If nobody minds the minor hijack, I could use some expert opinions as well. I would poke around in Newegg but I have Amazon gift cards to use. And shopping for computer parts on Amazon isn’t easy as the Egg.
I have maybe a $225 budget, and I need to be able to use my DDR3 RAM. The case is old…like 7 years or so. I don’t know if that means I can only use a fullsize ATX mobo or not.
For that matter…if I go with the combo LHoD did and had some money left over, would upgrading from my 8G of DDR3 to -4 make a difference? I have a 2G R9 270, I don’t think I can improve on that much and stay in budget?
If you’ve got the little bit of extra money, it might be worth buying a DDR4 motherboard, in order to keep things current going forward. As near as I can tell, DDR3 is on its way out, and you’re not going to be doing much upgrading from there with it. I linked earlier to a combo that’s in your price range and would switch you seamlessly to DDR 4:
No. Unless you’re doing RAM-intensive work, you won’t notice any difference at all. Your money would be better spent on a SSD.
How 'bout another 8Gb stick then…
If it makes a difference, I’m building specifically so I’m capable of running Dishonored 2. I have such a backlog that I probably won’t play any newer games for a while. The next new game I’ll play is the new System Shock projected for next fall.
More RAM is seldom a bad idea.
Open Task Manager, preferably on another monitor, and run your games and apps and see if your RAM usage exceeds 8 GB. If it does, then buy the extra RAM.
Thus just in…apparently, using DDR3 RAM will eventually harm a Skylake processor due to voltage compatibility differences.
Links abound, but DDR3 is 1.5v, and Skylake is built for -4 which is 1.2v.
Huh. The i3 6100 is Skylake, right?
Poop.
Woot! Came today, and three hours later, it’s up and running!
(It took me entirely too long to figure out that I had a power cable plugged into the “chassis fan” port, making the board short-circuit and not even boot up. Took that out, now the fan runs blind but at least everything works).
Bad parts:
-Wireless card is too old to fit, but my router is right next to the PC anyway, so a wire fixes that.
-Steam no longer recognizes it as the machine that my brother shared his games with, so we’ll need to re-enable game sharing.
-Subnautica is still crashing a lot. It’s early access, so hopefully some upcoming tweak to the game will fix this.
-The kicker, it STILL doesn’t meet the minimum CPU requirements for Witcher 3 :(. Some online folks suggest it’ll run fine on i3, so I’ll buy it and try it.
But it’s much quieter than my old chip, and I think I’m noticing a real improvement. Thanks again, folks!
IIRC TW3 requires quad cores. The i3 can fake two extra cores if you have hyperthreading enabled, which you do in the BIOS.
Have fun!
I have decided to make a stupid old grown-up decision. I’m not upgrading until fall, mostly because I’m afraid of not shooting high enough and having to upgrade again for System Shock.
So catching up on the backlog of old games it shall be. Kind of looking forward to playing the first Dishonored on my current PC, though. Played it on Xbox and it should look much better on the comp.
Stupid being responsible and crap.