, but they write their own firmware for it.
For zone loading times, all SSDs are basically the same. Even the really bad SSDs that will stutter and drive you mad are still good at zone loading times.
Intel charges a large price premium for its SSDs, figuring that people will pay it because they're Intel. Crucial and Samsung are more competitive on pricing. the Crucial M4 and Samsung 470 are basically their respective modern options:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147127
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148441
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147128
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148442
The Crucial M4 is a lot faster than the Samsung 470 in synthetic benchmarks. I don't think it would be much of a difference in noticeable real-world performance.
Both of those brands have so much garbage in their SSD lineup that I'd just ignore them and buy something else, rather than try to decipher which ones are good.
For what it's worth, the brands that I would consider buying for personal use are Intel, Crucial, Samsung, OCZ, G.Skill, Corsair, and Mushkin. I have an OCZ solid state drive in my desktop (120 GB Agility), and a Crucial one in my laptop (64 GB RealSSD C300). Both of those are older, however, and not what you'd want to buy new today.
Thanks for the reply Quizzical, Much appreciated.
Yeah, i dont really have all that much money so i usualy build from scratch, in stages...probelms with that as you can see, once the vision comes to fruititon then the first parts purchesed become somewhat dated..
Buying a AMD3 motherboard should put me generally back on track with the current generation of AMD tho?
As for my crossfire issue, Ive tried everything, OS reinstall, drivers, diffrent cards in diffrent slots ect ect. like i said all happened after i upgraded from F6 to F7C:http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3003#biospid=3003#bios which enabled the use of the 6 core cpu on the board. *shrugs* cant find any help on their website.. maybe its just me.
As for SSD's Do Newegg export? some of those prices are reasonable if it doesnt kill me in shipping..
But thankyou again for all the infomation and suggestions. Ill have to have a big think about everything i think.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Ah, you're in Australia. I didn't catch that before. Since you bring up Patriot and Kingston in particular, I'm guessing that you're looking at MSY's site, and they don't have much of a selection.
Google turned up this:
http://www.megabuy.com.au/corsair-force-series-115gb-ssd-280mbs-p256188.html
That's a first generation SandForce controller with 25 nm NAND flash. It will get you 107 GB of usable capacity, and it's priced pretty aggressively.
The modern standard for AMD motherboards is Socket AM3+. Zambezi was supposed to launch at the start of June, but Global Foundries didn't have the process node ready on time. AMD gave motherboard manufacturers the go-ahead to start selling motherboards for it, since they're backward-compatible to Socket AM3 processors.
If you're looking to replace the motherboard, then a Socket AM3+ motherboard with a 900 series chipset is the thing to get. A 970 chipset will only support one video card. A 990X chipset will support two video cards in CrossFire or often SLI, each at PCI Express 2.0 x8 bandwidth. A 990FX chipset will support both cards at x16 bandwidth.
A Socket AM3+ motherboard will take Zambezi processors when they launch. It is likely that they'll also take next year's Komodo processors, with whatever tweaks AMD makes to the architecture in the meantime. There's a decent chance that they'll work with subsequent processors after that, too, until the switch to DDR4 memory in a few years.
Socket AM3+ is also backward compatible to Socket AM3 processors, such as what you have. It won't take older processors, however, as it needs DDR3 memory, and processors before the Phenom II used a DDR2 memory controller rather than DDR3. That means you'll have to replace the memory, too. But memory is cheap.