Ages ago, I was much better at knowing when (and what) I could upgrade or when I should just pick up a new PC. These days are not those days, but I’ve always been impressed by the Dope’s PC savvy experts and their opinions so here we go.
I do a fair bit of heavy spreadsheet/data crunching, browsing and games like EU4 or Skyrim and I’d like to be able to handle the natural progression of those activities into the next 2-3 years. I’m willing to sink $200-400 into my 2-3 year old PC. So Dopers what, if anything, should I do to my setup?
Intel Core i5 2320 3GHz 6MB 4-Core S1155 Processor
Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 Z68 S1155 ATX Mainboard
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4) PC3-12800 DDR3 Memory Kit
Seagate 7200.12 1TB 7200RPM 64MB 3.5" SATA3 HDD
LG GH24NS70 24X DVD-RW SATA Drive, Black
eVGA GF GTX560 Ti 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E Video Card
Thermaltake Armor A90 Mid Tower Case, Black - NO PSU
Corsair Builder CX600 V2 600 Watt Power Supply
Or should I just wait it out a few more years and buy a new one?
You have a lot of stuff that is certainly good enough. You would have to pay a premium to get gear that would have a noticeable performance bump over what you have.
The easy answer is just buy an SSD for around $100. It will give all your activities a boost and you will not have to waste any existing hardware.
If I went for a SSD would I want to just get one for the OS? As soon as I start thinking about mucking around with any kind of storage the universe starts rubbing its hands in anticipation of the pain it will inflict on me.
Depends on how much you’re using now. If you can comfortably fit what you’ve got stored now (plus about 10%) on an SSD that you can afford, I’d just use cloning software (like Easeus ToDo) and do a straight swap.
More likely, get the SSD and use that for the OS and programs, and put your data on your spinner.
Oh, and I consider an SSD to be the most significant advance in home computing since…home computing. It’s magic of the purest kind, and I recommend it whole heartedly.
8 Gb of RAM is plenty for almost all applications.
I went the second route - use an SSD for boot+programs, and a spinner for the data. That would be my recommendation. SSDs have come down considerably in price, but a 1 TB drive would still be horrendously expensive.
I always figure that until I can afford a processor that’s twice as fast as my current one I wouldn’t notice the difference, because most of the time your processor isn’t the bottleneck. The SSD is a good idea, it’ll speed you up even when you’re not running at 100%.
There’s been a lot of evolution in drives in my lifetime, that’s for sure. I remember the first 1.0 GB drive I ever saw cost $1,700. Three years later I bought a 1.6 GB drive for $300 or so. I just saw a 128 GB USB drive at Costco for less than 40 bucks.
I game extensively (Skyrim, Planetside 2, Dirt 3, etc.) with a 3-core CPU and 4GB of RAM and slower hard drives than you, so you’re already ahead of me. I would buy a new video card for ~$125 now and then spend $500 or so on a new system in a few years.
What OS? I’ve upgraded my Vista PC with a bigger HD, faster CPU, better video card, and a better power supply because I don’t want to switch to Windows 8. Hopefully the next version of Windows is better than 8.
You certainly don’t need more RAM - building a new system 8gb would be pretty standard. Nothing you can do is going to give you more than an incremental improvement except very expensive graphics cards. Of the options you have, I’d rank them:
SSD - 256GB can be had for <$100 regularly - check slickdeals.net. Will speed up booting, loading, sometimes games load levels and save faster.
Graphics card - Given what you already have, you’d probably have to spend $250-300 to get a real improvement.
Processor - you could upgrade as far as an I7-3770k, which would be an improvement, but not noticable in most things unless you regularly do video encoding/processing or other tasks that are well threaded and are using 100% of your current processor.
JerrySTL - Windows 7 which I thought was excellent and easy to use.
Have to admit I’m feeling a little surprised that the SSD seems to be the biggest bang for the buck. I had thought people would be telling me “More RAM”, or “double up your video card”, or “scrap it and start over”. The SSD seems like an easy way to basically speed up the system and do a “safe” pseudo-reinstall.
An SSD should provide noticeable improvement in boot time and software load time. I think it’ll only help with games if you load the game on it.
It won’t help with spreadsheet & data crunching. Unless you’re loading gigabytes of data into memory at once, causing some of it to be cached to the disk - in which case adding more RAM would be a better option. (Or improving your data crunching method so you’re not loading so much data into RAM at once).
Also, have you considered that a larger monitor may be the most useful upgrade for spreadsheet work?
I think you can probably swing an SSD + a GTX 970 GPU for about $400 if you wait for black friday sales. The GPU will also net you 1 free $60 game to boot.
That should set you up nicely for the foreseeable future. Old games like Skyrim will look and run better and you should be set for the next grand Bethesda RPG (probably Fallout 4), or other big RPG’s like Dragon Age Inquisition… Or well, just about any game period really, the 970 is a powerhouse and your PSU is more than enough for it.
How heavy an Excel user are you really? Do you go and make yourself a cup of tea while it recalculates? Excel will use as many processor cores as you can throw at it. But I suspect you’re not really that much of a heavy user. In which case I would put your upgrades in order as GPU, SSD, CPU, and RAM. A Geforce GTX 970 will serve you well over the next several years and a SSD will make your general usage much more pleasant. Both can be transferred to newer PCs.
I regularly get to watch my % complete work its way to 100. Now you can argue that’s not a PC issue but a tool driven result but that’s the tool I have to work with.
Still the consensus seems to be grab a SSD (~$120) and (or) then, maybe a new video card like the GTX 970 ($400).
Just want to second/third/fourth the consensus. Buy a SSD. If you still game, buy a smaller SSD and a new video card. Everything else is fine, including RAM.
Used GTX 700s should be cheaper now that the 900s are out – down to $250 or so. I went from a 560 Ti and to a 770 and am glad I did, but the 970’s definitely a better card and a better value overall, though $100-$200 more.
I recently got an Asus GTX 750 Ti 2GB for $140 from Amazon.
I agree on SSD to an extent, but it only sped up games on my system there were disk intensive, like Arma3 and Planetside 2. Basically if you’re running a game or application and see the hard drive light solid or blinking a lot, it could benefit from a SSD. It will also speed up the system in general if it’s your boot drive.
