Upgrades... (No, not that kind!)

CGPepper · Oct 15, 2015

I'd recommend upgrading to this for maximum power efficiency

For SSD you probably want a 500gb drive. That s*t get full quick. Evo and crucial are very well priced atm
With GPU's and CPU's, i'd say upgrade small but often instead of going big for a long time

Rattle-N-hum · Oct 30, 2015

I'm just the opposite of CGPepper; I like to go big once every 5 years or so. This generally allows for a good few jumps in tech, and If I dont want the bleeding edge, I can get the last gen for 60% or so. I have a 2tb 7200 HDD if you want.

mromutt · Oct 30, 2015

I would wait in the GPU, I have that one in my test bench and its is still pretty good. The CPU I looked at what your board will take and I would say a FX-8350 if you want all that power or a fx-6350 if you want to save a little money (its a huge bang for buck) I am rocking the 6350 paired with a evga gtx 960 ssc right now and it never holds me back. But you should grab an SSD at least for your boot drive and your games on the other, that will get you a bit more performance out of your system for a relatively cheap upgrade. Though that hard drive should be upgraded it is a bit slow and it is cheap to replace with a high end one these days like this one I would recommend for a game drive.Your motherboard also supports adding two more of your sticks of ram for a total of 32GB of ram and probably not that bad of a price (do not know the exact model or spec of your ram so I cant quote price). All links provided to amazon for lowest price and convenience :p

Unshaven · Oct 30, 2015

Rattle-N-hum said:
I'm just the opposite of CGPepper; I like to go big once every 5 years or so. This generally allows for a good few jumps in tech, and If I dont want the bleeding edge, I can get the last gen for 60% or so. I have a 2tb 7200 HDD if you want.

That's what I do too. About every 5 years or so. About 70-80% of the top stuff. I tend to stay on the boring side and build for stability rather than speed.

I like Asus MB's and Nvidia lately (last 6-7 years or so). I have some older AMD's though that are still working ok from prior to that. I just finished my latest one with an Asus 97Z workstation MB, 32GB of Gskill, 4ghz 4790K, EVGA 970 FTW and a 1TB Samsung SSD with Win 7 ult. Not going to Win 10. Purrs like a kitten and should be ready for whatever SC can throw out. I had an old CoolerMaster CM Stacker case left over from years ago that I never used (it's a monster with a special squirrel cage MB fan). I used that. Came out pretty nice. Lots of room inside too.

Derkerter · Oct 30, 2015

I tend to go large every 5-7 years. My next concept build runs off of pure AMD. The Fury X is super attractive due to the AIO and me living in a hot area, plus it's small size, PLUS the new HBM type memory which I think will be exceptionally good with DX12.

Edit:
Hard drive wise. I do 2 SSDs and a HDD. Boot SSD, Steam SSD, mass storage HDD. I will be getting a SC dedicated SSD I think at some point since I have the feeling the game will be huge.

dubbzy · Oct 31, 2015

SSDs are about the same as regular hard drives during power outages, since there is no chance for a spindle to spin out of control. And they are much much faster than regular hard drives. I can boot up Windows in about 12-15 seconds, and programs (especially during startup) load much much faster. Today's SSDs are very very reliable, so you shouldn't worry about reaching the end of its lifespan (unless you write 200 Gigabytes per day for 4 years). I would, at the minimum, recommend a 64-gig for your OS, and if you have the money get a larger one. I currently have a 256gb and a 128gb, where I store all of my modern games. When I stop playing a game or if its older and doesn't benefit from the speed upgrade, I have a 1tb spindle hard drive

WarrenPeace · Oct 31, 2015

SSD is actually safer than traditional HDD. Power outages are no problem whatsoever, whereas with the HDD there's a remote chance you could scratch the platters if you were engaged in read/write at the time of outage. Boot times for OSs loaded on SSDs are so much faster it's absurd. My desktop goes from shut down to fully loaded in under 30 seconds, and I can get a browser window up within 15.

Derkerter · Oct 31, 2015

Vanisher said:
Again, read above. Is it perfectly fine to run/boot the OS from a SSD? What about power outages and the like, is that big a deal? Would it be better? (Newb questions about SSDs, I'm newb to SSD.)

I lose power at least 10 times a year, and my boot SSD is nearly 5 years old and going strong. Boot SSDs let your system start up significantly faster. I put drivers, OS, and a few select programs, on the boot SSD.

dubbzy · Oct 31, 2015

The one downside of a SSD is that I can't go to the bathroom while games load, or read the loading screen tutorial tips :(

Unshaven · Oct 31, 2015

Vanisher said:
You sure? I'm not too sure about having the OS/boot drive be a SSD. I understand it can't be magnetically wiped (like that's an issue any more) but I don't know how I feel about my OS being on what amounts to a large USB drive.

Again, read above. Is it perfectly fine to run/boot the OS from a SSD? What about power outages and the like, is that big a deal? Would it be better? (Newb questions about SSDs, I'm newb to SSD.)

Modern SSD's are wonderful. WELL worth it for normal use.

I'd read up a bit on them prior to installation as some things are different than on a HDD, such as defragging (you don't defrag a SSD).

There's a lot of info on the web on these differences. Lots of articles that can spool you up quickly...(no pun intended). :)

On a side note, even the Combo SSD/HDD's....aka Hybrid drives are pretty cool. I stuck one into a 5 year old Macbook Pro as it's drive was starting to fail. I cloned it over to the new Hybrid drive and got a nice performance boost at the same time. Win-Win.

honcho12 · Nov 1, 2015

Just to add a benchmark showing the ridiculous read/write cycles you can get out of a SSD:

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

With some luck you could get nearly 40 straight years out of a drive at dubzy's 200GB/year, which is just silly. Also, SSD health monitoring software can give you plenty of warning before it does die.

dubbzy · Nov 1, 2015

honcho12 said:
Just to add a benchmark showing the ridiculous read/write cycles you can get out of a SSD:

http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead

With some luck you could get nearly 40 straight years out of a drive at dubzy's 200GB/year, which is just silly. Also, SSD health monitoring software can give you plenty of warning before it does die.

You could redownload Star Citizen 10 times a day!

mromutt · Nov 1, 2015

Ah now that you linked the ram, yeah what I said in my comment stands :D thats nice ram I would get another set (not super important but still useable)

Agrath · Nov 1, 2015

About buying a second GeForce 760..
I have a phenom 2 6 core @3.2Ghz and a GeForce 760. At the moment I am cpu bottlenecked on 1080p,and gpu bottlenecked if I turn down my resolution one step down. So for the 1.3 alpha version you wont see higher framerates by buying another GeForce.

mromutt · Dec 14, 2015

Vanisher said:
So haven't posted anything new in here so I guess you guys get an update!

I just ordered in a SSD, 120gb, for pretty damn cheap (Amazon was having a sale on it and I had just gotten a gift card, so yolo.) Anyway, that should be coming in a couple days at which point I'm going to swap my operating system to Windows 10 and put it on the SSD. How I'm going to juggle the original 1TB HD is another question now, because I have to decide if I just want to keep the SSD as purely OS or not.

Meant to ask a question if anybody knows it (I think I know the answer) but: AMD AM3+ chipset, are they releasing new CPUs on this chipset still?

I would just put your os and normal programs on the ssd. as for amd cpu, there is a new socket coming out next year (will be all their new cpus) will be great if it does half what they say it will :)

thanatos73 · Dec 14, 2015

Awwww, CRAP, but I just got my FX9590 working right..... NOW they come out with a new Proc...... :)..... Oh, honey... um.....
OK, I just rebuilt my system(twice)(the second time was a bad motherboard), and the SSD is a MUST HAVE.

My current system is
FX9590
MSI 990FXA Gaming
XFX R9-270x 2Gb
16 Gb HyperX RAM
500Gb SSD(OS, Steam, SC)
1Tb HDD for storage
2Tb HDD for game recording
H-100i Water Cooler
EVGA 750w PSU(most likely to change in the near future)

Upgrades... (No, not that kind!)

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