Need help with Gaming PC upgrade

[s1lent]

Hi all,

Looking to upgrade my Gaming PC. I do alot of gaming (MMO/BlkOps/Skyrim/Starcraft) and work with photoshop. I want to upgrade my PC to make it faster and better for gaming. A few people had suggersted for me to overclock my CPU and buy a better GPU (670GTX or 680). I Do NOT want to overclock! I no nothing about overclocking and cant afford to fry anything. If someone had a list of fool proof instructions then I might consider overclocking. But it's to risky....So can you suggest some options for my upgrade?


I have about $800 to $1000 to spend.


This is what I am currently running.

Windows 7 --64
i7 920 @ 2.67
Asus P6T (not the Deluxe)
Geforce GTX 570 1028mb
Corsair XMS3 6gd DDR3 1333MHZ--Need to upgrade somtime in the future!
Samsung 1tb sata & 300gb HD---KEEPING
Corsair 850TX power supply---KEEPING



Thanks for all your help

 

[coozie7]

While it's not the current state-of-the-art (as once the poor old thing was ) that i7 is still a very, very powerful piece of kit and while a CPU/MB upgrade will give some improvements I think you'll find them fairly small considering the expense and hassle involved while a faster card will have a instant and fairly considerable impact.
What problems are you having with Photoshop? Extra memory might help but you may find cacheing its files to a SSD to be more benefcial.
Some releases of Photoshop use the graphics card to accelerate them so a faster card will help there as well.
So, I'd just drop a GTX670 and SSD in there (and maybe some more RAM) but leave the CPU/MB alone.
Unless you decide to beat your irrational and unfounded fears of overclocking, that is .

 

[s1lent]

While it's not the current state-of-the-art (as once the poor old thing was ) that i7 is still a very, very powerful piece of kit and while a CPU/MB upgrade will give some improvements I think you'll find them fairly small considering the expense and hassle involved while a faster card will have a instant and fairly considerable impact.
What problems are you having with Photoshop? Extra memory might help but you may find cacheing its files to a SSD to be more benefcial.
Some releases of Photoshop use the graphics card to accelerate them so a faster card will help there as well.
So, I'd just drop a GTX670 and SSD in there (and maybe some more RAM) but leave the CPU/MB alone.
Unless you decide to beat your irrational and unfounded fears of overclocking, that is .

Hey coozie7,

Thanks for the reply.

That darn 670 keeps ringing in my head! A few friends have recommend it to me also. Can you recommed a good 670 and SSD? I was thinking of getting some more ram but what I have is 6gb of 1333mhz. Should I jump to 8 or more gb @1600mhz?

I really appreciate your help!

 

[kodster8912]

Hey coozie7,

Thanks for the reply.

That darn 670 keeps ringing in my head! A few friends have recommend it to me also. Can you recommed a good 670 and SSD? I was thinking of getting some more ram but what I have is 6gb of 1333mhz. Should I jump to 8 or more gb @1600mhz?

I really appreciate your help!

I'm not coozie7 but you could always try
http://www.ncix.ca/products/?sku=79084&vpn=N660ti%20TF%203GD5%2FOC&manufacture=MSI%2FMicroStar
http://www.ncix.ca/products/?sku=67710&vpn=SSDSC2CW120A310&manufacture=Intel
And 8GB would help I guess there is really not a difference in 1333mhz and 1600mhz go with 1333 if you want a bit cheaper price.

 

[coozie7]

I do n't live in the USA (I guess you do) and have yet to look into an SSD upgrade myself, so 'll give no advice there, because, frankly I'm just clueles myself .
Keep a look out here and put a post in the Storage Forum as well, after all, the more opinions and information you get, the better the decision you can make.
Memory speed has been shown, in many tests, to have very little effect on overall system performance but if you regularly have several large images open at once in Photoshop, or multitask heavily, more memory would be helpful. As I recall the i7s' run triple channel memory, so you'll need to go from 6Gb (I'm guessing 3x2Gb sticks) to 12 Gb, which would be 3x4Gb, sounds expensive but the Newegg site has 12Gb kits of high grade memory for under $70!
As for the card, this looks good, plenty of positive feed back, too.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125438

Edit: Oh yes, and a little light reading, you'll find the chart at the end quite helpful.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32586.html

 

[kodster8912]

I do n't live in the USA (I guess you do) and have yet to look into an SSD upgrade myself, so 'll give no advice there, because, frankly I'm just clueles myself .
Keep a look out here and put a post in the Storage Forum as well, after all, the more opinions and information you get, the better the decision you can make.
Memory speed has been shown, in many tests, to have very little effect on overall system performance but if you regularly have several large images open at once in Photoshop, or multitask heavily, more memory would be helpful. As I recall the i7s' run triple channel memory, so you'll need to go from 6Gb (I'm guessing 3x2Gb sticks) to 12 Gb, which would be 3x4Gb, sounds expensive but the Newegg site has 12Gb kits of high grade memory for under $70!
As for the card, this looks good, plenty of positive feed back, too.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125438

Edit: Oh yes, and a little light reading, you'll find the chart at the end quite helpful.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-graphics-card-review,review-32586.html

If your both look for an SSD that's good Intel,Corsair, and Crucial are pretty good brands

 

[aebome]

OCZ Vector and Samsung 840 Pro are the SSD champs right now.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6363/ocz-vector-review-256gb
http://techreport.com/review/23990/samsung-840-pro-series-ssd-reviewed

 

[kodster8912]

Your probably right I'm just going by what I know. But I think the goal in mind is don't spend like $600 on an SSD.

 

[MC_K7]

Here's the perfect SSD (better sustained read & write performance than Intel and Samsung and it has a 5 year warranty and cost less):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249027

And here's a very good 670:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121637