Christmas Present

[Matt77]

Odd. I'm going to look into it, it's weird how it doesn't support the higher mhz RAM.

BTW, stick with 7, Windows 8 sucks.

 

[PP Mguire]

Newegg.com - BIOSTAR TFORCE TA790GX 128M AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

Odd. I'm going to look into it, it's weird how it doesn't support the higher mhz RAM.

BTW, stick with 7, Windows 8 sucks.

It's a DDR2 board. It can't support any higher than 1066 and DDR3 can't be used. Explains a lot more now. I would get the parts I mentioned in my last post to replace this.

 

[Matt77]

Haha, makes sense.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

If you can solve your ram issue, IMO it might be worth keeping your current mobo/cpu anyway.

DDR3 doesn't offer vast improvements over DDR2, and going from 1066mhz to 1600mhz won't be much of a performance jump either.

The biggest improvements would be the 720 to the 3220, or the 6870 to the 660. Honestly in a gaming machine, I'd be tempted to up the GPU over the CPU, especially when your CPU is already a quad @ 3.2Ghz per core

 

[PP Mguire]

When occupying all slots DDR2 AMD boards can be extremely finicky and unstable. As I don't think this board support 4GB DIMMs using 4 2GB sticks could cause some issues if he decided to upgrade to 8GB anyways. That is the only reason I suggest getting the upgraded setup over a new GPU or else I would normally agree with you.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

I can't comment there, AMD never was my strong point last amd chips I owned were in the Athlon era.

 

[Thresh25]

Okay what do you guys think of this...

90$ mobo...
Newegg.com - MSI Z77A-G41 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

I've never used MSI for any parts, I found this ASUS board which I've had good success with in the past for not much more.

105
Newegg.com - ASUS P8B75-V LGA 1155 Intel B75 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

I don't know anything about the i5s so I'm not really sure what any of hte differences are here for the same price besides the obvious speed differences. I didn't expect the i5s to be so expensive still...


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http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1154261&CatId=6988

Intel Core i5-3450 BX806237i53450 Processor - Quad Core, 3rd Generation, 6MB L3 Cache, 3.10GHz (3.50GHz Max Turbo), Socket H2 (LGA1155), 77W, Fan, Retail at TigerDirect.com

Intel Core i5-3450S BX806237i53450S Processor - Quad Core, 6MB L3 Cache, 2.80GHz (3.50GHz Max Turbo), Socket H2 (LGA1155), 65W, Fan, Retail at TigerDirect.com

I don't really know anything about SSDs either, but this one enticed me because of the free game... Is intel ok to go with for a SSD? Will 60gb be enough given the fact I'll only be putting games and the OS on it, data will be stored on my already existing hdd.

75
Newegg.com - Intel 330 Series Maple Crest SSDSC2CT060A3K5 2.5" 60GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Any suggestions for some good cheap ram?

Thanks a lot guys