HD /Comp upgrade questions

[Caeth]

My current build:

Dell
AMD Phenom II X6 1045T
ATI Radeon HD 5800 series
8.00gb RAM
SATA 1 TB hard drive
1920 x 1080 resolution (27" HD screen)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit


Which one would be the best upgrade for WoW and movie/tv watching?

I was thinking of upgrading my HD because Windows gives me the lowest score for that. Do I need anything special for a SSD or*can I just plug it in like a normal one and install Windows? Can I keep my current HD and have both attached....that way I can use the current HD to just store movies and tv episodes. Other than that I guess I can also buy an external HD....keep those space hogging things on the external one and get a 120 gb SSD for WoW and the faster transfer rate.

I was also thinking of going from 8 gb ram to 16gb....double for only 50 bucks sounds really good.

What do you guys think?

[inux94]

Never. Ever. look at windows scores as they're far far away from accurate when it comes to scoring of a gaming centered system.

A SSD will probably be the best addition you can get for your build, it's not going to improve performance much in WoW and such, but the overall speed & boot times makes it worth the purchase, considering they're very cheap these days.

Don't upgrade your RAM, as you won't ever use more than 8GB as an average gamer.

[Xuvial]

It's a pretty balanced build, assuming your card is a 5850 or 5870. Not much I can think of that would increase performance (other than swapping out the entire build for a new one :P). Which leaves overclocking...what's your motherboard?

[Caeth]

Let me see...not home so it's hard to look up....

it's a 5870 with 1024MB GDDR5.

My RAM is 8GB DDR3 SDRAM,1333MHz, 4x2GB

My HD is 1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200 RPM

Don't know if that changes anything.

---------- Post added 2012-11-23 at 05:59 AM ----------

Doesn't say what kind of MOBO i have....when i get home I can try to find that out...it's prob the standard Dell one.

[Xuvial]

"Standard Dell one"?

Never mind then, overclocking goes out the window.

You can upgrade your GPU but it'll leave your CPU as the bottleneck, and upgrading your CPU would require you to swap out the mobo as well. Like I said it's a pretty balanced build so it makes it VERY hard to recommend upgrading any specific part.