Project Reality Forums

Hello gentlemen, I would like to consider a new part or two as I can feel the machine starting to struggle a fair bit.

Current setup.

Budget is ?200 to spend on upgrades. Thoughts? Hard drives are also very old and feel sluggish .

i5-4570 (150 &#8364 or
i5-4670 (170&#8364 or
i5-4670K (~190 €, overclockable)

or did you plan to spend less on a new quad-core CPU ?

New mainboard required though for new CPU-socket... ("1150") :/



and for the rest a HDD?

Btw. I still have a GTX 570 aswell, planning on upgrading to a 770 this year. (my CPU i7-2600k, older but powerful!)

Compromise is the word of the day.
There isn't a clear path to upgrade,
I'd go buy a few case of beer and slab of ribs and have a proper bbq weekend with the monies myself.

The question we ask is:
Exactly which programs are seemingly sluggish?
You have 200 quid to put towards specific programs, so you need to name them.


The only solution I see is
buying a (CHEAP!!! large capacity) Sata6 SSD, because you only have Sata3 ports, which means even cheap SATA6 SSDs will saturate your Sata3 port, so go with cheap and lots of storage.

plug the SSD into the light blue SATA 3 Port.

Chipset:
5 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors supporting up to 5 SATA 3Gb/s devices

a fresh install of your OS on the SSD
installing the sluggish programs on the SSD.

Here is the best reference I can give you:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/parts/inter ... 5,24&f=3,2

drive = SSD
Interface = SATA6 and SATA3
form factor 2.5" and 3.5"
sort by lowest price per Gigabyte of storage.

Also I have the exact same 500GB WD Blue drive, , it's slow as shit,
In 2011-ish I went from that as my OS drive to a 64GB Vertex 3 as my OS drive on a SATA3 port mobo and it was like night and day. Extended the life of the PC by several years, it's still being used as an office PC with the Q8200 which is even less of a CPU than your i5 760.

The 760 is still good if you can get some proper cooling on it, a nice Hyper 212 EVO would do fine to get you around 4.1Ghz and your board seems sufficient for the task judging from reviews. An 840 EVO will do you lots of good here, 93 quid for 250GB of storage.

840 EVO 250GB: 93
Hyper 212 EVO: 25

Total: 118 Quid, as said by lito, the rest will always come in handy for a nice drink or two.

Thumbs up on X_Alts suggestion to OC that CPU/mobo.

Will increase speeds by 25% to 35%, bringing you in line with entry level SandyBridge i5 ( i5-2400 etc).

Google: gigabyte ga-h55m-ud2h overclocking guide

1. 4 x 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory (Note 1)
2. Dual channel memory architecture
3. Support for DDR3 2200+/1800/1600/1333/1066/800 MHz memory modules
4. Support for non-ECC memory modules
5. Support for Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) memory modules

* To reach DDR3 2200 MHz and above, you are required to use with Intel Core i7/Core i5 CPU without HD Graphics and install a discrete graphics card.
When using Intel Core i5/Core i3/ Pentium CPU with HD Graphics, the maximum memory speed supported is 1666 MHz
* Please refer "Memory Support List" for more information.

Upgrading/replacing that slower RAM sticks with faster ones could lead to benefits also.

If you're doing some CAD, raster plotting, cooking jobs on your PC then you would need some more of it, so get 16 GB. This in pair with SSD and overclocking would make your PC significantly faster. In any other way, you would require serious upgrades to get modern CPU and drives.

MaSSive wrote:Upgrading/replacing that slower RAM sticks with faster ones could lead to benefits also.

If you're doing some CAD, raster plotting, cooking jobs on your PC then you would need some more of it, so get 16 GB. This in pair with SSD and overclocking would make your PC significantly faster. In any other way, you would require serious upgrades to get modern CPU and drives.

He will have to do BCLK Ocing since its not unlocked, which will bump his speed up to about DDR3-1500? What is your GPU cooling/case BTW, 80C seems a bit even for Fermi cards. Snap a pic of the innards of your rig if possible and get a fan profile for MSI Afterburner.

Guide for the P55 board (pretty much same thing except yours has some extra "media" features): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy8D7bbxHXg

Thanks for the input(s)!

Main usage its for 3ds max/3d/2d packages, gaming as a second.

SSD is truly a godsend when it comes to decreasing loading times of programs like 3ds max, and the OS, but as Lito said you are limited by your mobo's lack of 6Gb/s SATA ports. Although you'll probably still get like double the speed you get with your current HDDs. But maybe it's worth saving up longer and then getting a newer mobo/cpu as well.