On what subject? CPUs? Video cards? The Napoleonic Wars?

 

Video cards. I think the rest of my computer is up to snuff.

How sad is it that I think the low-medium settings are still amazing? lol.

 

Ok, so refresh my memory. What video card are you using now?

 

More important above all else:

What resolution do you plan on gaming at?

 

None.

What I have: Intel DH67GB mobo, i5-2310 2.9GHz, 1tb hard drive, 16gb ram, LG optical drive and a cooler master exteme 600. That's what I remember, lol.

Does this have to do with my monitor, or is there a setting? Basically, I have no ******* clue.

I've never PC gamed before.

 

Oh, well, it's easy then.

Buy a Radeon HD7770. End of story. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127664


Yup, that's all up to snuff.


Don't worry about it, this is too much detail.

The short answer is yes and yes, but it's no biggie.

 

Wow, that's pretty cheap. Thanks, Vasquez. Let's Rock!

Should I be concerned about core temps? After an hour of spirited Hawken play, my temps were up between 50-60c.

 

More noob questions.

Does running memory in dual-channel mode matter much? IE, is it worth the extra cost of getting 2 matching sticks (and pulling the existing 4 GB stick), or am I fine just getting another 4 GB stick of similar if not identical specs and letting the BIOS adjust to the slower stick?

 

Yes, it is.

Now, this is not the absolute most powerful card on the market by any means. It was engineered to be inexpensive and have a low power signature. So if you're trying to play Call of Duty 27 across nine monitors with all of the quality settings on "Is this the Matrix, or is it real?" then you'll probably need something beefier.

But I got this as an upgrade to an old GTX280 for the purpose of playing TF2 on a single monitor at 1920x1200, and with most quality settings at maximum, it never drops below 60 FPS (I have Hsync turned on, so the card is inherently locked at 60 FPS. If I unselect it, then FPS increases to 100+, however this is unnecessary.)

I know nothing of Hawken. It looks a bit more visually complex than TF2, so other opinions might be warranted.


60° is nothing for a modern CPU / GPU. Hell, some of the AMD CPUs IDLE at close to that temp. (Another reason why AMD CPUs suck.)

Your CPU isn't going to burn itself out. Modern units will all downscale their clock if things start to get out of hand, but it doesn't sound like you're anywhere near the limit.

At the lab where I work, one of our bigger-brain EE types commonly jokes (with regard to some of the newer, larger BGA-style FPGAs) that until the solder starts melting out from under it, there's no problem.

 

Thanks a lot, Joe. I'll be looking to buy one as soon as I done buying car parts.

In the meantime, I have been playing around with things like Rainmeter. I have to admit, it's really fun. Here's a screen shot of my desktop.

 

Anybody?

 

The real-world performance penalty from mismatched RAM is likely to be trivial as compared to the performance gains resulting from the increased RAM reducing the amount of swap activity.

The slowest solid-state RAM ever made is still many times faster than the fastest hard drive.

 

That's kind of what I figured, but I wasn't sure what the prevailing wisdom was on this issue.

That said, I can't help but think that rather than spending a little on a video card or extra RAM, I might be better off getting an SSD first and doing a clean OS install on that. Would cost a bit more, but then I wouldn't have to redo the OS later on down the road.

 

Mgeoffriau what is your most immediate goal with this computer? I'd definately go gpu if you're wanting a better gaming experience. If/when you go ssd, I highly reccommend using it for your OS but keep using the other hdd for storage. I've done that and man is it nice. I had to reload windows one evening, took about an hour on the ssd, and after that I was immediately back up and running since I lost no data.

 

No, no 3D gaming to speak of. If I do, it'll be old games anyway. I'm just stuck in the mindset that a proper desktop needs a GPU.

SSD and RAM are probably more important. I'm just thinking SSD now so that I can avoid redoing the OS later on.

 

If I were you I'd go ssd and ram. On my last build I ran with no gpu for a while. I wasn't gaming on it so I didn't really need it. Once I started gaming though I got the best gpu I could afford and now there's no going back.

 

If you are only running 4GB of RAM at present, then I can guarantee that you will see a much greater immediate performance boost from doubling (or quadrupling) that amount, as compared to spending the same (or more) money on an SSD.



If you're serious about no 3D gaming, then a modern GPU will be of no use to you. The faculties which these cards provide are focused almost exclusively upon functions related to polygon rendering and texture-mapping. The pixel-shader element of these cards is employed by certain 2d applications (eg: the Windows "Aero / Glass" theme), however I don't consider this to be a priority. (I still have all of my PCs, including the 64 bit 7 machines, set to use the old 2000/XP interface. I find it cleaner.)


Not a bad idea, presupposing that you're dedicated to the idea of using an SSD.

On the other hand, this is another area in which bumping the RAM first will have a huge performance advantage- even with TRIM, the sort of constant write/read/erase behavior which is associated with the heavy use of paging / virtual memory is hugely detrimental to the performance of an SSD.

 

I'm calling shens on that, Joe.

 

I speak the truth.

If you are only running 4GB of RAM, then I guarantee you that your system is spending quite a lot of time paging in and out of virtual memory. And even while the write performance of newer MLC drives is getting pretty good, it's still many orders of magnitude slower than the write performance of DRAM.

Eliminating the need for paging will speed up the system quite a great deal more than marginally improving the speed of the device being paged to.

 

4gb is not a lot today.