Need some advice on what to upgrade? Help

[Doctor Amadeus]

Need some advice on what to upgrade? Help


Here are my specs I am kind of dreading the whole idea of upgrading either starting over or just making some adjustments on what I got. I want to be able to play World of Warcraft and going forward LIKE games, so I am just wonder what I would and should do to get mine up to spec to run the best.


Alien Ware Area 51

CPU Intel(R) i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20Ghz
Memory 6.00 Supported 12.00 GB Supported
Hard Drive Seagate 2 TB (ST2000DM001-1ER164)
Optical Drive PLDS DVDRW/BROM DH-6E2S


I have 2
Video Card NVIDIA GetForce GTX-580s

Interface PCI Express x16

Video Card Memory 1.50 GB

Driver Provider NVIDIA

Driver Version 9.18.13.4752, 2-5-2015

Temprature Card 1 Temp 60C Card 2 Temp 61C


Monitor is an Alienware 2210


OS is Microsoft WIndows 7 Premium Edition 64- bit

Service Pack 1

[Cyrops]

And what issues are you having currently?

[Shakadam]

Honestly it's all pretty dated. It's not outright terrible yet but you're looking at replacing it all since anything new is gonna work poorly, or not at all, with what you have.

If you want a bandaid fix I suppose you could get a SSD and replace the graphic cards with something better, but that CPU is gonna need replacing soon. Also I'm not sure what kind of upgrade opportunities you'll have with an Alienware computer, do you have any info on the motherboard and PSU?

[Doctor Amadeus]

And what issues are you having currently?

Right now I am having a huge problem with hearing the fans go crazy when playing something as simple as WoW back during WoD and STOR.

- - - Updated - - -

Honestly it's all pretty dated. It's not outright terrible yet but you're looking at replacing it all since anything new is gonna work poorly, or not at all, with what you have.

If you want a bandaid fix I suppose you could get a SSD and replace the graphic cards with something better, but that CPU is gonna need replacing soon. Also I'm not sure what kind of upgrade opportunities you'll have with an Alienware computer, do you have any info on the motherboard and PSU?

WoW I thought my CPU was ok it's old what kind of drawbacks would I have it a quad or maybe more I believe had it a while

The Motherboard

CPU Intel(R) i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20Ghz

Alien ware Motherboard
0J560M
Chipset intel X58
Southbridge intel ICH10R
ePPID CN0J560M697029AM0786


It's Alienware and liquid cooled and huge, so not sure what upgrading will all include but any help would be great, I really just want to get it more stable for games and have a reliable hard drive

[khazmodan]

the cpu is about as old as it can get without being totally hopeless but an upgrade would be huge anyway. the 580's are power hogs and you would save a pretty good amount in electricity to get just one 1070 now and get a huge performance upgrade to boot. Like somebody else said; an SSD would be an amazing upgrade for you right now without any other upgrades so if you want to take care of it a little at a time then that would be part one. Part 2 would be video cards because both the SSD and video card could be carried over to a new system and if you ever want to go to a higher resolution screen, you will definitely want to be ready with something like a 1070. Part 3 would be biting the bullet and replacing the cpu and motherboard for something like what is recommended on the build of the month unicorn section in mmo-champion...i gotta say that video cards are insanely priced (new virtual currency is driving that demand) right now so i would probably do the SSD and cpu/motherboard replacement first to give the market time to get reasonable.

[chazus]

Right now I am having a huge problem with hearing the fans go crazy when playing something as simple as WoW back during WoD and STOR.

Here's the process I would do.

1) Replace the water cooled setup or fix it. Get a $25 EVO and see if that fixes the cooling situation.

2) Get an SSD, and see if that improves performance.

3) If you're still unhappy with things, you're looking at a complete overhaul, sans SSD and cooler pretty much. All the other hardware is stuff I probably wouldn't replace alone. you can recoup a LITTLE cost by selling them piecemeal on ebay.

[Shakadam]

Right now I am having a huge problem with hearing the fans go crazy when playing something as simple as WoW back during WoD and STOR.

Clean the fans and heatsinks with some pressurized air, replace the thermal compound for your CPU if you have any around. That should help a bit with temperatures and thus, noise.

WoW I thought my CPU was ok it's old what kind of drawbacks would I have it a quad or maybe more I believe had it a while

The Motherboard

CPU Intel(R) i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20Ghz

Alien ware Motherboard
0J560M
Chipset intel X58
Southbridge intel ICH10R
ePPID CN0J560M697029AM0786


It's Alienware and liquid cooled and huge, so not sure what upgrading will all include but any help would be great, I really just want to get it more stable for games and have a reliable hard drive

The CPU and motherboard are honestly the biggest issues here. As I said they're not truly terrible but they're so old that anything else you change is gonna be bottlenecked hard by your CPU+mobo.

Your CPU is a first generation Nehalem released in late 2009. It was good then, it's pretty bad now. You'd notice a massive difference from pretty much any upgrade tbh. The problem ofc is that everything else is gonna need replacing if you replace your CPU.

The bandaid fix I mentioned with an SSD and a new graphics card is still ofc possible if you don't wanna shell out the money for a total upgrade right now, you can always use those parts when you do upgrade the rest. Just beware that you're not gonna get the max out of a new SSD (because your motherboard only supports SATA2 instead of SATA3, effectively limiting a modern SSD to half the speed it's capable of) or a new graphics card (because A: Your motherboard only supports PCI-E 2.0 instead of 3.0 so limiting the available bandwidth for an average gaming GPU these days and B: Your CPU will be a serious bottleneck for an average gaming GPU (let's say a GTX 1060).

Basically you're looking at a completely new build if you wanna get any real difference. You could save the harddrive I suppose but that's about it.

[Doctor Amadeus]

the cpu is about as old as it can get without being totally hopeless but an upgrade would be huge anyway. the 580's are power hogs and you would save a pretty good amount in electricity to get just one 1070 now and get a huge performance upgrade to boot. Like somebody else said; an SSD would be an amazing upgrade for you right now without any other upgrades so if you want to take care of it a little at a time then that would be part one. Part 2 would be video cards because both the SSD and video card could be carried over to a new system and if you ever want to go to a higher resolution screen, you will definitely want to be ready with something like a 1070. Part 3 would be biting the bullet and replacing the cpu and motherboard for something like what is recommended on the build of the month unicorn section in mmo-champion...i gotta say that video cards are insanely priced (new virtual currency is driving that demand) right now so i would probably do the SSD and cpu/motherboard replacement first to give the market time to get reasonable.

So the 580's running could that cause for the high fan use?

SSD = Hard Drive? If So any suggestions?

Thanks I might bite the bullet but gonna see if there is anything I can do to get a few more years from this.

- - - Updated - - -

Clean the fans and heatsinks with some pressurized air, replace the thermal compound for your CPU if you have any around. That should help a bit with temperatures and thus, noise.




The CPU and motherboard are honestly the biggest issues here. As I said they're not truly terrible but they're so old that anything else you change is gonna be bottlenecked hard by your CPU+mobo.

Your CPU is a first generation Nehalem released in late 2009. It was good then, it's pretty bad now. You'd notice a massive difference from pretty much any upgrade tbh. The problem ofc is that everything else is gonna need replacing if you replace your CPU.

The bandaid fix I mentioned with an SSD and a new graphics card is still ofc possible if you don't wanna shell out the money for a total upgrade right now, you can always use those parts when you do upgrade the rest. Just beware that you're not gonna get the max out of a new SSD (because your motherboard only supports SATA2 instead of SATA3, effectively limiting a modern SSD to half the speed it's capable of) or a new graphics card (because A: Your motherboard only supports PCI-E 2.0 instead of 3.0 so limiting the available bandwidth for an average gaming GPU these days and B: Your CPU will be a serious bottleneck for an average gaming GPU (let's say a GTX 1060).

Basically you're looking at a completely new build if you wanna get any real difference. You could save the harddrive I suppose but that's about it.

Honestly thank you for the break down, it flows from one point to another, I think actually replacing the motherboard and CPU on this would be an undertaking especially me never having done it before and trying to sync everything up.

Anything compatible now alien ware you suggest, in terms of the lowest available now now. I'm thinking gut this and put what maybe can be salvaged on this.


Thanks again for all your help

- - - Updated - - -

Here's the process I would do.

1) Replace the water cooled setup or fix it. Get a $25 EVO and see if that fixes the cooling situation.

2) Get an SSD, and see if that improves performance.

3) If you're still unhappy with things, you're looking at a complete overhaul, sans SSD and cooler pretty much. All the other hardware is stuff I probably wouldn't replace alone. you can recoup a LITTLE cost by selling them piecemeal on ebay.

Is the cooled set up easy enough to fix on my own, is liquid cooling not needed now or obsolete?

Yeah I am also liking the ebay route any Computer shops you think might trade anything decent for it?

[Shakadam]

Don't have time to address to your other questions right now but I'll mention something about this:

Is the cooled set up easy enough to fix on my own, is liquid cooling not needed now or obsolete?

Yeah I am also liking the ebay route any Computer shops you think might trade anything decent for it?

Fixing the cooling depends on what's wrong with it. I'm betting most of the noise comes from your graphics cards though and those are likely not (?) water cooled. Cleaning the fans and heatsinks from dust will always help a little though.
Liquid cooling is not needed anymore unless you plan to heavily overclock. For standard speeds or "normal" overclocking, air cooling is both cheaper and less noisy.

As for selling it, the memory might be worth a little something still as it should be DDR3 memory at least. I'm not really seeing a market for the rest though, you'd be lucky to get a couple of bucks for anything else. It's just too old and power inefficient.

Power as in electricity is something to keep in mind as well. Your current system is easily consuming 700W or more under load (your dual gtx 580's alone consume ~600W at max load) and a significant amount in idle as well since that older hardware doesn't have nearly as good power saving modes as new stuff does.
A new build with much much better performance would still only consume less than half of what your current system does. That's some rather significant energy bill savings over a year.

[Cyrops]

So the 580's running could that cause for the high fan use?

SSD = Hard Drive? If So any suggestions?

Thanks I might bite the bullet but gonna see if there is anything I can do to get a few more years from this.

- - - Updated - - -



Honestly thank you for the break down, it flows from one point to another, I think actually replacing the motherboard and CPU on this would be an undertaking especially me never having done it before and trying to sync everything up.

Anything compatible now alien ware you suggest, in terms of the lowest available now now. I'm thinking gut this and put what maybe can be salvaged on this.


Thanks again for all your help

- - - Updated - - -



Is the cooled set up easy enough to fix on my own, is liquid cooling not needed now or obsolete?

Yeah I am also liking the ebay route any Computer shops you think might trade anything decent for it?

Like others suggested, buy a can of pressurized air (canned air or air dusters, they go for a few bucks a can) open the case (I suggest doing this outside) and blow the dust out, depending on your living situation, I would recommend doing this at least once a year.

SSD is Solid State Drive (same function as HDD only it has no moving parts) this is the upgrade you WILL feel the MOST, highly recommended to get at least 250GB one and use it as your C:/ drive, you will need to reinstall the windows for this. The decent ones are from Samsung EVO series, I also got a 1TB from Wester Digital (they bought some other company out and put their sticker on SSD's) just for all my games. I have a Kingston in my PC (120GB as I got it a few years ago) which works fine. If you decide to upgrade your PC the SSD will be reusable, so it's not a waste of money to put in your current machine.

Replacing motherboard and CPU, you will also need to replace the RAM, at the very least, this is not that difficult, there are a TON of 'how to' videos on youtube for this, unless you can't wield a screwdriver.

Alienware just slaps their logo on PC's, they don't manufacture any parts, as far as I know. The only things you could put into new PC is the old HDD and perhaps the GPU's, GPU market is more than messy right now, buying any decent card is not recommended.

[lockedout]

Need some advice on what to upgrade? Help


Here are my specs I am kind of dreading the whole idea of upgrading either starting over or just making some adjustments on what I got. I want to be able to play World of Warcraft and going forward LIKE games, so I am just wonder what I would and should do to get mine up to spec to run the best.


Alien Ware Area 51

CPU Intel(R) i7 CPU 960 @ 3.20Ghz
Memory 6.00 Supported 12.00 GB Supported
Hard Drive Seagate 2 TB (ST2000DM001-1ER164)
Optical Drive PLDS DVDRW/BROM DH-6E2S


I have 2
Video Card NVIDIA GetForce GTX-580s

Interface PCI Express x16

Video Card Memory 1.50 GB

Driver Provider NVIDIA

Driver Version 9.18.13.4752, 2-5-2015

Temprature Card 1 Temp 60C Card 2 Temp 61C


Monitor is an Alienware 2210


OS is Microsoft WIndows 7 Premium Edition 64- bit

Service Pack 1

I would just build a new PC. Your rig is going on 8 years old.