PC Upgrade advice

[spikenet]

Another query for the hardware guru's

 

I'm going to upgrade my Q6600 as it is showing its age and struggling with DCS games.

 

Looking at getting:

 

2500K

ASRock Z68 PRO3-GEN3

G.Skill DDR3-1600 8GB

 

Will be keeping my old drives and ATI 6970.

 

A couple of questions

RAM- Is it worth using 1600mhz RAM, I have read that the 2500k chip runs at 1333 and generally it isnt gaurenteed the board will even run the RAM at 1600? 8gb or 16gb ? Are the RAM timings important these days?

Any thoughts on the MOBO? Its very basic but I think the specs are good for the money.

Any thoughts on cooler for the 2500K I will be overclocking it but unsure of how much room is in the case until I build it.

 

thanks

Edited December 7, 2011 by spikenet
edit

[Krebs20]

I run this RAM on this motherboard and i can't get the memory to run above 1866. It hasn't shown to be a bottleneck. Please note I have revision 2 board not the one listed.

 

I run a corsair H70 cooler and it has been good for my needs. I run a small overclock at 4.4ghz no problems. I rarely see the temps go over 40c but i stopped watching them closely anymore. I did run 5.1ghz for an hour to win a bet over a freind. It ran in the high 60s but never tripped the alarms. Dual fans are loud when running on high settings.

 

There are better coolers out there. But the H70 does what I need.

[emenance]

I am also going to upgrade soon I hope Jan or Feb to be finished.

 

 

I would consider the ASUS P8Z68 DELUXE/GEN3 LGA 1155 , the other stuff isnt a concern. I like the feedback on these Gen3 boards , its like a second time go I suppose for Asus and peeps seem to be very happy with these. I really wanted to go with a gigabyte this time with the intel. I was going to build a bulldozer but : rolleyes: I dont like the bad press asus is getting with their boards in general but the gen3 boards are getting better feedback. Id drop asus in a minute if something was better but I do appreciate the INtel lan cont. and some other things other board makers leave out.

 

More specificly the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157279&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Motherboards+-+Intel-_-ASRock-_-13157279 board you are wanting answers on is intresting. I wonder why they used gold caps but used a realtek lan controler??? Most caps these days are doing fine from 3-4 years ago on nice mb's. PLus a friend told me he would never sell an asrock board. and he runs a computer shop for about 16 years. The quality is cheap and the engineering , firmware/ bios, the way the options are on the board can be very very poor. Esp 5-6 years ago. I know they are making things better but the pain was real.

 

I am also going to get a 2500k . I cant justify a 2600k for 100 bucks more. Almost no diff. Im coming from a q6600 as well. Been at 3.0 gz for years np

 

Memory reality max shouldnt be over 1600 and since you want to clock I would get the 1600 ram just to be safe. Really there is too much to the software on my computer to risk a flakey system. Add in a flight sim to take care of and it scares me enough to stay at a mild overclock.

Edited December 8, 2011 by emenance

[spikenet]

ok thanks.

 

I'm really aiming for cheap as possible without loosing to much capability. Think the days of high-end hardware having an big edge are over. That asrock board is $120 and from the reviews it performs close to the high-end ones, within 200mhz, when your talking of 4ghz thats nothing.. I'm not going SLI, dont need onboard firewire etc etc

 

Think I'll go 8gb ram and surprisingly the 1600mhz is cheaper the 1333! $40 for 8gb is pretty awesome!

 

might look at a SSD soon, but I'm running raptors which should be still ok for now.

Edited December 8, 2011 by spikenet

[MustangSally]

You'll be fine. An SSD is the ducks guts tho! I now have a Crucial M4 128gig as my OS drive. Performance boost is fantastic.

[sobek]

You'll be fine. An SSD is the ducks guts tho! I now have a Crucial M4 128gig as my OS drive. Performance boost is fantastic.

 

Indeed. The M4 seems to be at the sweet spot between reliability and performance.

[spikenet]

yes was looking at either the M4 or intel 320. Cant find anyone with M4's at the moment, well not for a decent price.

[sotosev]

Yesterday I got my OCZ vertex 3 SSD. I am so exited to how quickly windows start and how responsive OS is to open new applications also A-10 loading times decrease dramatically! And this with my current machine running SATA II. Forgot to say you don't hear the disk rotαring and reading, just quiet that makes me thing I ll never go back to HDDs

Edited December 9, 2011 by sotosev

[MustangSally]

yes was looking at either the M4 or intel 320. Cant find anyone with M4's at the moment, well not for a decent price.

 

Did you try umart or PCCasegear??

[spikenet]

Did you try umart or PCCasegear??

 

 

Actually when I was looking 2 weeks ago I couldnt find any, but now easy. I got a 64gig M4 on the way.

 

Went with the M4 after reading (alot) of reviews. Was close between the intel 320 and the M4.

 

I guess the best setup for me is SSD for system drive/swap file then setup my Raid0 raptors for game files?

 

Ordered the rest of the system so look forward to seeing what this new stuff can do! The Q6600+P35 served me well but time to move on :(