Hi, I am looking for some advice on what are my best options in terms of upgrades or improvements.
My PC is an HTPC build for gaming and emulation. It is connected up directly to my Sony 1080p TV and Home theatre system and is used exclusively from the couch.
As mentioned the main use is for emulation and gaming, I have a fairly large and mixed Steam library, but basically I like to play modern third and first person games @1080p/60FPS and maximum graphics settings. The current rig still plays most things pretty well getting 60FPS in most games, but struggles a little in some instances. The other main issue I have is that the 7950 is very noisy, hot and seems to dump a lot of heat in the case. The case is pretty tightly packed in my TV stand, maybe ½” either side a couple of cm at the top, but free at the back. I have the cooling set up with three 120mm Noctuas pulling in air at the sides and the 2 80mm’s dumping it out of the back.
Surprisingly beyond the 7950 getting pretty hot and noisy, I don’t really have any cooling issues, CPU temps and general system temps are solid.
Current Rig
CPU: Core i5 3570K
M/board: Asus p8z77-M Pro
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Red Low Profile 8GB DDR3 1866 MHz
Case: Silverstone GD05B HTPC Case
Cooler: Noctua NH-L12
PSU: Silverston Bronze Strider Plus 600 Watt Modular ATX Power Supply
Sytem Drive: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB
Data/Game Drive: Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001 7200rpm
GPU: 3GB XFX HD7950DD Edition
Case Fans: 3 x Noctua NF-P12 120mm/2 x Noctua NF-A8 PWM
As the build is now over 2 years old, I am looking at a bit of an upgrade/spring clean and looking for any advice.
My thoughts are replacing the 7950 with a GTX970 (ideally I want to go Nvidia for streaming to my shield tablet), I am thinking that I probably want a blower design as this should help dump more heat out of the box. The case will fit up to 11” card, though is limited in height (basically anything which comes above the PCIe slot is too high. I have been looking at the OcUK “reference GTX970”, I think this looks good, seems to perform well and pretty quietly and is a blower design. The other option might be the Asus DirectCU Mini as this may give more room in my case for airflow?
My other thoughts are to get a 250GB SDD (probably looking at Samsung 850Evo) to use as a “games” drive. I tend to “game” off the Seagate mechanical drive and performance is pretty damned good, but I think moving some games to SSD would still give a boost.
Final consideration is a backup drive (thinking about this one, I think that maybe going for an external USB3 drive might be a good idea) I plan at the moment to only use this as a direct backup, though a little extra storage of a 4TB could be useful. Not sure that having 2 * 3.5” mechanical drives in such a small case will help with heat and noise…
Any other thoughts or do these sound like the most sensible upgrades? My budget is a max of £500, goal is as above to be able to game through TV @1080p with as much performance and as little noise as possible.
Cheers
My PC is an HTPC build for gaming and emulation. It is connected up directly to my Sony 1080p TV and Home theatre system and is used exclusively from the couch.
As mentioned the main use is for emulation and gaming, I have a fairly large and mixed Steam library, but basically I like to play modern third and first person games @1080p/60FPS and maximum graphics settings. The current rig still plays most things pretty well getting 60FPS in most games, but struggles a little in some instances. The other main issue I have is that the 7950 is very noisy, hot and seems to dump a lot of heat in the case. The case is pretty tightly packed in my TV stand, maybe ½” either side a couple of cm at the top, but free at the back. I have the cooling set up with three 120mm Noctuas pulling in air at the sides and the 2 80mm’s dumping it out of the back.
Surprisingly beyond the 7950 getting pretty hot and noisy, I don’t really have any cooling issues, CPU temps and general system temps are solid.
Current Rig
CPU: Core i5 3570K
M/board: Asus p8z77-M Pro
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Red Low Profile 8GB DDR3 1866 MHz
Case: Silverstone GD05B HTPC Case
Cooler: Noctua NH-L12
PSU: Silverston Bronze Strider Plus 600 Watt Modular ATX Power Supply
Sytem Drive: OCZ Vertex 4 128GB
Data/Game Drive: Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001 7200rpm
GPU: 3GB XFX HD7950DD Edition
Case Fans: 3 x Noctua NF-P12 120mm/2 x Noctua NF-A8 PWM
As the build is now over 2 years old, I am looking at a bit of an upgrade/spring clean and looking for any advice.
My thoughts are replacing the 7950 with a GTX970 (ideally I want to go Nvidia for streaming to my shield tablet), I am thinking that I probably want a blower design as this should help dump more heat out of the box. The case will fit up to 11” card, though is limited in height (basically anything which comes above the PCIe slot is too high. I have been looking at the OcUK “reference GTX970”, I think this looks good, seems to perform well and pretty quietly and is a blower design. The other option might be the Asus DirectCU Mini as this may give more room in my case for airflow?
My other thoughts are to get a 250GB SDD (probably looking at Samsung 850Evo) to use as a “games” drive. I tend to “game” off the Seagate mechanical drive and performance is pretty damned good, but I think moving some games to SSD would still give a boost.
Final consideration is a backup drive (thinking about this one, I think that maybe going for an external USB3 drive might be a good idea) I plan at the moment to only use this as a direct backup, though a little extra storage of a 4TB could be useful. Not sure that having 2 * 3.5” mechanical drives in such a small case will help with heat and noise…
Any other thoughts or do these sound like the most sensible upgrades? My budget is a max of £500, goal is as above to be able to game through TV @1080p with as much performance and as little noise as possible.
Cheers
