idea for a new rig

[mikee]

My cirrent rig is getting old but not slowing down at all for some reason. Still feels as fast as when i built it back in the xp/vista days. However I am starting to feel like it's time for an upgrade mainly because of gaming. I am not a hardcore gamer and having below average eyesight I cannot tell a significance between resolutions over 1280x720 in games and high vs very high, ultra high settings too much. However I think my hard drive is starting to wear out. It's still IDE and I think that is a bottleneck in games I play since i hear it grinding away trying to keep up in games like crysis 2, gta iv, fallout 3 etc. Not in minecraft though (not a very hdd intensive game)

ASUS M4A88T-M DiabloTek Barebones Kit - ASUS M4A88T-M Motherboard, AMD Phenom II X6 1045T, Patriot 4GB DDR3 RAM, Seagate 500GB HDD, Lite-On 24x DVDRW, DiabloTek Mid Tower Case, 450W Power Supply at TigerDirect.com

This is what I am thinking of getting. My friend bought this exact kit yesterday but with a nicer case and a geforce gt 520 and we put it together yesterday. It failed to start up for the first time though but when it doubt check to see if the mobo power light is on and check the front panel are hooked up right. They of course weren't because I cannot read the darn small writing on the board.

I am open to suggestions It has been so long since I have built anything for myself 6 years exactly when i built this computer

 

[lhuser]

If you want to upgrade to SATA, it'll help a bit, but the only times the HDD speed is mostly considered is with the loading time.

I don't think upgrading your PC would be the best choice because like you've mentioned, it doesn't feel slower at all and the fact that you're not a hardcore gamer, it would be useless IMO to spend on a new machine. If you really wanted, you could upgrade the CPU...

 

[mikee]

I can't put a quad in this rig I found out the motherboard only supports up to II think the core2duo e8300 or something that is still pretty old. One thing I should mention is that the computer takes almost 4 min to start up even after a fresh format which i thought would fix the problem. I'm thinking hard drive speed for that because that was still the case when it was completely fresh with no programs installed.

Edit:

Also I want to make sure I can play some future games like far cry 3 but I don't know the requirements for that game.

 

[lhuser]

Well, the requirements on FC3 tells me your system's fine as is even.
Have a look:
Far Cry 3 System Requirements and Far Cry 3 requirements for PC Games

I've forgotten about disk cache though. A drive that spins at 5400RPM and have a lower cache will definately have a slower transfer rate than a 7200RPM disk drive with higher cache.

 

[setishock]

I would suggest if you're wanting to upgrade your hard drive performance is to get a pci card that is a sata interface. That goes in a pci slot and the sata drives plug in to that.
If you're wanting to keep your current computer and save a few dollars in the process, that would be one cost affective route.
Stay away from SiiG. It's track record for failures is to me unacceptable.
Also Samsung makes some sata drives that I have used before. Long life and rugged to shocks. And very cost friendly.

 

[lhuser]

According to his build specs though, I do believe the board would have intergrated SATA though, and if I assumed right, he reused his old IDE HDD.

 

[mikee]

I have sata ports 4 of em i have one sata drive which is 1.5tb for my files and the old 120gb for windows which i benchmarked with hdtune and it gets a whooping 40 mb/s max speed the 1.5tb gets like 200 something. I'm suspecting that the drive I got in 2007 from a local shop to fix my old rig was not a new drive to begin with..

I guess my dilemma now is new rig or just a new hard drive. I can see what happened with my old rig happening to this one as well. I probably won't be building a new rig until summer because I have pretty much no time right now.

Another game I want to play in the future is GTA V when it comes out. These games are always demanding on computers and I don't see my computer now being powerful enough to run it. Unless of course they use the same exact engine with a different city or what ever

 

[lhuser]

New hard drive...it will have better seek times, better cache and if you want the most of it, go with a 7200RPM drive.

 

[mikee]

yeah I'm running out of space on this drive and have practically nothing installed so I think I may go with a 500gb hard drive when I get some money to spare. I just noticed my ram is maxed out too. I can't go any higher than 4gb ddr2 ram. When having only 4gb becomes sort of a burden maybe then it will be time for a new rig.

I have noticed over the past 5 years of this rig that game requirements haven't been going up in the way they have in years past. My old computer after having it for 5 years couldn't play hardly anything but this one can play everything still it seems.