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Country: Canada I'm not looking to build a complete system from scratch here, but upgrade an existing one. Here's the current system (I don't think that's the actual brand of memory in there, and the monitors are "closest match", but all the specs are accurate): CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor Motherboard: Asus M5A97 ATX AM3+ Motherboard Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 1GB Video Card Monitor: Samsung B2240W 22.0" Monitor Monitor: Samsung B2240W 22.0" Monitor The genesis of this is that I want a new monitor with HDMI input so I can move the PS3 into the same room. And if I'm getting a new monitor, I might as well get something that I can put in Eyefinity with the two existing screens. This turns out to constrain the monitor choice extremely heavily, since it needs:
And after applying all of those constraints, there appears to be pretty much only one choice that's actually sold in Canada: Monitor: Asus VN248Q-P 60Hz 23.8" Monitor My video card, meanwhile, is showing its age. If I want to triplehead even older games, it'll have trouble keeping up; if I want something relatively modern like Dark Souls 3 or Kerbal Space Program (+ eye candy mods) it will fall over. The Radeon R9 390 is probably what I want, or maybe even the R9 390X if a convenient sale (or the imminient announcement of the Polaris cards) brings the price down some; even the 390 is more than I've spent on any previous video card by a wide margin, but I have higher ambitions and more disposable income these days. (Looking for video cards on PCPartPicker is incredibly frustrating, by the way. Even when set to Canada as the region, it returns prices that are off by $100-200 in either direction, and reports prices for stores that don't actually sell that card. You basically can't trust anything it says about video cards except the technical specs.) So the monitor and video card are pretty well nailed down. Where I'm conflicted is the possibility of upgrading the motherboard, CPU, and RAM. For $200 I could get an FX-8350. It's not the hottest thing going, but it has good performance for its price and doesn't require replacing the motherboard. That's pretty appealing. But it's power-hungry, and would only be an incremental improvement over the 6300, and one that would only really be noticed in games that lean heavily on multiple cores, which are still a small minority. So, on reflection, I don't think this is worth it. On the other hand, for another $50 I could get an i5-6500, and for another $75 an i5-6600, which would be dramatic performance improvements at lower power requirements. (The i5-6600K adds more like $150, since the chip itself is $300 and doesn't come with a cooler.) But then I also need to add in a new motherboard, and new RAM if I get a DDR4-capable motherboard (apparently you can get LGA1151 motherboards in both DDR3 and DDR4 flavours). So now I'm looking at something like $400-$500 (plus the monitor and GPU) and an almost complete rebuild, keeping only the case, storage, and power supply. Is it worth it? Or should I just settle for the GPU and monitor upgrade for now, and wait for the Kaby Lake and Zen announcements this fall and see what that does to the CPU/motherboard lineup before planning further upgrades?
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May 5, 2016 18:05
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:56 |
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