I am looking to do an overhaul on my aging rig and I am not sure what I should keep and what I should replace. Certainly my first priority is more RAM, but I would like a little feedback on if there are other bottlenecks I should address before upgrading my GPU from my 460 GTX. My budget for the first round of changes is about $400-600. BTW first post so I am hoping my system specs show up on the bottom if not I will post. Thanks!
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55-UD4 (I hate this thing)
CPU: Intel i5 750 w/ H50 watercooler
RAM: 2 x 2 GB G.Skill Ripjaw 1600
GPU: Nvidia 460 gtx
Hardrives: WD Raptor 150G, WD Blue 500G x2Case: Gigabyte 3D Aurora
Well, your cpu might be a bottleneck at this point. You could probably keep the ram for right now. 4GB is still enough, but it is definitely nice to have 8GB. Ram is pretty cheap now though, so that's probably not a huge deal anyway. I would suggest going with Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, and then get a nice GPU. This is above your budget right now, but it sounds like you're going to be saving up for it all anyway. Here's what I would suggest:
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115072
or
Intel Core i5 3570K - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116504&Tpk=3570k
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128544
RAM: Mushkin Redline 8GB @1600mhz 7-7-7-24 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226305
GPU: MSI GTX 660TI - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127697
If I were you, I'd get the motherboard, cpu, and ram first. After that, I'd save a little bit more money and grab a graphics card. After that you could always grab a better cpu cooler and an SSD if you want to spend a little more.
CPU Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE - http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Description=phanteks+ph-tc14pe&x=0&y=0
SSD: Samsung 830 Series 128GB - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147163
When it comes to the CPU decision, there are some things to factor in. The 3570K will give you some nice features like PCI-E 3.0, but the 2500K overclocks better in general. The only reason you would really want PCI-E 3.0 is for more bandwidth for your graphics cards, but you don't really need the extra bandwidth unless you're running at least three cards anyway. Not to mention that this board can only really do dual cards. I'd personally probably go with the 2500K just to overclock the crap out of it, but the 3570K might be slightly more future proof.
I really am quite pleased with my 2500K. Can't go wrong there. SSD turns any machine into insta-beast!
Vortex thanks for that huge reply. I was interested to hear you thought the CPU was a bottle neck. Its sitting at 3.8 atm what improvements would upgrading to say the 2500K offer? Teach me master hehe.
Also my current hard drives are aging and getting pretty full. I really havent kept up on the changes in HDD. I must admit I am a bit confused about how things currently stand. My understanding is that the caching now means that higher RPMs doesnt strickly mean better performance.
As for SSD I know its going to make booting all but instant but what else does it help with? Certainly wouldnt help with gaming will it?
BTW, Vortex I love that you have the balls to run RAID 0 haha. Much thanks to both of you!
Well I'm not positive that the i5 750 would absolutely be a bottleneck, but it is an older CPU now, and you might not get the full potential out of a new graphics card because of it. If you want, you could always go for the graphics card first and get the CPU, motherboard, and ram later. The card would still perform a lot better than the GTX 460, but you might not get its full potential. On the other hand, you might get the full potential of the card, and the only bottleneck there would be is if you decided to run two of them in SLI. If you ran two cards, then your cpu would most likely bottleneck the two cards.
A 2500K would allow for more modern video cards to perform at peak performance, and you could run two in SLI without a problem. They call it a central processing unit for a reason. It basically has to monitor and throw out commands to the rest of the computer. If it can't keep up with your video card or cards then you're not going to see their full potential. The CPU is basically the brain of your system, and the motherboard is the nervous system (all the nerons that carry the brain's signals). CPUs aren't needed as much for games because the GPU basically takes over since it's more suited for that type of application, but from my understanding a cpu can still bottleneck a gpu.
Like I said though, I'm not 100 percent sure if it would be a bottleneck or not. I'd have to test the card in two different systems in order to compare them.
When it comes to hard drives, the faster the rpm's the faster the drive is going to be. I always like to get the largest cache on the hard drive as possible too. Premium hard drives usually have 64MB of cache built into them now. When it comes to hard drive caching with technology like Intel SRT, you're going to need an SSD to pair with the hard drive. RPM's still matter in this scenario though. The way it works is that your computer will automatically store your most used programs on the SSD, and everything else will be written to the hard drive. When you first setup the system things might seem a little slow because the computer hasn't figured out what to put on the SSD yet, but after some use, your most used programs will load up a lot faster. RPM's still matter because the rest of your programs that you don't use as often aren't going to see any benefit from SSD caching, since they're written to the hard drive instead of the SSD.
SSD's are all about decreasing load times. If your OS is installed on it, then your computer will boot up a lot faster. Any programs that are installed on it will load up and be ready to use almost instantly. The only real difference you'll see if you install a game on it is that loading screens will be shorter. Although I have heard people claim that your frames per second will be more consistent in games like Skyrim where part of the world around you will be loaded without being interupted by a loading screen.
And I <3 RAID 0. People make it seem really risky, but it's not at all. Usually the people saying this are people who are running a single hard drive, which I don't understand at all. Their argument is that if one drive fails then you lose all of your data, which is true, but if their drive fails then they lose all their data anyway. Having two hard drives in an array does increase the risk very slightly (it's something like less than 5 percent riskier than a single hard drive) only because probability would state that if you have more than one drive it's more likely that one of them will fail. The more drives you add the riskier it becomes, but hard drives today have a really long life span, and the only real reason I can see a hard drive failing is if it's a dudd, in which case it will probably fail within the first few months you own it (at least that's what I would assume). Basically, the more drives you buy, the more likely you are to get a dudd, but with only two drives I'd say that's extremely unlikely.
Ideally, I would like to have a RAID 10 array so that I could still get the same performance and space as a RAID 0 array, but still have two other identical drives in the system for backup. There are reasons I'm not doing that though. For one, this is the second rig I've had with a RAID 0 array and both are still going strong. Secondly, I've personally had 5 hard drives since I started building computers in 2008, and none of them have failed. Thirdly, the only hard drive I did have fail was a 10GB hard drive in a Gateway computer from 2000 that crapped out on my family in 2005 or 2006. Lastly, I want to get a custom water cooling loop going in my rig eventually, and I'm going to have to do some mods which isn't going to allow me to install anymore than 3 hard drives and a single ssd, which is the current count in my computer. I'm going to have to cut part of the hard drive cage out, put all the hard drives in the remaining slots, and mount my SSD with velcro somewhere else.
Anyway, to summarize, RAID 0 isn't as risky as everyone makes it out to be. The same goes for overclocking as long as you know what you're doing.