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So I have a 2 year old desktop. . It's served me well these two years, and I'd sort of like to extend its life. At the time AMD was sort of making a resurgence with phenom II so I didn't go the i5 route (like a moron).
This summer I have a fair bit of income, but need a laptop for basic notetaking/maybe some light programming. I'm leaning towards getting a cheaper/smaller laptop and just upgrading my desktop a bit with the savings. Or I could just get a macbook or a nicer ultrabook, oh well, so many options.
In terms of the desktop, I"m wondering whether 100-200 dollars of upgrades would accomplish anything, and what the utility of making this amount of upgrades would be.
MSI 870A-G54 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
Phenom II 955 BE, stock heatsink/fan
CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)
Antec 300
1TB Samsung F3 HDD
ASUS cd/dvd drive
MSI N250GTS Twin Frozr 1G GeForce GTS 250 1GB 256-bit GDDR3
I just do fairly light gaming (sc2 probably heaviest game i play), coding, web browsing. I'm not sure if any upgrades would be worthwhile, but I'd like to keep this machine capable for as long as possible.
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United States2718 Posts
On June 10 2013 12:43 Froadac wrote:
So I have a 2 year old desktop. . It's served me well these two years, and I'd sort of like to extend its life. At the time AMD was sort of making a resurgence with phenom II so I didn't go the i5 route (like a moron).
This summer I have a fair bit of income, but need a laptop for basic notetaking/maybe some light programming. I'm leaning towards getting a cheaper/smaller laptop and just upgrading my desktop a bit with the savings. Or I could just get a macbook or a nicer ultrabook, oh well, so many options.
In terms of the desktop, I"m wondering whether 100-200 dollars of upgrades would accomplish anything, and what the utility of making this amount of upgrades would be.
MSI 870A-G54 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
Phenom II 955 BE, stock heatsink/fan
CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)
Antec 300
1TB Samsung F3 HDD
ASUS cd/dvd drive
MSI N250GTS Twin Frozr 1G GeForce GTS 250 1GB 256-bit GDDR3
I just do fairly light gaming (sc2 probably heaviest game i play), coding, web browsing. I'm not sure if any upgrades would be worthwhile, but I'd like to keep this machine capable for as long as possible.
Have you overclocked your phenom yet? Short of that, you'd need to sink 300$ for a noticeable upgrade (i.e. go to Intel)
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United Kingdom20327 Posts
With a low spec system like that i'd seriously look into SSD or a card like the 7750/7770. Maybe both.
I disagree with dual cores in anything but lower end systems really these days, and stepping up to i5 or especially unlocked i5 seems expensive or wrong with a gts250 and no SSD. You could raise settings on many games for example with a better GPU. Stock phenom II is good, even if overclocked haswell is running around with double the performance numbers, it would only be a good idea to upgrade CPU first if you planned to play sc2 on low and pretty much nothing graphically intensive with that kind of system
Must ask the question of what you would want upgrade for, for any of it to be relevant really
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I've got a small OC on it.
I can actually run sc2 on high with this system, somehow.
I was considering getting like a Hyperx 212 and increasing OC, or just to cut down on the noise. Other than that a SSD / new GPU are options. In terms of gpu, is there anything in the 150-200 range that would make any sense?
In terms of SSD, would it make a significant performance difference on this machine. Would GPU or ssd be more noticeable?
If 300 would be more substantial I could do that, I'll have several thousand of income over my expenses. (probably 3-4k) so a hundred more isn't huge.
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United States2718 Posts
SSD would be much more noticeable in day to day system use. I would get that now that Cyro mentions it if you're ok with having settings in some other games of yours dialed down. It will make your entire experience outside of the video games much much nicer.
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United Kingdom20327 Posts
Depends what you want to upgrade in terms of system performance
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Probably ssd is the best option
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Does anyone have a non-K desktop Haswell yet? I'm curious if those can still overclock like the non-K Ivy Bridge chips(4 multipliers, and 5% host clock). I've looked around, but I haven't seen anything from reviewers. I figure if they haven't completely crippled them, it'd be a better deal than paying extra to have TSX and VT-d disabled.
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I do believe it has been confirmed that limited overclocking is gone with Haswell.
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I read some offhand comments suggesting the chips are completely locked now, different from the past, no +4 to the turbo multipliers. You also cannot change the BCLK straps to those new 125 and 166 MHz without the K CPUs. It's fixed to 100 MHz +/- a few percent like it was with LGA1155 socket CPUs. Those LGA1150 Xeon CPUs would have been very interesting. 
In threads about Xeon E3-12xx v3 CPUs is where I've seen those comments about everything being locked down now, so it might be different for i5 and i7.
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On June 10 2013 08:04 MisterFred wrote:That LG screen is just a standard IPS monitor. Should be decent quality, but nothing notable. You'd probably rather have the BenQ gw2450hm for 30 euro less: http://www.computeruniverse.net/products/90463642/benq-gw2450hm.aspThe BenQ isn't IPS, it's MVA which I'm told is pretty equivalent, perhaps a bit better. I don't think you'd be unhappy with either.
Thank you very much for your help. Appreciate that.
Now gogo ordering all this stuff. 
PS: Keyboard, mouse and a good headset have to be chosen as well. But nobody can help me here. I have to do some research and decide myself.
Have a great day.
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On June 10 2013 18:51 skyR wrote:
I do believe it has been confirmed that limited overclocking is gone with Haswell.
Do you remember where you heard that?
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Thanks. I don't know what I expected from Intel given AMD's performance, but disabling TSX still doesn't make sense to me. It would make more sense if there was some software that takes advantage of it, but it's too new for that, and all they're doing is delaying adoption of those instructions.
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On June 10 2013 19:05 S3ph wrote:Thank you very much for your help. Appreciate that. Now gogo ordering all this stuff. PS: Keyboard, mouse and a good headset have to be chosen as well. But nobody can help me here. I have to do some research and decide myself. Have a great day.
If you're a right-hander, look at a Mionix Naos 3200. The ergonomics are incredibly comfy. Seriously. As for keyboard, *shrug*, I just use whatever cheap $5 keyboard is laying around.
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United States2718 Posts
On June 10 2013 20:02 MisterFred wrote:Show nested quote +On June 10 2013 19:05 S3ph wrote:On June 10 2013 08:04 MisterFred wrote:That LG screen is just a standard IPS monitor. Should be decent quality, but nothing notable. You'd probably rather have the BenQ gw2450hm for 30 euro less: http://www.computeruniverse.net/products/90463642/benq-gw2450hm.aspThe BenQ isn't IPS, it's MVA which I'm told is pretty equivalent, perhaps a bit better. I don't think you'd be unhappy with either. Thank you very much for your help. Appreciate that. Now gogo ordering all this stuff. PS: Keyboard, mouse and a good headset have to be chosen as well. But nobody can help me here. I have to do some research and decide myself. Have a great day. If you're a right-hander, look at a Mionix Naos 3200. The ergonomics are incredibly comfy. Seriously. As for keyboard, *shrug*, I just use whatever cheap $5 keyboard is laying around.
Gotta have that 160$ keyboard with all the frills!  tbh, I take the keyboard kind of like an SSD. It doesn't actually make you a better gamer or improve frames or anything, but it does make the whole user experience a bit better. Purely subjective as to whether something like that is worth it though. I personally have a ~$75 CM Storm.
+ Show Spoiler [Haswell stuff] +
Does Prime95 output results anywhere? I ran it overnight, but apparently it crashes something like a few hours in, but I'm not 100% sure. My actual PC didn't crash, and is working fine now, so I'm wondering if the OC crashed it or if it's possible for it to literally have just been P95 crashing.
4.4Ghz @ 1.168Vcore and 2.15 VRIN, temps ranged from 84-74 celsius on my CPU cores btw.
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On June 10 2013 22:08 Alryk wrote:+ Show Spoiler [Haswell stuff] +
Does Prime95 output results anywhere? I ran it overnight, but apparently it crashes something like a few hours in, but I'm not 100% sure. My actual PC didn't crash, and is working fine now, so I'm wondering if the OC crashed it or if it's possible for it to literally have just been P95 crashing.
4.4Ghz @ 1.168Vcore and 2.15 VRIN, temps ranged from 84-74 celsius on my CPU cores btw.
There's no output from P95 other than what it shows it its own program window. Usually, an unstable OC will cause it to show errors in one of the worker-windows, but a crash seems fishy as well. I would investigate further (perhaps run P95 overnight w/o OC and see if it runs stable).
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United States7481 Posts
As the rest of my parts start shipping, I'm looking at the actual build process and I'm a bit confused about airflow. From what I understand my case (Corsair Vengance c70) comes with two intake fans by the hard drives, and an outflow fan at the top of the rear of the case. I figure I should probably orient the CPU cooler so it points towards that outflow fan. But the fans on my graphics card look like they'll point down towards the PSU? and the PSU fan points towards the graphics card? Where is that air supposed to go? I think the case has some fan mounts on the left side, should I buy another fan and put out fan(s) there?
edit: maybe the PSU fan is supposed to point out the bottom of the case, that would help some. Still don't understand where the graphics card air is supposed to go.
double edit: wow who knew psu fan pulls from the bottom and pushes out the back? not me an hour ago
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The PSU fan is going to pull air from either the bottom or inside of the case and exhaust it out the back, the GPU is going to pull air from below it, and either exhaust it out the back, or exhaust it back inside the case.
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The GPU will suck air into itself, either exhausting out the back of the base or just spilling everywhere, depending on the heatsink design.
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EPT
