Hi there I am a Graphics artist that lives in Illinois, I work in the game industry. My current home rig is slammed together like a toaster with a really bad hangover. I do a lot of work from home so I need help figuring out how to not make it suck so bad. For example I have 4GBx6 of Gskill DDr3 but because of my motherboard I only have 3 sticks installed. I suffer from random blue screens ever senses i installed my Radeon R-290 any my old graphics card is 5 years old and is now dying. I have a sneaking suspicion my hard drive is about to fail too. All the other computers in my house are SSD and it feels like a slug. With that said Help would be awesome. I need to spend less than a grand. Thanks for everything.
I currently have
EVGA E760 CLASSIFIED 1366 Intel X58 Intel Motherboard
i7-950 LGA1366
COOLER MASTER V8
4GBx6 of G-skill DDr3
R-290
Rosewill BRONZE Series RBR1000-M 1000W/ modular
Random 1.3 T hard drive.
What I am looking at
Crucial M500 960GB sta 2.5
I7-4770k
Some motherboard my current memory will work with?
What power supply do you have? The R9 290 is likely much more power hungry than your old GPU. Also, if your old GPU was from nvidia, did you uninstall the drivers?
Thanks for the response I forgot to mention its a Rosewill BRONZE Series RBR1000-M 1000W/ modular.
Your i7 is still a old, but decent CPU, and should still perform rather well. Do you know what error the BSOD gives you? A picture of the BSOD may help us as well.
If you really give up on your system, we can probably help you setup a new one. Lots of parts should be able to be transferred to a new system.
The BSOD is so random, most the time it does not get that far, it just becomes very unresponsive. I would really like to use all the ram, but its only compatible with a few motherboards. I will post a pick of the BSOD as soon as i get it next.
An SSD that large is very expensive and unnecessary.. and relatively risky for a work computer. You will want redundancy.
Perhaps something like this that will fit into that same budget:
Your proposed budget; http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3JI0x - $980
I think this is better for your storage needs and I don't know if your ram is comptible with current motherboards or not.. you have the older tri-channel memory I think..
For a little less you can get this: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3JIbV - $942
You get 120GB SSD as a windows and regular program drive, a 256GB SSD as a working file and game drive, and 2x 1TB HDD for long term storage and a backup incase one dies, so you dont have to worry as much about all your important work files.
**I chose samsung SSD's because they are reliable and have a 5 year warranty.
There is also 16GB of ram included in the build so you can create a ram drive for windows and project temp files for increased speed. And turn off the file paging system in windows.
This will be a huge increase for your system performance and you can still overclock on this if you want.
Lastly, you may need to get a new CPU cooler for overclocking. I personally like the Noctua NH-D14 for its amazing performance and quietness. And it will fit in a lot of older cases that don't have room for radiators.. (prefer this to the closed loop liquid coolers as well.)
Anyway, I hope this helps.
wow thanks feralshad0w I am really liking the sound of that second build, do you have experience with ASRock? the only thing i am thinking is i have over 240 programs installed mostly odd art packages and what not. and I do have cloud backup.
Seagate ST1000MD003 isn't a reliable choice in my opinion. Unfortunately I cannot guarantee that other options would be more reliable. Despite that I would personally lean towards WD Reds or 7k4000 from Hitachi. Also I don't see a reason to replace your current RAM sticks. The ones you have should be fine.
Asrock has been good to me. my last 2 boards have been asrock without problems. I have had asus and gigabyte as well. Asrock seems to have the best price/performance ratio and i really like their xfast ram software.
As for seagate, i havent had any problems with the 4 i have owned, but you can pay more for western digital black and reds. The blacks are my goto premium Hdd's but they are more expensive.
Look and see how what the total volume is for your installed art programs. Maybe you need the 500GB SSD, but that is still MUCH cheaper than the 980GB SSD.
thanks all, as soon as i get paid, i will see what i can get. smile.
oh man, i just found out that 16 gigs is not enough mem for what i am doing, any suggestions?
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3S1nh
I can't imagine a PC that actually needs an SSD of that gratuitous size, so I opted to go for a slightly smaller setup that should provide some fairly respectable performance when placed in RAID 0. I also included a board that I find attractive that has a nice feature set and a 12-phase VRM design, which is about as good as you can expect to find on a board that costs less than $200. I then threw in 32GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM from Patriot, because it looks nice and it is a sufficiently large amount to replace what you've currently got.
You can buy more ram... If you got the build I recommended, you could actually use 2 sticks of your old ram as a temporary for now, but then you can just buy another 2x8GB kit. If you buy the same kit, then you shouldn't have any problems running it. I am currently running 2 kits in my system of the same series ram.
So for now. try throwing in 2 sticks of your old ram. It should be fine if the ram is paired correctly (consult your manual) and when you have the money, buy another 2x8gb gskill sniper kit. Then you will have 32gb of ram and that should hold you over for a VERY long time.
Managed to take a photo of the blue screen on the old computer. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18323833/2014-05-29%2004.28.10.jpg
I would recommend completely uninstalling all nvidia and AMD graphics drivers from the system in safe mode. Then install the latest AMD drivers from their website. This seems like a driver clash (most probably).