- Dec 3, 2013
- 3
- 0
- 10,510
I am trying to evaluate what piece of hardware I should upgrade on my main workstation. I was thinking about adding a NVIDIA GTX 660 with the GTS 450 I have, however first wanted to see where my current bottlenecks are before adding another video card. I do not play video games, I spend most of my time on the computer programing and for my business I create virtual tours. I have my operating system on a SSD 840 drive and the rest of my work resides on 4 - 7200rpm SATA drives.
Current System Configuration
Mainboard: BIOSTAR T5XE CFX-SLI
Chipset: Intel P55
Processor: Intel Core i7 870 @ 2933 MHz (max: 3861)
Physical Memory: 20480 MB = 20GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450
Network Card: Realtek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Adapter ( I use BitSync and constantly remote access files off of this computer )
Cooling: Water Cooled CPU and more fans then someone could want for the rest of the hardware.
Average Physical Memory Usage while idling: 19%
Average CPU Usage while idling: 5%
I consistently max out memory and keep CPU usage in the upper 90% if I am either rendering panoramas for virtual tours or using Adobe After Effects or encoding a video or just have a lot of stuff going on with word, browsers, and Lightroom 5.
Maximum Budget: $500 prefer to spend under $400
Would I see a significant improvement increase with a newer motherboard and newer CPU?
OR
Would I be better off adding a GTX 660 graphic card and adding another 2 monitors? - I would only do this if $400 wasn't going to get me a significant performance increase.
OR
Would I just be better off saving my money and maybe adding another solid state for key files I am using in relation to panoramic rendering or video encoding?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for reading this!
Current System Configuration
Mainboard: BIOSTAR T5XE CFX-SLI
Chipset: Intel P55
Processor: Intel Core i7 870 @ 2933 MHz (max: 3861)
Physical Memory: 20480 MB = 20GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450
Network Card: Realtek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Adapter ( I use BitSync and constantly remote access files off of this computer )
Cooling: Water Cooled CPU and more fans then someone could want for the rest of the hardware.
Average Physical Memory Usage while idling: 19%
Average CPU Usage while idling: 5%
I consistently max out memory and keep CPU usage in the upper 90% if I am either rendering panoramas for virtual tours or using Adobe After Effects or encoding a video or just have a lot of stuff going on with word, browsers, and Lightroom 5.
Maximum Budget: $500 prefer to spend under $400
Would I see a significant improvement increase with a newer motherboard and newer CPU?
OR
Would I be better off adding a GTX 660 graphic card and adding another 2 monitors? - I would only do this if $400 wasn't going to get me a significant performance increase.
OR
Would I just be better off saving my money and maybe adding another solid state for key files I am using in relation to panoramic rendering or video encoding?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for reading this!
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