xdaniel Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 I finally had the chance to replace the aging core of my desktop PC (thanks to saving money and an Amazon gift card) and I am now waiting for the components in question to arrive at my doorstep. In detail, the new heart of this beast will be... AMD Athlon II X2 250 ("Regor", 2x 3 GHz, Socket AM3) Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 mainboard (Socket AM3/AM3+, 4 DDR3 RAM slots, USB 3.0, etc.) 8 GB DDR3-RAM (2x 4 GB, PC1333) Okay, that's still pretty low-end I guess - kinda befitting my Radeon HD 5450 512 MB - but at least still provides a bit of an upgrade path, unlike my existing, ancient AM2-based Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (first introduced 7 or so years ago) on its ECS GeForce7050M-M (not too much younger). Besides a new HDD for the OS, I think the next thing to upgrade will be the graphics card, although we'll see how important that's really gonna be once the new CPU & co. are here, and once played some games and emulators on that. Hoping for a few games on Dolphin to become playable, at least 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haddockd Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 What is your budget xDan? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xdaniel Posted March 29, 2013 Author Share Posted March 29, 2013 For HDD and graphics card? I don't really have much of an income to speak of, so I guess it's whatever I can save up for them. I'm thinking around 70€ (90 USD, 60 GBP) for each, one after the other. You can get certain 1TB HDDs here for around that, like my existing Samsung HD103SJ... not sure about the graphics card, tho, I haven't really been "up-to-date" about them in years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haddockd Posted March 29, 2013 Share Posted March 29, 2013 ATI HD 7750 is around $90 - $100 USD and would be a solid upgrade from your 5450. I plan on upgrading once the 8000 series comes around (assuming the wife will let me spend the money ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xdaniel Posted March 31, 2013 Author Share Posted March 31, 2013 (edited) Hm, Amazon.de has ex. a Sapphire HD 7750 with 1 GB GDDR5 RAM for 88€, while similar ones - other brands, other/less memory - can be had for 80€ and up, too... Yeah, I guess I'll make one of those the next upgrade purchase, or the one after that Also, CPU, mainboard and RAM did arrive here some... eleven hours ago, and I installed them ten hours ago. And the next six hours after that I spent playing Minecraft FTB online (via Hamachi) with a good friend Gotta say, that did make a nice "stress and performance test" - the game ran at a smooth 60 FPS when it wasn't loading chunks, where it dropped to still very playable ~35-45 FPS. That's a far cry from being told to "look to the ground, look to the ground!!" when my friend was fighting mobs and the performance dropped like hell, because I'm also running the server I also tried out a few GCN games via Dolphin, and it really does seem like the graphics card is the one thing keeping FPS down. Only did some very brief tests, but during those Wind Waker ran at full speed (at original, native rendering resolution) on Outset Island - was like 25% speed previously, if not less - and Metroid Prime's demo ran at ~75% outside the Orpheon (lots of geometry). F-Zero GX was usually around 50-75% speed, too, but dropped dramatically on the vehicle select screen and got to 100% when it wasn't rendering much, like when stopping in that... overhead U-turn thingy shortly before the start/finish on Mute City. All in all, I'm already very pleased with what I got! Will try some PC games - ex. Saints Row The Third, Crysis 1, Portal 2, Sonic Generations demo version - later on EDIT: A quick followup: I've since tried some of my PC games, namely the Sonic Generations demo, Saints Row 3rd and Crysis, all of which don't seem to run much faster. I think the FPS are a bit more stable, but the limiting factor really does seem to be the old HD 5450. On the plus side, video decoding has also seen a speed boost with the new hardware, with certain anime fansubs (720p, MKV container, etc.) now correctly rendering even heavily styled and animated subtitles. Before, animated subtitles (meaning ex. karaoke) couldn't be bothered to actually animate, while those with a lot of styling just made all subtitles disappear for as long as they were on screen - there's none of that anymore, after a tiny bit of reconfiguration, namely reenabling stuff I disabled to prevent things from stuttering or going out of sync before. Also note that Minecraft had that smooth performance I mentioned with render distance set to far, while previously it struggled a lot even on normal. Edited March 31, 2013 by xdaniel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts