Completly baffled (upgrade/life extension)

[Toby B.]

Ok so a little insight to my situation. For some god awful reason or another I decided to get back into playing WoW, but my old pc isn't quite up to snuff and has piss poor frame rates and latency spikes from hell. My internet is not the greatest but working towards getting that rectified. The conundrum I face is, with limited fund if $400-500 is only going get me a entry level system that I'll have trouble upgrading later on. I am on the fence about getting some used parts off eBay and putting together a system that I can utilize my current RAM and processor, and hopefully the hard drive with OS intact.

So I am trying to compile side-by-side data to see if I can get away with a drop in replacement board that I can ad parts to later on as I acquire cash. And by re-using my processor, and RAM I can save a little bit of money for a video card.

Essentially, the board I have is the middle of the road version of (what I can currently determine is a group of three motherboards. Aria (stripped drown base model), Apricot (some extra features, and the board I have), Alpinia (fullest featured of the three). Still unable to determine the mass-controller device information that would ultimately tell me how hosed the OS would get with a board swap.

In trying to compile the information for side-by-side comparison, I have encountered some information that contradicts HP and quite honestly stumps me as I have not dealt with PC building for years.

What I have found for the Apricot board:

According to HP
Max Processor - AMD Phenom II X6 10xxT Six-Core (Thuban core) - 95W TDP
current processor - AMD Phenom II X2 250 Dual Core - 95W TDP
What I have been able to find for a comparison between that fastest 6-core (1065T) and my current processor.
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-Phenom-II-X ... -II-X2-250

HP says the max ram is:
8GB PC3-10600 [DDR3-1333] (DIMMs run at PC3-8500 [DDR3-1066]). Then why would Sisoft Sandra say my 8GB of ram is recognized as PC3-10700? And Crucial shows compatible maximum as 8GB of PC3-14900
http://www.crucial.com/ProductDisplay?d ... reId=10151

So is it more of a benefit to go with a lower speed and more cores or less cores and .1GHz faster speed for the processor? And as far as the RAM would I see an increase in performance going with the PC3-14900 over the current PC-10700?

[Toby B.]

I should also mention I still dabble around with programming/coding and have XAMMP installed/running. as well as a text editor, among all the other crap for day to day use.

[Karlsweldt]

Hi, Toby.. Good to see you are still with us.
Yes, some decent stuff on eBay at good prices.. but always look for some sort of warranty or "no DOA" notation.
Video card would best be in the range of 1 GB, whatever brand favored. Of course the PSU would need to be up to the needs of the system.
Always best to use premium-grade memory, but a 'value' grade will work well if a higher rated speed than required.
8 GB of system memory should be more than enough.. unless Windows loads all those needless 'apps' that you never use but hog memory!
In truth, more cores would result in an overall faster system, as data is shared among all cores.. but maybe only a few percentage points higher than a faster CPU ith fewer cores, though. Big difference in CPU cost. Is it worth the extra cost for more 'horsepower'?

[Toby B.]

Hi Karl, hope you're feeling better.

8 GB of system memory should be more than enough.. unless Windows loads all those needless 'apps' that you never use but hog memory!

While 8GB should more then suffice for the "normal person" I am far from normal. I have a bad habit of leaving my PC running 24/7 unless forced to do a restart via power outage or program requirement (or when resources get too hogged and Windows falls flat on it's face due to leaving programs, etc open. -> I have a tendency to leave whatever I have open, pass-out/go to work and pick up where I left off when I return.
A for instance.. This morning when I passed out I left Firefox open (2 panes w/ two tabs each), Notepad++, Windows Explorer. The only reason battle.net and WoW aren't listed (typically have them going gaming or not) is that late yesterday afternoon I had shut the system down so I could access the BIOS in an attempt to get information for my side-by-side comparison.

The RAM I currently have installed is Crucial Ballistix Sport "kit", bought that pair of sticks direct from Crucial's website an eternity ago. Whether that is classified as premium or value, I have not had any issues to speak of.

As far as excess crap running (i.e. in startup / down by the clock). I have gotten rid of all the HP garbage from the startup process, well the "eye candy" part anyway. I am sure I could delve deeper and clear out a few GB of folders/files of HP crap but fooling with the Registry is something I would rather stay away from unless I absolutely need to touch it. As far as other stuff running.. Three programs related to the game (battle.net , twitch and TSM desktop app), then there's security stuff (MSE, Malwarebytes, and CrapCleaner), and to finish off the list is the XAMMP control panel (which even though it's set to run at startup I still have to manually start it and it usually takes about 2 minutes or so before everything is up and functional. Also where it's manually started, if on a gaming binge I will exit out of it, although I just realized I never shut down the services for it before X'ing out of the CP so the services/processes for Apache and MySQL may very well continue on running in the background.

Video card would best be in the range of 1 GB, whatever brand favored. Of course the PSU would need to be up to the needs of the system.

1.) I would love to have a Dual monitor setup as it would make projects a lot easier as my eyesight is utter crap (depending what I am doing I can't see with glasses and other stuff cant see without. Although my system has DVI-D and VGA, it doesn't have enough "oomph" to run my 23" off the DVI and a 14" off the VGA. Flickers and prolonged blank screens...
2.) Wow's minimum requirement for the game video card wise. "VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 560 2GB or AMD™ Radeon™ HD 7850 2GB or Intel® HD Graphics 530 (45W)". Although I theoretically go with a 1GB video card. I am almost afraid I would be in the same boat as I currently am with poor framerates.
3.) I do not need SLI/Crossfire..

Basically I will never be able to financially keep up with their "minimum requirements", let alone exceeds them without being forced to buy used parts like I am now. Although it would be cool as hell to have a system that maintains 60+FPS, I'd be happy with a system that can maintain 10FPS. Instead of dropping from 4-0 when I enter a "high-pop" zone or some battle with all sorts of stuff lighting up the screen. If never played wow, look up wow raids on youtube you'll see what I mean.

As far as a power supply, yeah I kinda already anticipated that.

Currently I have the 14" hooked to my laptop, and it works great but with one exception. The laptop goes into sleep mode on a regular basis which is set slightly above bare minimum to prevent overheating issues. And being on public Wi-Fi for the time being everything is password protected which is no big deal, just another step to deal with..

[Mr T]

Go with more cores - most operating systems are optimized to run with more cores. The hex core AMD CPU's are really good. However most AMD CPU's (unless you go with the latest) are blown away by older i5's. I have snapped up a lot of lower end 1155 i5's on H61 boards and they are incredibly quick in Linux.

Windows on the other hand for me is c**p. It is slow, unreliable and bloated. Unfortunately I still have to use it for certain things, but I emulate a lot with Wine and run it in a VM - apparently that can be done with WoW - see here!

8Gb is a good start now for 64bit operating systems - RAM speed is not wholly important unless you are at the high end of things. My Main system has 32Gb's of DDR3-1333 on an FX8320 - an i5-2400S with 4Gb's of RAM runs quicker. May AM1 2GHz on 8Gb's of RAM is oddly as quick in doing basic things and playing Blu-ray through Nero.

Online gaming, definitely put the budget in CPU and video card, tight budget AMD - RX550 or better is Nvidia 1050Ti and of course your big limitation is speed of your internet.