2 PCs. Time to start upgrading one or both.

HeSaveDave

HeSaveDave

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Okay I got my PC's stats all set in here. Where should I start upgrading? Which video card setup is better? Should I move any part to the other PC?
I want one of these to be my gaming PC. So, if I need to move parts from one to another and start upgrading that one first then that is fine. I want to get the most out of one of them for gaming. Any suggestions are appreciated.

PC 1
ASUS P6X58D Premium LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
2 x ATI Radeon HD5870 Crossfired
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX950 (CMPSU-950TX) 950W Power Supply

PC 2
ASUS P6X58D Premium LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz
G.SKILL PI Series 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL7T-6GBPI
EVGA 01G-P3-1373-AR GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) Superclocked EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 Video Card
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
KINGWIN Lazer LZ-1000 1000W Modular Power Supply
 
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Futuremark has a bunch of benchmarking programs that you can run on your computer and will give you a score you can compare to others.
 
Okay I got my stats. Where should I start my upgrades? SSD? How big of an SSD would I need for my gaming PC? More memory?

I want one of these to be my gaming PC. So, if I need to move parts from one to another and start upgrading that one first then that is fine. I want to get the most out of one of them for gaming. Any suggestions are appreciated.
 
SSD is the least of your bottleneck concerns in PC gaming. i7's are awesome, I have a 920 myself but for gaming it's overkill. I use it to render videos lightning fast, so for gaming it's just icing. Find a nice i5 for ~$200 (might even be $175 now?) and you'll be set on CPU. Just find a nice matching mobo to seat it and that's step 2. Can't speak for video cards right now because I haven't looked at them in a year. With all the driver issues I've heard of late for nVidia, I'd stick to ATI since they were (are?) the leader in FPS:$ this gen. Don't crossfire; put the money into a single card solution to keep PSU watts down (not really the reason, but it's my personal preference). 6 gigs of RAM is the sweet spot right now and you're done.
 
Sorry I didn't explain very well I guess. The specs above are PCs that I actually own right now. I'n looking to beef one of them up to the best gaming PC I can.
 
[quote name='Jodou']Well by default PC1 is the better choice. No real need to reconfigure a thing.[/QUOTE]

So, should I start with an SSD with PC1 or more memory?
 
[quote name='HeSaveDave']So, should I start with an SSD with PC1 or more memory?[/QUOTE]
SSDs won't really give you a lot of performance in games, as games really aren't HDD intensive. An SSD would give you a lower boot time and possibly lower loading times between levels, but it won't affect game performance too much.

As for the memory... 6GB is plenty for gaming.

The only thing I'd do with those rigs is switch the procs so that PC1 has the faster CPU.
 
Yeah, looking at both rigs, about the only thing you need to do is to switch the processors. The crossfired 5870's should be more then enough to run practically anything you can throw at it.
 
u should also start ocing and make sure your ram timings are right
see if you can run it stable at about 3.7g's, i wouldnt go up much from there tho because it's going to be a pain in the ass to stabilize and it'll probably raise your power bill b y another 50$ hehe.

btw i run a 920 too. i got a 295 card. guess it might be time for me to upgrade that vid card soon so i can get some dx 11 support =p
 
do you have a bolt through cooler on the cpu's? if so it might not be worth the effort to switch them. if you have an aftermarket cooler already, overclocking will close the gap between them fairly well that swapping the cpu's isn't really going to help that much. might want to get a 2nd 460 for pc2 to even them out, after that a 120gb or so SSD is probably the only upgrade you need. By the time you would need more RAM (unless doing video/graphics editing work) it would probably be in 2 or 3 years and you would want to move onto a different platform anyways
 
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