Thursday, November 11, 2010

Time for a computer update!


So, over the past year, the computer has gone through some changes and I thought it might be time to note them.

Cooler master Hyper 212+
Asus PCIE TV Tuner card
OCZ Agility 2 SSD
XFX 6850

I did not add all the parts at once. I have been slowly installing them as needed. The CPU fan was added first. My old 4890 blew hot air out the back but the new GPU blows inside the case. I did not intentionally plan to pull hot air upward. Yes, my CPU temps did go up some but a few degrees is nothing to worry over.

Currently the CPU is clocked between 3.5ghz and 3.6ghz
basically it runs them same load as a stock phenom II 945 while only using 3 cores.

It's hard to see, but there is a tiny Asus TV tuner card right under the XFX 6850. The tuner card has been great for me but many other people have had issues with theirs. Maybe Asus should do a little more R&D in this field.

OCZ Agility 2 SSD is used as my windows boot drive. I still have some other drives inside as well for storage and videos. Honestly, people claim an SSD is amazing but it was not any sort of life changer for me. I bought the SSD to run windows and Final Fantasy XIV. The prices are great right now so if you can afford one it's fine to get one. But if you are on a budget, it's definitely not any sort of deal breaker.

I bought the XFX 6850 to give me a little FPS boost in FFXIV. sadly, that game is so horribly coded I still can't run with ambient occlusion and depth of field on with MSAAx2 at a high resolution and get a respectable frame rate. I overclocked the card a bit but it still falls way too short.

in my opinion FFXIV is the new Crysis. need to test a GPU? Throw FFXIV at it and you are guaranteed to get bad frame rates regardless of how nice your setup is.

I settled for the 6850 instead of the 6870 I wanted because I decided it might be best to save a little money now and be able to upgrade again next year in the late spring. Right after making my purchase I took the extra 100$ and bought me some anime toys which I will post about at a later time.