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Weekend Open Forum: Your next PC upgrade
With the Radeon HD 7000 series trickling out, Ivy Bridge and Kepler bound for mid-2012 and hard drive prices gradually recovering, it seems a great time to begin plotting your next system upgrade. What parts do you plan to buy in the near future? Need more horsepower, storage or RAM? Finally going to splurge on a flash drive or secondary display? Perhaps it's time for a completely fresh build?
Components for Shawn's new X79 test rig
I'm tempted to perform an overhaul this summer, but I think I'll skip this generation and see what 2013 brings. The i5-750 and GTX 460 should hold strong until then. Coincidentally, you are reading this via TechSpot's newly upgraded server, which now has dual quad-core Xeon E5620s, 12GB of RAM and two SSDs in RAID (from dual quad-core Xeon E5335s, 8GB of RAM and 10k RPM SAS drives).
Related Products from Product Finder
AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 PCIe
The AMD ATI Radeon HD 7970 measures 27 cm long (10.6 in), the GPU core is clocked at 925MHz, and the GDDR5 memory operates at the same frequency of 1375MHz (5.5GHz DDR). Still, pairing that frequency with a 384-bit memory bus gives the HD 7970 264GB/s of theoretical bandwidth. The HD 7970 carries 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs, up 33% from 1536 SPUs and 96 TAUs, it's also the first PCI Express 3.0-compatible card.
AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 PCIe
The HD 7950 has 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs and 32 ROPs. The only other ports are on the I/O panel where you'll find a dual DL-DVI connector, a single HDMI 1.4a port, and two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 sockets. Supports a max resolution of 2560x1600 on up to 3 monitors.
AMD ATI Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB PCIe
The AMD ATI Radeon HD 7770 measures 21cm (8.2in) long, the GPU core runs at 1GHz, it comes loaded with a 1GB frame buffer, the Radeon HD 7770 also carries 640 SPUs, 40 TAUs and 16 ROPs. The HD 7770 operates at near silence because even under load it only draws 80 watts and as little as 3 watts at idle, courtesy of the ZeroCore Power technology. Last but not least, AMD has included a single 6-pin PCI Express power connector.
HIS Radeon HD 7750 iCooler 1GB GDDR5 PCIe
The Radeon HD 7750 measures only 17cm (6.6in) long and operates at 800MHz. The HD 7750 reference card has a single slot cooler that uses a low-profile heatsink and fan measuring 3cm tall. The heatsink itself is 9.5cm long, 7.5cm wide and is cooled by a 65mm fan. The I/O panel has a dual DL-DVI connector, a single HDMI 1.4a port and a DisplayPort 1.2 socket.
User Comments: 82
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going to replace my quadfire. I have a feeling this time is gong to be Nvidia 600 series.
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Darth Shiv said:
hahahanoobs said:Jibberish18 said:Just my opinion but I think EVERYONE's next upgrade should be an SSD.
+1,000,000
PCIe SSD (Revodrive 3 X2 or greater) and Ivy Bridge successor is my target. Something with > 2x Native SATA III anyway.
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Still have a hard time justifying an upgrade on my current system. No games out right now have trouble running on it. I would like to get away from my 5870s but its a lot of money right now. Maybe I'll reconsider when Nvidia comes out with Kepler. CPU wise, I'm still happy with my 960, OC'ed at 4.25Ghz since day one. Probably going to wait for DDR4 to come out and buy in to that platform, and at that point its a new system all together.
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Marnomancer said:
I'm confused whether to buy a Radeon, RAM, or Athlon or Phenom. No money for SSD
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I want to do a new build come summer, but it's hard to justify atm =/ . If I can't get around to it this year, I definitely plan on getting myself an SSD, new video card be it either Radeon 7850/70 or 660ti and possibly a Corsair Hydro Series Cooler.
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I am playing civilization 5 the system below:
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.80 GHz, 512K Cache, 533 MHz FSB, 2GB RAM, 80 gig segate IDE hard drive, HIS HD 4670 IceQ Native HDMI 1GB (128bit) DDR3 AGP, 24 inch Samsung 1080P Monitor, HP gaming mouse, backlit keyboard.
I shouild see a large increase in performance with Civ 5 if I use an AMD FX 4100 series processor, AMD 2950 , 8 gig ram, two 60 GB ssd (one system, one data)? Will I care if I us an Intel processor instead given the performance level of my current system?
If I have a 1080p monitor, how can I tell if it will support higher resolutions? Should I care to play games above 1080P or is 1080P good enough for a 24" LCD monitor.
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I'd love to get a SSD but at the current price point I will settle for a new 6Gb/s SATA HD. I am currently running on an older 3 Gb/s model which is approaching end-of-life. Following that I'll be making the jump from 4GB of RAM to maxing out my motherboard at 8GB.
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