The upgrade from a GTS 250 to a GTX 550 Ti is not worth it. I'm not saying the GTX 550 Ti is a bad card, but from a GTS 250 the difference isn't big enough to warrant the cost. A RAM upgrade is also not necessary for most games either. Battlefield 3 might see an improvement, but by and large most games should run just fine with 3GB of RAM.
[QUOTE="whitey_rolls"] Unlikely going to be a problem (the PCI-E 2.0) while running a single card, only in multi gpu setups In five or six years? Five or six years ago the 8800GTX was the most powerful card on the market. In another five or six years there will be $100 cards on the market that make the HD 7970 or GTX 680 look positively frumpy.
Going off early reviews Ivy Bridge is nothing to get excited about. And damn, I can't see temps getting any better, than the ES chips that have been tested.C_Rule
IB might not be all that much to get excited about, but Panther Point is definitely worth waiting for. PCI-e 3.0 might not seem like a big deal right now, but if this guy's still running a Q6600, he's probably not the type to ditch a platform every tock cycle. Maybe two or three GPU upgrades (say five or six years) down the line he'll probably be thankful for the extra bandwidth provided.
If you're new to overclocking, don't touch any voltages. A bad overclock you can revert to stock settings from. Too much voltage is the only thing these days that can actually destroy your hardware. Overclocking these days is simple as hell. Most of it is easily accomplished just by raising the processor multiplier to get to the level you want to be at. No messing around with RAM ratios locking PCI-e clocks, or any of that stuff. It's all straightforward and rather easy. I'd do an 8-hour minimum burn-in on your overclock using a utility like Prime95 to ensure stability. A target speed of around 3.6GHz (x18 multi) should be doable on stock volts just to give you something of a goal.
For that I will direct you to Anandtech's power draw section of their HD 7750 review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5541/amd-radeon-hd-7750-radeon-hd-7770-ghz-edition-review/23 As you can see that even on their test bed system which consisted of a very power-hungry Core i7 3690X, X79 chipset, 8GB of RAM and a single SSD (which is only about 5w less power use in a best-case scenario) the power use was only about 215w in a game like Metro 2033, which is considerably more stressful than most games. On a system like yours in a less demanding game I doubt you'll see power use go over 200w.
Dont get testy about it..... you only bring up cleaning and clean looking cabling as the only good point of having a fully modular psu when the fact remains that you can make a fully non modular psu look good also let alone a partially modular one clean it without issue.
04dcarraher
Let's follow what exactly happened here then:
You say something is useless. I explain why it's not.
You say that YOU don't care about that therefore it's still useless without even addressing the issue.
I have to assume you're being obstinate on purpose simply because you (and many others here on these forums) hate being wrong. I'm not going to bother explaining myself again, but I do wish you'd re-think how much help you're really providing people here if "proving" your opinions right is more important than being correct.
[QUOTE="04dcarraher"] So wrong if you use compressed air correctly you dont have to do a crap load of work You don't have to clean your case at all really. You do it for pride in a clean machine, and if you do a bit of work on the side building machines it helps to have a pristine rig to help build confidence in a potential customer. Some people go further than others. I know guys that make me look like a complete slob and there are others out there that make me look like I'm absurdly overkill. The bottom line is that what YOU personally feel is clean enough isn't a universal standard. Just because YOU cannot fathom why something might be important to someone else doesn't mean it's not important. I clearly and (initially) concisely explained why a fully modular power supply has benefits over a partially modular or non-modular unit. If that doesn't sit well with YOU, then I don't know what to tell you.
[QUOTE="Elann2008"] What do you use to clean your PC, Rayvin? How do you clean it? Just curious. I really need to clean my PC. I saw those specially made vaccuum cleaner sets for gaming PC's. The company makes them especially for them. Are they any good? I'm talking about these. Thank you in advance. I just use compressed air. I'll usually start by removing all the fans in the case and really cleaning them out about once a month. I'd like to do the power supply the same way, but since my HX520 is only partially modular I usually just hit it while it's inside the case, and only take it out to give it a really good cleaning once every four months or so. Once a year I'll really get down and dirty. I remove all my dust filters and wash them, re-apply thermal compound to the CPU, chipset, and GPU, pop all the keys off my keyboard clean that out, wash my mousepad, wipe off the monitor and essentially take my case apart to get all the dust out of every nook and cranny. I don't like those vacuum kits really, though I have considered a blower like the Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac. Even buying compressed air in bulk at Costco I'll probably save money if I get one of those even if it only lasts for one year.
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