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Desktop component upgrade help
Hey guys and girls,
I was wondering:
If I had 500 euros to spend on component upgrades, which would give me a noticeable perfomance boost (If any)?
Main games I play:
Planetside 2
World of Tanks
My current system:
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i5 2500K @ 3.30GHz (Running at 4GHzk)
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 488MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. SABERTOOTH P67 (LGA1155)
Graphics
SMS24A350H (1920x1080@60Hz)
2048MB GeForce GTX 670 (ASUStek Computer Inc)
Hard Drives
112GB OCZ-AGILITY3 ATA Device (SSD)
466GB Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 ATA Device (SATA)
10
Comments
Save your money and wait until you can't play games at mid-high settings with good framerates. Then, a CPU and GPU upgrade would be in order. Prices will be much lower for today's best parts and you'll be glad you waited.
Are you experiencing issues?
I noticed you have a SSD and mechanical drive. Do you put your OS and games you actively play on the SSD? If not, that may be the cause of performance issues.
Also: I run my main games from the SSD. PS2 is a lot more enjoyable that way :P.
Anyway: Running the memory at it's rated stock speed? Sounds interesting, I'd have to look into that.
Thanks for your comments
.
What kind of framerates are you getting? Does the game feel too choppy? Or are you just trying to keep the framerate over a certain number?
Certain graphical effects take a lot more processing power than others. Anything to do with lighting, shading, or reflections can be very intensive. Anti-aliasing is also a large source of GPU load and should be turned down or completely off when playing at higher resolutions on a decent monitor. Motion blur, depth of field, and bloom are also in the list of effects you could turn down and not suffer much of a decrease in graphical quality.
My suggestion is to find settings you can deal with being off or low instead of trying to max everything out just because you want the status of running of everything at maximum settings. Once you mess around with settings, you might be surprised how much you don't really need when it comes to graphics.
I don't understand the desire to run everything at maximum settings on every game. Some of the graphical effects are overkill in some games, and some take up a lot of processing power for something you can barely notice. While the eye candy is nice, I can tolerate a lower standard of graphics if the gameplay is good.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Never RAID a SSD. It only slows them down. I don't remember all of the details, but it has to do with most reads required when gaming being around 4KB. You can find the exact reason by searching the internet, or maybe Quizzical will chime in.
There are some good reasons to put SSDs in RAID. Consumer use isn't among them. For consumer use, most people would have RAID 0 in mind, not RAID 1, 5, 6, or 10, so let's ignore the others.
One simple problem with RAID 0 is that there's no point. Good SSDs are so fast that if you're not waiting on an SSD anyway, what's the point in trying to increase your storage performance? If you had a hypothetical 100 GHz Ivy Bridge 12-core processor today, what would be the point in getting something faster than that for gaming? You'd never be meaningfully waiting on the CPU anyway with that.
So if there's no upside to a RAID 0 array, then it doesn't take much downside to outweigh it. And there are plenty of downsides.
First is the one intrinsic to RAID 0: if either drive dies, your data is gone. All of it. So you've just doubled your chance of data loss. Furthermore, even if both drives are fine, sometimes RAID arrays can be finicky, especially on consumer hardware. So RAID 0 harms reliability considerably.
Next is the loss of TRIM support. SSDs use TRIM to keep performance high over the long term as data gets deleted to make room to write back over it later. For a long time, putting SSDs in any sort of RAID meant you lost TRIM. Some SSDs could do all right without it, but some could get into big trouble and perform poorly if you filled the drive too full and wrote too aggressively. Some RAID controllers can now pass TRIM through, but that's still not universal as far as I know.
RAID 0 also causes problems if either SSD gets slow for some reason. If you're using two SSDs in RAID 0 and one stops for a tenth of a second for some reason, they both have to stop. With two SSDs in RAID, this isn't that much of a concern, but if you want to put 8 of them in a huge RAID array, some SSDs won't do that well. SSDs have been getting better about performance reliability, especially if you leave a lot of space free, but this is still a concern.
There's also cost. One 240 GB SSD tends to be cheaper than two 120 GB SSDs, for example. One 480 GB SSD is cheaper than two 240 GB SSDs. Not unless you need more than that is there much reason to get multiple SSDs at all, and even there, the recently launched 960 GB Crucial M500 tends to be cheaper than two 480 GB SSDs.
Now, there are some good reasons to buy multiple SSDs and put them in a RAID array. But other than a simple RAID 1 array for reliability (if one SSD dies, the computer keeps running from the other until you replace the one that died), such reasons usually also justify buying a discrete RAID controller, and that's $100+, and likely a lot more than that depending on what you need.
raid ssd is huge risk and not realy needed just pop in 2 ssd no need for raid believe me ive alot of experience with this and tested alot config with different sdd and raid.
Better just upgrade to new generation ssd then raid0 also they have to be exact same sdd for raid 0
Just saw above poster his explain and advice clears things much better up then mine.