EVE General Discussion

Hi Guys/Girls,

I really dont have much money at the moment with having a little baby girl/getting married and moving house all in the space of a few months. So was wondering what I could possibly buy cheaply to upgrade my system. Im rubbish with Pc's

Vista Home Premium (SP2)
Intel 2 Quad Core Q6600 @2.40GHz
RAM - 4GB
32-Bit OS

According to the Performance Test I get around 5.5, which is probably bad but to be honest the PC is a few years old and Life at the moment aint giving me much luck on the Money side ; )

Any help would be gratefully apprieciated,

Torsk

Processor - 5.9
RAM 5.5
Graphics 5.9
Gaming Graphics 5.9
Primary Hard Disk 5.7

It's not like I had a choice at the time mate..

I upgrade my PC's every few years and I've never done it on a tight budget. Nothing against bargain hunters but my PC is something I never skimp on.

You're in a bit of a pinch there as upgrading your current platform is going to require some cash. Here's what I see and take it with a pinch of salt due to the aforementioned:

You need a 64 bit OS to easily surpass the 4GB RAM limit
I love and wouldn't settle for anything but a cpu from the core i7 processor family
I love my nvidia GTX 580 graphics card but I think they're still not cheap (bought mine 5 months ago for $500)

The only areas I go cheap for my rigs are CD/DVD drives, mouse and keyboard (i upgrade those later with christmas presents etc.) and the PC's case.

Get an NVidia graphics card around 100-150 $/€/£ is my advice.

You don't need a newer cpu for Eve - not if you buy NVidia for the PhysX part of Eve. Edit - and probably not even then as its all to do with character models (Incarna).

I have a lappy that has the same (mobile) cpu in it and a couple of NVidia cards - its fine for dual boxing and probably triple boxing if you have that many monitors. Another lappy with an i7 in it and dual AMD cards needs cpu much more - PhysX offloads calculations to graphics card which is much faster.

You don't need more RAM.

You could do with going to Windows 7 - Vista is too annoying for words but if you can't then you can't.

tl;dr buy a newer gfx card around the 100-150 $/€/£ region. Buy NVidia if Eve is your main game, probably AMD if it isn't although I don't much care either way these days. Much of a muchness unless games support (and use) PhysX.

A new GPU is prolly your best option for upgrading on the cheap since games mostly utilize GPU these days. You have enough ram to run 2 clients with low settings and not take hits on system performance by the system utilizing the page file more than usual. Make sure all the vista eye candy is turned off and you keep at a minimum programs running in the background. Also, turn off indexing on your hard drives if you haven't already. Dunno how Vista handles indexing but in XP it was a big performance hit.

Also, another thing you can do in absence of "upgrading" is to do a fresh install of your system. If it's been a few years things tend to build up, registries grow, errors creep up. A fresh install most always makes old hardware seem faster because all the garbage that's grown over the years on your system that the OS loads into memory or accesses frequently is eliminated.

You don't mention what graphics card you are running. This most likely is what you want to upgrade if you want extra performance for games.

Some other things that might be worth considering.

Buy more RAM. You won't be able to address higher than 6.7 gigs (I think is the number) on a 32 bit OS but 2.7 extra gig is still 2.7 extra gig.

If you do buy more RAM you may consider a 64 bit OS to take advatnge of the extra overhead.

Consider drive speed- SSD's, high speed drives and RAID setups could all be consdierd

SSD- low size but very fast

HSD- medium size medium speed

RAID - large size, usually faster than HSD but a more expensive option, you may also need someone to configure your system for you.

Things its probably not worth considerdering.

MOBO

CPU- proviso if you feel the need for extra processing power, a cheap option can be to invest in extra cooling (CPU air fans or a water cooling system) , this would allow you to OC your CPU and would be cheaper than a whole new CPU and possibly MOBO depending on your 'socket'.

SLI- proviso, mostly pound fo pound 1 highspec card outperforms 2 mid spec cards for the same outlay, making it very much a rich mans toy (you need to be able to afford 2 highspec cards for it to be worthwhile). If however you already have a SLI enabled MOBO and a fairly decent Graphics card (as I say you don't mention one) then you might get a cheap and cheerful boost by adding another similar card.

Hope this helps.

Oh and the windows performance test is garbage. Gaming benchmarks such as the Unigine Heaven and 3DMark Vantage will give you a much better idea of your system's gaming performance. It will also help you identify the biggest bottlenecks and prioritize the best parts to upgrade.

MOBO yes, case/PSU meh they come and go.

^^ Excellent comments from above poster. The 'net is full of people that tell you what they think you should buy, not what you actually need.



The performance test always quotes the lowest as your performance, but you don't need more than 4 GB of RAM for most things, so this method is flawed.

You have an excellent CPU, even though it is old.
You have more RAM than you will need in normal use.
Your hard disk is the same speed as mine and will only effect load speeds. Plus, it's bad time to buy a hard disk.
Your graphics looks good enough for normal game play, but this is the area you could improve if you bought an older, higher specification graphics card off Ebay. ATI 5870, for example.

That setup is fine for Eve and most other things, except the latest 3D games. Vista may have been a dog when it first came out, but its close enough to Windows 7 for most users that paying to upgrade needs a good reason if you care about the cost.

If you are short of cash there is no point upgrading 'for the sake of it', which is what you seem to imply. I'd like to upgrade my 7 year old Ford Focus that has140,000 miles on the clock for a brand new BMW, but I can't afford one and don't need one, so I won't.

One of the best ways to make an old PC faster is to get the registry cleaned up and remove all the clutter that starts with the PC. Alternatively, if you have a problem with your PC, get the problem fixed.

Finally, one of the easiest ways to speed up a Windows PC after a few years is to do a clean install of the operating system.

Well I'll start by making enemies and defending vista. I like it so much that I've had it installed on 3 of my systems, replacing xp with it on one and windows 7 on the the other. Ok, now that I have no viability left I'll give you my thoughts on what you could do.

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Vista Home Premium (SP2) - As I said earlier vista is what i use, people will lambast you for it but it works absolutely fine, if possible try to upgrade to 64bit as this (probably around £70 or the equivalent in other currency). If this is unfavouvourable for you, 32 bit will still be fine.
Intel 2 Quad Core Q6600 @2.40GHz - What I'm running on one of my systems, absolutely fine.
RAM - 4GB - Once again no problems here
32-Bit OS - see above

-Beyond this graphics card wise ati will give you better value for money, consider an HD5770 HD5750 or HD5850. All good cards under £150 so they won't break the bank.

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Above suggestions would effectively give you exact same spec as my uni pc, might sound like a shameless 'copy me' plea but to be honest it's cheap, effective and as I use it myself I can guarantee it will cover you for pretty much anything you might want it for (outside of enormous fleet battles or modding the bejesus out of crysis).