Need some upgrading advice

A

Aero-Z

Geek Trainee
Hello,

I'd like to upgrade my PC a bit but I'm not sure what should I upgrade. Current setup is:

-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 3.2GHz (9 x 356MHz) 1.43125v
-Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R
-A-Data EXTREME DDR2 800+ 4GB (890Mhz) 5-5-5-15 2.0v
-ASUS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB (750/900)
-Samsung SyncMaster P2250 (1920x1080)
-Western Digital WD5000AAKS-65YGA0 500GB
-Fortron Blue Storm II 500W PSU

Should I go for SSD drive at first? Or should I change out something else? I don't have specific budget but I'm not planning to make this a high-end gaming PC.

Thanks!
 
looks like a pretty solid setup.
what are you trying to do by upgrading?
what os are you running?
what games do you play?
do lots of data transferring, downloading?
i think ssd isn't a good choice as a boot drive for your os with all the problems that it may have.
you could install it as a secondary drive and install your programs, games, data for performance through data access.
 
violetblueskies said:
looks like a pretty solid setup.
what are you trying to do by upgrading?
what os are you running?
what games do you play?
do lots of data transferring, downloading?
i think ssd isn't a good choice as a boot drive for your os with all the problems that it may have.
you could install it as a secondary drive and install your programs, games, data for performance through data access.
Click to expand...
I'm mostly playing Eve Online with it. But I also like Bad Company 2 and Crysis 2.
I can't remember the specific stats but I remember that my harddrive had the lowest windows rating so it seems to the bottleneck right now.
I'm not very familiar with SSD but as I've read people suggest to put the OS onto SSD and other stuff on other drives.
Currently I got 500GB SATA2 WD5000AAKS drive. OS is Windows 7 x64.
 
well from the last thing i read about ssd it was a mess with winxp and buggy on win7.
i found this article that not only explains its benefits but walks you through what needs to be done to really take advantage of its speeds.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-setup-secrets-and-tune-up-tweaks/2910

quoted from the top of the article...
"Solid-state drives are wicked fast. SSDs start and shut down fast, and they perform read operations (especially random reads) at speeds that blow the doors off conventional hard drives. In the first installment of this series, I gathered the numbers to show just how much faster you can expect an SSD to perform in the real world.
But you might need to jump through some setup hoops to get top performance out of an SSD-equipped PC running Windows 7. That’s because Windows has evolved over many years with features that specifically target the behavior of conventional hard disks. Features like Superfetch and Prefetch and ReadyBoot are designed to monitor files you access at startup and when you launch programs and then arrange them on the disk for optimal access. Because SSDs don’t have motors and spindles and platters and magnetic heads, they don’t benefit from those features and need to be handled differently.
In fact, there are a series of steps that must be performed before an SSD can perform to its full potential on a Windows PC. Skip any of those steps and the results can be disappointing."

if you can make the ssd work to what its specs are then i definitely recommend this route.
i haven't tried ssd personally as i still use winxp and will continue to do so until i'm forced to move up basically.
i have to say it has been tempting to go win7 though. its funny how i run winxp on an intel core 2 quad q6600 2.4ghz.
winxp will only see 3.5gb of my memory... not that it really needs that much.

like you were saying and with what i just said, if you can get win7 installed on the ssd tweaked at its maximum performance then i would do that for sure.
 
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