Upgrade advice requested less than 500.00

Bkgphoto · Aug 18, 2015

Looking for some upgrade advice. My current build is 5 years old. I'd rather not build a new system. I'm gonna max ram to 16gb. Does speed of ram make a lot of difference? Would it be worth faster ram? I'm not a gamer, but I am a heavy photoshop user. Would processor upgrade do much? Also recommendations on what components would be best. Currently running windows 10 64, and Photoshop CC. I'd like to keep upgrade to below 500.00. Thank you.

ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 AMD 890FX 6 x SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 6-Core 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W HDT90ZFBGRBOX Desktop Processor
EVGA 01G-P3-1373-AR GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) Superclocked EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL

game junky · Aug 18, 2015

It really depends on how much you love or hate your day to day usage experience. Photoshop is CPU intensive, but the 1090T is among the fastest CPUs supported by your motherboard. You can take some pressure off of that processor by upgrading your graphics card though you won't get the listed performance numbers because your motherboard doesn't have a PCI-E 3.0 (x16) port. A 960 would be a huge upgrade from what you're using without severely bottlenecking your system. Faster RAM will improve slightly performance but anything faster than 1333mhz would require overclocking on your motherboard, making it less stable - the juice isn't worth the squeeze in my opinion since you could corrupt your project files if it blue screens mid-edit.

It it were me, I would: get another set of the same memory kit, swap out your graphics card with a Nvidia 960, add a solid state drive. For the solid state drive, Samsung's 850 Evo is great bang for your buck - size will depend on how much space you use on your current system. I actually setup our designer's desktops with 3 drives: the operating system runs on a 250GB SSD, they have their Creative Cloud applications using another 250GB SSD for their scratch disk and I have a 1TB HDD for them to save their finished projects to. Incredibly fast, incredibly reliable without any stress.

I have a buddy that has a 1090T w/ 16GB of RAM running a Nvidia 680 and it has been running like a champ and he's still very happy with his day to day performance.

Bkgphoto · Aug 20, 2015

game junky :

Ok. Thanks for your reply. I just ordered the extra ram. I will also order the graphics card but I was wondering which one to get. Amazon and newegg both have a few variations. What would work best? I have another question. I just used the ASUS utility to OC. It raised speed by 16% to 3.7ghz if I added a better cup cooler would that help get a better OC speed? Currently using AMD 1090T Black edition. It came with a built in cooler, just wondering if an aftermarket cooler might work better if so which one? Thanks for all your help. This is what's available from Amazon

game junky · Aug 22, 2015

Yes, if you go with a higher performing air cooler or at decent water cooler, you could definitely increase that overclock fairly safely though with overclocking you will want to make sure you're monitoring your temperatures whenever you are doing CPU-intense tasks. There are plenty of good options - the statistics to look when comparing video cards from the same series are the core clock speed, the boost clock speed, the effective memory clock speed and the total amount of video memory. If it fits within your budget, this is the option I would take:

http://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-video-card-04gp43966kr

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Upgrade advice requested less than 500.00

Bkgphoto

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game junky

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Bkgphoto

Reputable

game junky

Distinguished

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