Upgarding motherboard, HDD, Graphics.

[thepowerbehindthescenes]

Hi. I wanted to buy this motherboard & I wanted to install two gtx 550 ti fermi video cards into it because I have one so far and looking to buy another. The current motherboard that I do have is a Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 socket 1155 with a core i5 Ivy Bridge 3750k at stock speed of 3.4GHz. I've thought about buying a Sapphire Radeon 7770 or 7850 but I really don't because I have this EVGA card and it works really well as far as I know. I mean, it handles my games pretty well like Diablo 3, Battlefield 3, Resident Evil 5, Torchlight 1 and 2, etc. but, sometimes there is lag and some choppieness and I want to smooth things out and jsut have better performance. I know I might have to upgrade my PSU since it is 700 watt OCZ StealthXstream 2 since there will be two cards and they haul alot of power. I have two blu ray burners, 1 TB HDD Seagate and a 500GB HDD Seagate, 16 GB of GSkill RipJaws at 1600MHz, the CoolerMaster 212+ with two fans on each end of the cooler and windows 7 ultimate 64 bit retail. I need advice on what I should do. Should I just leave my rig the way it is or make the upgrades? I also wanted to upgrade my HDD to a 3 TB Seagate instead of having two separate HDDs. My current Seagate HDD was giving me inconsistency issues for sometime now and it was also not staring up right away or booting right away. It would take awhile and I think it is time to buy a new one because I am afraid it will die unexpectedly on me. It is 3 years old and counting. I have good airflow as my machine is right by the window and I let cold air in to keep things at room temps. It is actually below the window. Any help is appreciated as well as advice too. I don't want to go out and buy anything without any advice. I think this motherboard is good - The MSI P67A-GD80 (B3) LGA 1155. It's on Newegg.

 

[popatim]

You dont make alot of sense.
You have a z68 motherbd with an ivy cpu and want to downgrade to a p67?
You have 2 seagate hdd but dont tell us which is having problems.
Half your system specs are at the beginning and the other half in the middle after a bunch of rambling...
Are you ADD? I dont mean to be mean but you remind me of my ADD granddaughter.

In the future you might want to orginize yourself so you get some responses.
Heres what I have, Heres what I want to do, What do you think?
or Heres what I have, This is my problem, Can you help solve it?

in the meantime. Backup important data and then Replace the failing hdd with a 128gb ssd. I personally recommend the samsung 830's or patriot pyro's. Niether have failed me yet.
Install windows to the ssd without the other (good) drive being connected.
once windows is installed connect the good hdd. You can format it if you wish or just delete the old folders. (you should already have backups of what you deemed important) Now move your swap file to it. (it being the HDD) Move all your documents, pics, videos ... libraries to it then tell windows 7 to default to using them on the hdd automatically and not to use them on the ssd. Now install the games you want performance from to the ssd and the games, apps, & programs where it dont matter so much to the hdd.

Now play your games. If the 550 still isnt cutting it then a 7850 is better than two 550's but some 'lag' cant be avoided, like internet lag...

ps - 128gb is plenty big; windows will be under 30gb leaving you well over 80gb just for a few games. Enjoy.

 

[thepowerbehindthescenes]

Best answer selected by thepowerbehindthescenes.