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When is the right time to upgrade the PC?
When is a good time to upgrade the pc? When you buy a new piece of hardware and get the itch to upgrade everything else?
i just bought a EVGA GTX 470 video card . I had 2 8800 gt 512's.
Help me out guys, cause I got food, water, gas all on the line here LOL!
This is what Im running.
Asus M4N82 Deluxe 980 tril SLI board
AMD Phenom II x4 945 3.0 ghz
Razer Barracude sound card
Antec tru power tri 650 watt
G.Skill 4 gigs 1066 (8500)
Antec P182 gunmetal case
Western Digital 640 gig black
Thank you
Comments
Every 2~4 years leaning more on 4 years. Ofcourse if you build your own systems some things will be a while before you upgrade such as cases and power supplies can go up to 8 years or more. Optical Drives and Hard Drives might see 6 years before replacing.
When you can't run a game you want to play. LoL!!1~!
not sure about AMD processors but i am pretty sure the one you go is pretty old. I'd consider upping that asap.
Everything else seems fine...except your sound. Get a speaker system, i got mine for $10 (it has a sub woofer) and i never regretted it. The only reason why i don't have a logitech sound system is because it wont fit in my computer room.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
When you actually have the need to do so. If you wanted to do it each time there was a chance to do so, you would be updating multiple components multiple times in a year. If you believe that the upgrade would offer you a substantial upgrade at that point for what you are doing, then it might be time to consider an upgrade. Then again, if you wait a little while - you can get that same substantial upgrade for much cheaper; increasing your performance cost index in an increasingly unfriendly consumer market for pc components.
That being said, I had to kind of laugh at the other comment somebody made about your Phenom 945 being "old" and you should upgrade that asap. Yep, thoose pesky black edition X4 CPUs are so out of date...heh, one can easily check most CPU charts to see there would not be that much gain for most applications by changing that - though if somebody was down the line below that, there would be reason to go with something else in a similar price range.
My machine is older that dirt, and I love when games put out their ultra settings and they still do not make a dent in what I am doing... technology is generally way beyond what we need.
I'm curious to how much of FFXIV is about needing the hardware and how much is just lazy; cause the graphics do not look impressive enough for some of the requirements they are pushing...
...but yeah, it really comes down to having a need or a desire. Only you can really answer that.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
That is not an old processor and does not need replacing.
Overall your system looks great. I upgrade every 2-3 years as needed. Maybe upgrade Grafix card every 18 months or so.
But like another person said, upgrade when you cant play what you want to play at the settings you like.
That's like the 3rd best processor AMD has on the market.
Honestly, you have a pretty well-balanced system right there, no obvious weak points. If you were really looking for excuses to upgrade, you might consider jumping into the expensive but fast world of SSD's, or possibly squeezing a couple hundred more MHz out of the CPU (which can probably be done quite safely, but may require better cooling).
But again, that's definitely a well-balanced system you're running at this time.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
The best time to upgrade would have been when Core i7 came out, that would keep you set for a very good number of years. With a good processor like that, only video card upgrades, a few extra gigs of RAM and some decent accessories and you're good to go for many years. I predict that it will be 2017 or 2018 before Core i7 or equivalent processing power becomes the minimum specs for games.
I think there are two criteria to judge when it's time to really dive into serious upgrades.
The first, like others have said, is to simply make it a rule to not fix what isn't broken. Upgrade when your system isn't playing what you want how you want.
The second is something I've learned from bad experiences, and it's to keep track of the market and only upgrade when something better isn't a month around the corner. Usually this isn't a problem, but sometimes it really just isn't a good time to be buying hardware, because something fundementally different is coming up. For instance, buying a DX10 card in the middle of last year would have been foolish, because we knew Ati was coming out with the Radeon HD 5000 series within a couple of months, and was going to offer DX11 support (not to mention absolutely disgusting performance). These days, I'd consider it a mistake to build a whole new system because absolutely enormous changes to CPUs are coming in six months. AMD Bulldozer is going to be the biggest change in AMD CPU design since the K8, and Sandy Bridge is going to be just a big on Intel's side.