Thinking about upgrading my pc

[Nasu]

My current pc is about 4.5 years old with little to none actual problems regarding crashes, bugs, overheating, etc. So only reason I'm thinking about upgrading is to add some more punch and get better performance. My budget is enough big for even getting a brand new top computer but I have little need. I'm also interested if my older parts can actually damage new parts I might get.

 

Biggest problem I have currently is bluescreening in some games (Path of Exile). I believe it's either the game's fault or my GPU overheating/getting old.

 

 

My specs are:

 

OS: Windows 7 64-bit

CPU: Intel i7-920

GPU: Radeon HD4890 1Gb gddr5

 

RAM: 6Gb ddr3

 

Power supply: 750W Corsair

 

Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (x58)

 

Fans: Intel's own fan for CPU. Also no problems with overheating.

 

Memory: 1tB

 

 

What I'm thinking I should get:

 

1.SSD

2.new GPU (no idea wat yet)

3.more RAM

 

I'm interested if my motherboard or any other component is a bottleneck, what gpu I should get and general tips on upgrading, etc.

[frosty]

Well if your budget is high get a GTX 7??, 780, 780Ti?

[Harpr33t]

Get an aftermarket heatsink/fan and upgrade your card big boy.

[BoM]

More fans.

 

 

Will expand later.....

[Pan32]

1. SSD would be a good idea, the system runs so much faster.

2. Take a look at the MSI GeForce GTX 760 Twinfronz 2G, pretty good stuff for a pretty good card

3. Adding more ram is an overkill imo, 6 gbs are more than enough.

[Psyche]

almost 90% of the time the only thing that will bottleneck you is the graphics card.

 

also as for overheating and your bluescreening do you look up what error you are getting when it happens? Because it tells you exactly what causes the error so you can pinpoint what is causing the fatal error.

 

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

 

I used this and found out my graphics card was failing every time I started up a game.

 

also as for everything else, get one of the new 700 series graphics cards, or even the new 280X AMD cards I heard were really good. if game recording is your thing though I would go with nvidia, since they just rolled out a new program called Shadowplay which uses a built in H.264 encoder on the card for recording games. I used it and the quality is amazing, and has almost no impact on FPS.

 

If you really want more RAM I would invest in getting a single 8GB stick so in case you ever want to upgrade to more RAM in the future you can just buy the same stick. TO be honest though 6 GB is fine, the only performance difference you will notice is if you get RAM with speeds that go up to 2133 MHz or high, and most motherboards don't really support that.

 

a 1TB hard drive is fine, if you want a faster boot time or faster loading for specific games, I would suggest getting a small secondary SSD to install the OS on. I plan on installing GTA V on it so the load times aren't as excruciating.

[Neptune]

almost 90% of the time the only thing that will bottleneck you is the graphics card.

 

also as for overheating and your bluescreening do you look up what error you are getting when it happens? Because it tells you exactly what causes the error so you can pinpoint what is causing the fatal error.

 

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

 

I used this and found out my graphics card was failing every time I started up a game.

 

also as for everything else, get one of the new 700 series graphics cards, or even the new 280X AMD cards I heard were really good. if game recording is your thing though I would go with nvidia, since they just rolled out a new program called Shadowplay which uses a built in H.264 encoder on the card for recording games. I used it and the quality is amazing, and has almost no impact on FPS.

 

If you really want more RAM I would invest in getting a single 8GB stick so in case you ever want to upgrade to more RAM in the future you can just buy the same stick. TO be honest though 6 GB is fine, the only performance difference you will notice is if you get RAM with speeds that go up to 2133 MHz or high, and most motherboards don't really support that.

 

a 1TB hard drive is fine, if you want a faster boot time or faster loading for specific games, I would suggest getting a small secondary SSD to install the OS on. I plan on installing GTA V on it so the load times aren't as excruciating.

 

GtaV pc confirmed

 

But yeah the new amd cards are suppose to be pretty good.

[Griffin]

Fuck nivida, get an AMD r9 290, it's twice as fast as the titan.

and a good SSD would be from kingston and for ram you should get one 8gb stick, rather than 2x4.

also getting 1 8gb stick helps if you want to upgrade to 16gb later, just buy the same 8gb stick again, and there you go!

[shoiep]

Fuck nivida, get an AMD r9 290, it's twice as fast as the titan.

 

Normally, I would agree with you (have AMD parts in my pc) but, the 290X seems to run so fucking loud and hot + consumes metric shittons of electricity. I wouldn't go near the thing. I would consider the 270X or 280X for the new Mantle API though.

 

But also like what Psyche had stated, if I had the money right now, I would get a new nVidia 7XX card for ShadowPlay. I'd rather be able to record games without an FPS hit than get a few more frames in the handful of games that will ever use Mantle.

[Neptune]

Normally, I would agree with you (have AMD parts in my pc) but, the 290X seems to run so fucking loud and hot + consumes metric shittons of electricity. I wouldn't go near the thing. I would consider the 270X or 280X for the new Mantle API though.

 

But also like what Psyche had stated, if I had the money right now, I would get a new nVidia 7XX card for ShadowPlay. I'd rather be able to record games without an FPS hit than get a few more frames in the handful of games that will ever use Mantle.

 

The R9 290X does have a quiet mode and an uber mode.

Here's a review I found on the card. Even shows benchmarks for fps on certain games.