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Looking for advice - Upgrading computer
I am looking to upgrade my video card, changing out my power supply(a fan went out on it), and possibly getting more memory.
Here is what is in my computer currently and the item numbers from Newegg.
Motherboard: ECS P67H2-A3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - #13-135-279
CPU: Intel Core i7-2600 Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz - #19-115-071
Memory: Patriot Gamer 2 Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) - #20-220-556
Solid State Drive: OCZ Agility 2 OCZSSD2-2AGTE90G 2.5" 90GB SATA II MLC - #20-227-608
Hard Drives: 500GB and 750GB
Video Card: DIAMOND 5850PE51G Radeon HD 5850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 - #14-103-085
The video card should be able to handle two monitors and have an HDMI port. I am not looking to get two cards, just one unless they are cheap enough.
Comments
I dont understand why would you want to upgrade now when you already have the high-end setup in use lol.
But if you REALLY REALLY want to upgrade and burn money to nothing, go for "HD 6950 DirectCU II" or "GTX 580 DirectCU II"
And get 750 or 800 Watt PSU. (Note, they might be slighty big for that setup, but atleast you have spare power for upgrades.)
The reason I want to upgrade the video card is because it is almost two years old and I have had some problems with it so I decided it was about time to upgrade. I was going to do it when I upgraded everything else minus the memory, video card, and power supply. Forgot to mention, I am looking for a cooling system that is easy to setup. I have not dealt with them before so I do not know what types there is or what I can even go with.
You dont need extra cooling systems unless your case is shit or you suffer from CPU fan noise. DirectCU II guarantees that on GPU atleast. (Copper heatsinks with pipes)
And I'm using 5850 right now and I see no reason to upgrade atleast until later this year when the new Triple A MMO's come out. Possibly not then either. 5850 can run all current games at high settings minus anti-aliasing/shadows.
for cooling its best to simply place a standardly air cooled tower in a cold room, use liquid nitrogen tanks and oyu can keep the room the tower is in at -100 F easily, super conductor effect kicks in, pc runs 10x better.
Talk about going overboard
The 5850 I have I am sure is either going out or something. The fan on it does not want to work half the time, when it does actually work it sounds like it is about to fall off. Temperatures for the card range from 55 celsius at idle up to around 78 celsius or more during gaming. FPS is 18 to 25 in most games on high, which shocks me from what I have read about this card for people who set them on high/max out settings.
just curious, what kind of computer case do you have? maybe it's a problem with the case airflow.
as for the computer, the parts you listed doesnt sound like they are 2 yrs old. if only some parts are old,(video card) have you tried cleaning out the dust from the cooling solution?
running everything on max setting isnt what you want most of the time. the frame rates you listed isnt out of the question if you are talking about the latest and greatest games at 1080p or higher resolution. you can upgrade, but you dont really need to. you might just need to dial some of the settings back that you dont actually need or able to see the difference (16x AA for example)
if you are upgrading simply for the sake of upgrading, then you can wait a few months till zambezi and southern island comes out.
I am talking about even on WoW for the FPS. The power supply, video card, and memory are from my old computer. The rest were bought in January of this year. All this computer is cooling from the one fan on the rear of the case. I have cleaned out the computer of dust. Also I do not run games at a high resolution though I would expect for even a game like WoW, I would be able to max out the settings. I have done it before and use to get great FPS but now it seems like I cannot get over 20.
buy the biggest meanest single card in the 5xxx era (5990 is a dual ,single slot card so ignore that card)
i dont recall what the card number was back then i think it was a 5980 but not sure
it will be fairly inexpensive since they have the 6xxx serie going on and will be montrously fast!(256 bit data path just in cast someone try to sell you a 5980 128 bit (if it ever existed but just in case)
If the card is still under warranty, I would RMA it immediately. Load up some of the nVidia demos (and manufacturer demos if they have them) and write down the FPS. Then follow the manufacturer's RMA process. Some vendors will even do a cross ship. This allows you to put a deposit on a new card that will be shipped out immediately. Then you send the old card in the box that the new one comes in. If they don't get the old card back within 30 days (and there is a tracking number for your protection) then they charge you the balance of the suggested retail price.
A couple quick things to note though, as suggested, check your case air flow. Make sure you tie down any loose cables and swap out any wide ribbon cables for legacy devices (IDE or floppy) with cables that are much more narrow. Dusting out the fans and heatsyncs is very important. It does restrict airflow and can increase temperatures dramatrically. UNPLUG the power first. You will want to make sure that the front bezzel, CPU fan, motherboard fans, video fans, and power supply are all kept dust free.
Regarding the RAM - any current gaming rig should have 8GB or more. This will avoid Windows from swapping out data from memory to the pagefile on disk. If you notice that you typically hover at 6GB memory in use after optimization, then I would upgrade to 16GB (4 x 4GB). Be sure that the CAS is 7. It does make a difference. I use a disk caching system that uses my computer's memory to cache anticipated hard drive access. It works very simular to a hardware raid system with an onboard memory controller for servers. This chews up 6 Gigs alone which is why I use 16GB, but it does boost my SSD performance.
Honestly, the temps on your video card sound pretty normal.
A lot of people had trouble with the 5850 cards though, I don't know if they are just fussy or what, but it seems to be a somewhat reoccuring theme. They were pretty good deals as far as price vs performance when they were available though.
The rest of your computer seems pretty solid. Sure, you can upgrade the RAM, but unless your running out of memory now, you won't see any performance increase from it. RAM is one of those things, either you have enough and it runs great (and adding any more won't help that much), or you don't and you see massive slowdowns.
As far as upgrading that video card: You need to set a budget. Cards that upgrade that range from about $150 (US) all the way up to as much as you want to spend.
There have been rumors pegging the newest generation from ATI coming out as soon as September, but I think it's more likely late winter before we see them (no spy pics or random Chinese google-translated pages with leaked benchmark scores are out yet, so they are still a ways out I think)
If the problem is that the fan is dying, then it's cheaper to replace the fan and heatsink than to replace the whole card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118061
If you got the Radeon HD 5850 in the first few months after it launched, then you have a reference card, and that heatsink and fan is designed specfically for the reference card. Be warned that the memory heatsinks don't stay on very well, but the GPU heatsink works great.
The Radeon HD 5850 was made on TSMC's 40 nm process node, and that's still the state of the art, so what has come out since then isn't much better.
What power supply do you have? Your motherboard looks like cheap junk, so I'd worry about the power supply. Something like this would work nicely for you:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371048
That's a rebranded Seasonic S12II, so it's pretty good.
first question :
do you need the computer mostly for gaming ?if so keep the one you got, a buy a console like say an xbox with xbox live
you ll have more fun!
I already have an Xbox 360. I use my computer for different things besides gaming such as web and graphic design, sometimes video editing, and just for my homework for college. The budget I have for the video card is $300 and I have seperate budgets for other parts, mainly looking at a max budget of like $500. As for the power supply is a 600 Watt. I cannot remember the brand.
Find the exact brand name and model. If you have to open up the case and read the label, then do it. The nominal wattage doesn't mean much. If you have a good power supply, then great, but if you've got something awful, then you may urgently need to replace it.
For what it's worth, there aren't a whole lot of good 600 W power supplies, as most of the good power supply lines don't hit that particular wattage value for one reason or another. Of the thirty 600 W power supplies that New Egg lists, only one is really good, and several others are reasonably nice, but most of them are junk.
something tells me this is a major part of your problem.
gonna ask once again. what kind of computer case are you running on?
it sounds to me you have a pretty bad airflow problem. you have all exhaust(case fan + vid card + powersupply) and no intake source. that means you get alot more dust buildup then normal. you said you've cleaned it out, but the root problem is overall airflow not just dust.
IF you can't even get WoW at 20 FPS while running at lower resolution, you may have some other issues. it's "possible" that you havent cleaned out the dust from your vid card well enough since it's one of the older parts. you may have to take apart the whole fan/heatsink assembly and do a real cleaning on that card and re-apply the thermal compound on the heatsink.
but it doesnt sound right for WoW to run so slow with your gear unless you have some seriously clogged up video card and if thats the case, then your temp's should be running higher. have you ever overclocked the card? maybe you cooked something?:D
This is the case I have COOLER MASTER Elite RC-310-BWN1-GP Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower - Newegg item #11-119-203
I have never overclocked anything my computer. Personally I don't know enough on how to do that correctly. As for me taking apart the card and cleaning inside, I do not know a lot about that. I have used a can of air on the part several times. I typically clean my computer out of dust once or every other week.
the case you have is just a cheapy so you cant really expect great thermal performance from it. what i would recommend is to move the rear 120mm exhaust fan to the front (in front of the hard drive cage) so you have at least some cool air intake. this way the cool air can be drawn in by the video card and exhausted in the back. maybe invest in one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811999217
or one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811988015
to help with the dust.
you can also add another 120mm fan on the side of the case to help with cooling the video card, but it's not as ideal. however it would at least balanced the intake with the exhaust (2x120mm fan intake vs video card + powersupply exhaust) to provide a more ideal thermal solution.
the problem with the cheapy cases is you end up spending alot of $ trying to fix the problem then if you bought a better case to begin with.
as for using air to blow out the dust, you need to blow it out in reverse air flow direction. if you blow it in the same dirction the fan is blowing on, then you are simply packing the dust into the heatsink rather then blowing the dust out.
Keep the 5850 for a backup, get 4 more GB of identical ram ($40-60) and then buy these:
$170 with MIR http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125357
$90 with MIR http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171037
I own the PSU in my build and no problems for 8 months now. I run 2 Gigabyte 6850 in crossfire and no problems either. I'm recommending the slightly more powerful 6870 since prices are down and it's a good mid level single GPU card. Oh and get Win 7 64 if you want to use all 8 GB!
A Radeon HD 6870 is barely faster than a Radeon HD 5850. The only reason to make that switch is if you're giving up on the 5850 as dead.
And don't get that power supply. It was nice enough in its day, but it's rather dated by now. I guess today it's kind of all right. But you don't want to pay $120 for kind of all right. If inclined to replace the power supply, you can get something substantially better for dramatically cheaper:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371048