4Gb of RAM or Radeon HD 6850 - Already decided :P

[Ydoow]

Which should I get?

From what I\'ve seen, my RAM usage never really gets far beyond 3Gb, however I have no idea how much page-filing is being used so I may have the need for more, but not realize it.

My gpu is getting old. Radeon 4670 1gb DDR3 ram. It\'s not bad, can handle the games I like decently, but it\'s age is starting to show; turning games down to medium/high.

I can barely afford to get both things, but I\'d much rather only buy one or the other. Obviously RAM would be much cheaper; $30-$40 vs. $140/$170 ($170 if I get 2gb version)

From what I\'ve seen, the Radeon 6850 is the most cost effective gpu out there right now.

So. What\'s your vote?

[Mojavi-Viper]

You can easily get ddr3 ram @ 8gb (1600) for $40 easily. So if you wanted just 4gb you can get the cheaper graphic card and 4gb of ram for the same price.

[Edit] I got my wife the 1gb (same card) and it plays games maxed out pretty good and she does some video editing stuff too and she claims it works like a champ.

[Ydoow]

Hm very true.

My thoughts for going with a 2Gb version is that I use two monitors and a bit of future proofing I suppose.

My reasons aren\'t strong for the 2Gb version, I\'ll be honest.

I\'ll consider a bit more on getting both. I\'m forgetting about a 7lb jar of change sitting on my desk that might make up for the cost to get my through to next payday comfortably

[Mojavi-Viper]

I can feel you how bad that 4670 is, I upgraded from the 4850 in Jan and I didn\'t realize how badly I needed to upgrade until afterwards. I think you might not realize how far graphics have come since 2008 until then, because I didn\'t, Haha. It will be night and day.

[Ydoow]

Well I just ordered 4Gb and the 1Gb Sapphire.

I really am expecting night and day. I\'ve never been one to 'need' 30-60 fps which is why I went with the 4670 in the first place.

It was $70 (black friday purchase) and played all my games at an acceptable level, I was never expecting absurd gaming out of it.

Now I\'m noticing it\'s really struggling in things like WoT and the dreaded VAB (although that\'s a killer in it\'s own right).

I\'m kinda excited for it to come in. This has always been my bottle-neck of my system. Next in line was the RAM.

I don\'t consider HDD\'s as bottle-necks since they\'re always slower and not really involved with gaming speed.

[Amram]

HD\'s can bottle neck you, but in different ways. they mostlty impact loading times. games that load sections of a map as needed for example might suffer frequent stuttering if the HD is too slow, or fragmented. It also holds you back with load times and initial startup times. But generally speaking, no, the HD is insignificant if any bottleneck.

Im a little late to the party it seems, but yeah, thats a good call. More ram is always usable. Beyond a given point it stops really showing any improvement, but what happens is that instead of having no more free ram and everything slowing to a crawl, you still have all that new ram to use. If you had less than 3gb of ram i\'d say te ram itself would make a huge difference. Since you made it pretty clear you have at least 3, and most likely 4, then yeah, more ram is useful, and has its perks, but its not the clearly evident increase you\'d be seeking.

You should see a pretty significant step up in the graphics card. More memory for the card is mostly useful at high resolutions, with antialiasing, and anistrophic filtering. two cards, otherwise identical, both play saw, WoW at minimum settings, and you will probably get near identical settings. Play something like Skyrim, or Shogun 2, max out the graphic settings and ensure that AA and AF are at 16x, and use a large resolution like 1920X1080, or larger, and I can guarantee you the 2gb card will get significantly higher frame rates.

Having gone from a 4670 to a 6850 is an enormous jump. from the low end of the budget line, to the low end of the mainstream line and 2 generations newer. i think you\'ll be pleased.

[Ydoow]

I always get nervous that I\'ll get a DOA piece of hardware.

I always feel like I\'m playing the lottery >.<

Ah I forgot to mention that I cleaned out my pc while checking which RAM I had.

Holy freakin dust.

I\'ve cleaned it out before and removed a lot of dust with canned air, but this time it\'s been about 4 weeks after my room was re-painted and everything got shifted around.

I wanted to wait about a month just like I did so the dust could really settle.

My god man.

I don\'t even know how my GPU fan was spinning. It was loaded with so many chunks it had to have been completely filled with dust.

CPU was moderately filled and the rest was fine for the most part.

But really...there had to have been about 5-10grams of dust inside my GPU. It was insane.

[Amram]

true enough. I sometimes wonder if most computers have an unstated design feature to keep your room clear of dust for longer by inhaling all of the dust themselves. Small heatsink/fan combos, like those on motherboards or graphics cards are especially good at it and CPU\'s aren\'t much if any worse.

I\'ve only ever owned a single system that didn\'t excel at collecting dust, and thats my current system. I attribute that entirely to a lack of fans within the case however. Its water cooled, so only the PSU and radiator have fans for a total of 3 120mm fans, thats it. Every other system I have ever owned has made it apparent that canned air, or strong lungs are necessary.

I wouldn\'t stress too much over DoA parts. Most places have really good RMA processes for such parts, so its typically fairly painless and reasonably quick to get things dealt with. When i dealt with Koolance they sent out my replacement pump by overnight air, i had it before the end of the next day after i mentioned it, not 48 hours from initial delivery to replacement delivery, and had a month to get the dead part back to them.

I still visit stores for parts, but only if they price match now, or legitimately hold the lowest price, if not its online all the way. I\'ve had no more problems with that route(other than the obvious delays that shipping brings) than with buying the parts in a store.

[Ydoow]

Well the parts should arrive in the next half hour.

UPS tracked says it was out for delivery since 6am this morning, and I know the UPS trucks head home for the day at 6pm (5:30pm now).

I actually live down the street from the UPS HQ, so I\'m guessing they decided my house would be the last stop before quitting time.

At least that\'s what I really, really, really, hope. Better not have missed me...

Edit: Me Gusta.

[Amram]

I take it they didn\'t arrive today

[Ydoow]

They did at 6:04 pm; I was his last stop before return to HQ.

Everything is working, frame rates on maxed settings are higher than they were on med/high

I just need an SSD now to make my bootup faster, it\'s really crawling now - even after defrags and cleaning up the startup programs

But that\'s for another day. I\'m very very happy with how things are playing now. Very incredible difference

Sounds like my rear-exhaust fan is noisy though. I\'m betting it\'s just collected dust on the inside of the fan that needs a true deep cleaning.

But if not, any advice? I\'ve got some cleaning oil from a electric shaving kit I could use to lube it up. I\'m not sure if trying to do this might burn something out though.

[Mojavi-Viper]

They did at 6:04 pm; I was his last stop before return to HQ.

Everything is working, frame rates on maxed settings are higher than they were on med/high

I just need an SSD now to make my bootup faster, it\'s really crawling now - even after defrags and cleaning up the startup programs

But that\'s for another day. I\'m very very happy with how things are playing now. Very incredible difference

Sounds like my rear-exhaust fan is noisy though. I\'m betting it\'s just collected dust on the inside of the fan that needs a true deep cleaning.

But if not, any advice? I\'ve got some cleaning oil from a electric shaving kit I could use to lube it up. I\'m not sure if trying to do this might burn something out though.

I was going to get a SSD but I am going to wait thanks to the new technology that will basically make SSD\'s obsolete.

[Awaras]

I was going to get a SSD but I am going to wait thanks to the new technology that will basically make SSD\'s obsolete.

You realize that it will take at least 5-10 years for this to become commercially available?

[Mojavi-Viper]

You realize that it will take at least 5-10 years for this to become commercially available?

I am not sure where you got your info at, but I think its a LOT closer than you realize.

[Awaras]

I am not sure where you got your info at, but I think its a LOT closer than you realize.

If that\'s true, great. I saw this article:

http://www.gizmag.com/seagate-hamr-hard-drive-technology/21880/

Seagate says its first HAMR hard drives will be introduced later this decade, with drives offering up to 60 TB likely to appear in the following ten years.

[Ydoow]

The technology seems cool. And sounds like it\'s much more capable of keeping up with Intels Photon data transport system thingy mabob I heard about a while ago.

I think it moved 56 Petabytes in 24 hours or something.

[Amram]

I just need an SSD. But that\'s for another day. I\'m very very happy with how things are playing now. Very incredible difference

Sounds like my rear-exhaust fan is noisy though. ...But if not, any advice?

i figured you\'d see a significant and worthy improvement from those.

well, there\'s any number of reasons for the fan noise, it could also be that its internal bearings are shot and its number is up. not much you can do if thats the case. i assume its a 120mm fan on the back. At the very high end of things for silent you can get a Noctua NF-P12. Damn near impossible to hear at more than 2ft away(or outside the case), and push a good amount of air while they are at it.

I use a pair of them on my radiator, and my PSU is far louder than they(both combined) are, and I picked a near silent PSU that hardly ever breaks a sweat(the fan rarely ever does more than idle on it). its night and day from the basic 120mm fans Thermaltake had in this case when i bought it.

Seriously, for $25, they are worth it imo. You can push more air, or you can get quieter, but good luck getting this much air pushed, and being quieter.

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/printpage/Anatomy-of-Computer-Fans/1039 that might be a good read if your debating tearing apart your fan to get at and lube up its bearing(s)

And yes, you will wonder how you ever used a computer without one the day you get an SSD. Its insane the difference they make. I STILL have under 12 second boot times, and I have to wait longer than most while the raid array initialises. If not for that, I would still be sub 10 seconds, and this is over a year after the initial install. I thought about it, put it off a few times, almost didn\'t get one, and knowing what i know now, i feel like an idiot for having waited so long. its not the end of the world to not have one for gaming, they don\'t make that huge a difference there.

It mostly reduces load times(which for games that load when needed while in game, it can eliminate potential stuttering....ARMA 2, im looking at you!). The single biggest difference though will be in general computing, you will literally NEVER wait for your computer to do anything involving its OS drive ever again. no more waiting for the sleeping HD to spin up. no more 1/4 second but noticable delays to the start menu opening. no more drives becoming fragmented and bloated and making the OS crawl. Probably the single best upgrade I ever made.

There is a pretty wide margin between a good SSD, and a crappy one though, so do take some care to read around before choosing.

[Ydoow]

Hm.

I wonder if I could take out the SSD from the Cr48 and plug her into my Desktop Mobo...

time to research

Yeah my only reluctance on SSD\'s is the price per storage unit. I really shouldn\'t be spending much since i\'m in college anyhow

I\'ll check up on that fan. I\'m gonna gold off on buying a new one unless it really comes down to bearings. It\'s not noisy enough to make me think bearings though.

Honestly, it could just be running faster than usual. It\'s been very hot/humid since the day I installed the new GPU; the day I noticed it was louder than usual.

Edit: SSD in Cr48 uses m-SATA, so I\'d need a m-SATA -> SATA adapter nominally to make it work.

http://www.zdnet.com/photos/google-cr-48-chrome-notebook-teardown/491340?seq=34&tag=photo-frame;get-photo-roto

For Cr48 SSD info

I\'m actually getting mixed results between SATA and mSATA

Seems to be a SATA connector, got final results.

[Mojavi-Viper]

If that\'s true, great. I saw this article:

http://www.gizmag.com/seagate-hamr-hard-drive-technology/21880/

I guess I stand corrected.

[Amram]

Yeah my only reluctance on SSD\'s is the price per storage unit. I really shouldn\'t be spending much since i\'m in college anyhow

well, in all fairness, no-one in their right mind buys the SSD for its storage space. For that you pair it up with a secondary drive, such as the one your currently using. Use the slower standard drive for mundane tasks like holding your movies, music, and other large things you just keep on hand on your drives

games and programs that you want to benefit from the SSD should be installed to the SSD, and its strengths will shine through clearly. I\'ve done ok with a 160gb main OS drive SSD, and 2TB of storage in the system. I don\'t actually ~need~ any more than that, although I do have over 10TB between all the externals and the internals.......lol, but thats the point. Externals, and additional drives can satisfy your needs for space, the SSD is there to speed up the majority of what your system will do.

[Masochist]

Just ordered parts for a new computer myself...trying my first SSD for my boot/games disk and eager to see the differences...sadly I have to wait til Monday because UPS wont ship to me on the weekends and its due to show up Saturday (aka it will sit about 50ish miles away from me for a whole weekend...taunting me lol)

[Amram]

Just ordered parts for a new computer myself...trying my first SSD for my boot/games disk and eager to see the differences...sadly I have to wait til Monday because UPS wont ship to me on the weekends and its due to show up Saturday (aka it will sit about 50ish miles away from me for a whole weekend...taunting me lol)

I have always wished they allowed recipients to come and retrieve their packages in such cases. So many times I have been taunted. I\'ve had it in the same city as me, but miss its outbound leg before end of the day, and wait over a long weekend, drove me bonkers knowing I could walk there if so inclined, a little far, but doable.

[Masochist]

lol yeah I thought it over and realized its going to be in the same city most likely...within 10 miles of me.