You can see my current specs in my sig, and I am thinking about an upgrade by January at the latest. Now the system runs pretty good as it is, but I was considering a few things. A raid card would be nice for my SSDs and maybe add a third SSD to the RAID 0 array. Also I was considering swapping my 4890 for a 5850. I was considering throwing in an extra 4 GB. I usually run at about 3 GB of memory in use out of my 4GB. Heck with the money left over from RAM, I might even grab a few Scythe fans to replace the junk stock thermaltake fans. Things run pretty good in all departments as it is but I been getting in to 3d modeling a bit. I use zmodeler 2 which I would imagine as a much smaller footprint then 3ds,rhino,etc, and at current it is the only 3d modeling app that support the game I play. For now its all low polygon models, less then 5,000 polygons, but that might soon change. Still doing video editing and video conversion(sometimes using HD/720) video source. So what department would you upgrade?
What do you really need the SSDs in RAID for? Beyond a ertain point I'm pretty sure you see diminishing returns on that, other than the extra capacity, which you'd get simply by having separate drives. Whether you want to go for higher-end RAID or not is up to you (you don't stand to gain much performance at all swapping from onboard to dedicated RAID with SSDs), and since you already have ample CPU power, and presumably storage space too, the two things I'd look at are graphics and RAM. 4GB RAM is often run pretty close in an x64 environment with high-end applications. How often that happens depends on your scenario. I know certainly for me upgrading to 8GB would be beneficial. As for the graphics, depends what games you want to play, how much you care about detail/performance. The HD4890 to HD5850 is only a 38% upgrade or so, and it's still quite a lot. If I were you, I'd at least go for an HD5870 for 60%, if that seems too expensive you may as well wait for the HD6000 series around the end of the year, or if the games you play support crossfire, track down a cheap second HD4890.
As for the SSDs are you asking in regards to the current set up? If so well, at the time you yourself didn't know any better. and as I recall you pmed me sometime ago about your friend having a similar set up and he saw a nice boost as I recall it. Pretty sure I still have the pm actually. Anyways I was expecting performance boost and adding a bit more storageon my C drive, but that's not all that important. Anyways I figuered it would come down to the ram or gpu. I don't play anything that demanding asid from a game called Emergencey 4. Now keep in mind while this is a 4 or 5 year old game, it allows for people to create modifications for the game. Now even then the game runs excelent with mods although the lights reflections from units can cause some slight lag if there are a lot on the screen at once. However the games editor can lag a bit but the game engine wasn't that great even for its time. Now Emergencey 2012, the fifth game in the series is due out in october. Its got a new engine and not much is known in terms of what to expect for minimum requirements. It will have a mod system to. As for ram, as I said I have been doing some work with 3d models but nothing big. However its not unusual to have say 2 or 3 c++ files open in notepad 2, two c++ scripts in araxis merge, game editor, a 3d model open in zmodeler 2, utorrent,transmission remote, smart ftp and firefox open running lots of add ons and several tabs at once. However I never max out the 4gb under heavy use. So I'm a bit stuck here on which to do. Plus if I do the ram id rather buy 8 gb and drop these g.skills as this model seemed to have a lot of problems and run 4 sticks of corsair, rather then 4gb of g.skill and 4gb of corsair.
He's got boosts in transfer rates. Useful for him, are they useful for you though? Using a single brand of memory is always useful, especially if you've had problems with the existing set. On the game though, you need to be careful when mods are used that they aren't just CPU-killers. You ought to test an overclock on your CPU first and see if it nets any benefit in performance. If it doesn't, then it's probably safe to say the GPU is the bottleneck.
Well I ran to tests in just the editor. 1 using fraps benchmarks/fps and one using the graphs in rivatuner. Now I turned the lights on which is when the editor lags. Now the graphs were basically identical. However, frpas was another story. With the "lights on" I managed to get about 10fps idle, scrolling kept it at about 10fps. Now with the lights set to "game mode" I was able to about 35 fps idle. Scrolling peaked at about 40 fps. Now a known performance fix for this game is to run it on a single core rather then multi-cores. I guess this is because it was never designed to use multi-core cpus. The result was actually about 5fps drop over the stats above under all conditions. In regards to CPU killers, I understand but i dont believe thats an issue. Any time I alt+tab out of the game or editor, I never notice reasonably high cpu usage.
CPU usage isn't the point, games aren't necessarily coded very well in terms of CPU utilisation. If it's a possibility, it's still something you should test, imo.
Id rather not. Not sure exactly what the problems was, but last time I did an OC I ended up having to RMA my mobo, and my ram on 2 occasions.
Then be careful! It's not difficult to adjust settings without causing damage. It's entirely up to you of course, but it's an easy way to potentially prevent wasting a fortune on an uprated graphics card if you won't use it.
Well I used OC Genie just playing around. Ran it at about 3.7/3.8 for 2 days before the problems kicked in. Id rather not chance it.
Still unsure here. I have noticed recently that if I load a dds image in photoshop 7 the whole screen goes grey, and slowly things reappear. Now on the ram front, I have 1600 right now but I ran them at 1333 for a bit and couldnt see a big difference, so I am wondering if 16000 is worth the extra $145: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...45-313^20-145-313-TS,20-145-315^20-145-315-TS Also will the 5800 cards run any cooler or quieter then my 4890?
You won't notice a big difference with higher memory speed, though it will affect your CPU's performance in certain applications. Using 1333mhz memory over 1600 does limit your ability to overclock, however. Your problems from overclocking by the way were likely from using software overclocking - always do it in the BIOS. That's an interesting deal on that memory there. I'll keep an eye on that when upgrading my system. The HD5850 will run a fair bit quieter than your HD4890. The HD5870 is probably going to be similar, but still a bit quieter. The HD4890 was the card ATI produced with a needlessly high fan speed just to shut up the whiners that assumed their PC problems were caused by their graphics card overheating (they weren't).
Interesting gact there on the 4890, because I usually have to keep my fan at a descent volume to run it at about 60*C. The stock settings dont seem to get the job done, that or there isnt good air flow for the gpu, but that shouldnt be a problem as theres one intake fan in the front of the case blowing air directly under the card. Plus another fan where about half of its airflow is going to hit under the card as well, and half blowing across the top of the card. And on a side note, you might be able to answer this Sam, on a semi related note why are the card built upside down? All gpus that is. Why not have the GPU on top of the card where the hot air can escape easier and not to mention the fan blowing heat away from the gpu?
define 'don't seem to get the job done' - remember the safe standard operating temperature of a GPU is 95ºC, it's normal to see anything up to that. GPUs can run far hotter than CPUs. As far as I can tell cards are built 'upside down' so that cables and peripherals coming out of them, as well as heatsinks, do not interfere with the CPU area above.
I guess its just being overly sensitive, but with rivatunner on auto, thats what my GPU temps look like in game. I try to keep it at about 70* in game as I find it tends to run better that way.
You shouldn't notice any difference in performance with your GPU at 100C than with it at 50C. If there's lag, it's probably coming from something else, such as a CPU overheat. I have no performance issues with my GPU temps at 91C and MemIO at 98C in a game with 100% load on all GPUs.
