Looking for advice on Upgrades

mjlewi072588

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Feb 24, 2011
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I have been fairly busy with school and work and what not since I built my system back in the summer of 09 and was wanting to make sure that my system can run some of the games of the coming years (i.e. SWTOR, Brink, etc). I realize that my graphics card is probably the main bottleneck along with my HDD.

My Specs:
Case: Cooler Master Centurion (Decent breath-ability, but only one fan)
HDD: Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 7200 RPM
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775
Video Card: Gigabyte GTX260 OC core 216 896MB
PSU: Rosewill 530W
RAM: 4GB G.Skill PI Black (2x2) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
CPU: Intel E8500 Stock 3.16 GHz

The Mobo only supports Crossfire and I am running an Nvidia card so that pretty much cuts out the option of just adding a second vid card (assuming my PSU could handle it). I guess I was thinking along the lines of getting a new CPU cooler and thermal paste and then OCing my CPU to around 4GHz or so and maybe adding some more RAM to take the total to 6 or 8 Gigs. Finally I have a 250 GB 2.5" Harddrive laying around, would it be worth it to get another and set up a RAID system? Again I am somewhat averse to spending a lot of money currently, but I also do not really have a set time frame as my computer currently handles anything I play right now flawlessly.

I hope I did not leave anything of importance out as this is my first post, but I will be happy to provide additional information if needed.

Thanks in advance,

Mike
 
Hello mjlewi072588;
You didn't leave anything out.

Adding extra RAM won't improve gaming performance. Extra RAM can't move forward into the next build.

You can't RAID HDDs of different speeds (7200/5400) as far as I know. Or maybe it would slow down the fast drive to match? Not a good option.
And if you could it would turn that 500GB into a 250GB.

This is tough one. I think you pinpointed the options that makes sense.
Anything you add to the system you want to be able to carry forward into the next build.

You could do that with a new CPU cooler (one that supports 775/1155/1155/AM3 sockets.

Same for a video card upgrade. Most of the better 1156 or 1155 boards give you the option of CrossfireX and SLI.

On the maybe/maybe not side of things: Adding a SSD for a OS boot/program drive would make the system respond faster, but not improve in game performance hardly at all.