Looking for suggestions ro upgrade a 3 year old system. Currently running the following:

ASUS P6t Deluxe V2
EVGA GTX 285
1000W Kingwin PSU
Core i7 940 2.93 Ghz
Corsair 2Gx3 RAM
2x 640 GB WD HD
Win Vista Ultimate 64
Full CH HOTAS setup

I've got about $1K to spend. The GPU I'm guessing is a must. Also looking to double the RAM to 12 GB. For the sake of simming, is an upgrade to the OS to Win 7 64bit worth it. Currently into Il-2 and Falcon 4 but would also like to move into newer sims such as DCS A10C. Rig is currently a dual boot system so I'm also currently running XP but its only 32 bit. I'm not a huge fan of overclocking, but have the ability with the CPU. Trying to get the best performance without wrecking older sims playability.

Thanks,

AC

You can build a Sandy Bridge system with win 7 64 and a pretty nice vid card for 1k pretty easy now.

That is still a pretty good proc you have. Why not OC it and get a faster vid card like a GTX 580. Also not going to see much benefit going form Vista 64 to 7 64.

Speedbump,

1st, Thanks for the quick response. I'm a bit behind the times since I built my system having spent 18 of the last 24 months overseas in some not too technological places. So a couple (possibly dumb) questions. I's like to stretch the mobo and CPU life so i think I'll go the overclock route. I'm running a Thermaltake Armor case so I can toss in a couple more fans for cooling along with a good CPU cooler. So on to the questions.

1.) Would I see any increase on the older games if I was to dig around and find an XP 64 bit upgrade for the XP side of the system?
2.) Would running two GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 in SLI or a single GeForce GTX 580 3072MB 384-bit GDDR get me further. Round out to about the same price.
3.) What do you see as the biggest bottleneck.
4.) How much trouble would multi-screen be in the future with the above GPU choices?

Sorry if this seems a bit much, but its been hard to keep up.

Cheers,

AC

XP 64 was never properly supported as far as drivers or compatibility with gaming. XP 64 is pretty much a niche product.

I would get the 580 if money is no object. Avoid SLI if you can since some games don't support it which results in one card essentially doing nothing. Two 570s in SLI will stomp a 580 for certain games. Even two 560 Ti cards will beat a 580 in certain games.

I think more memory would be a waste of money, especially if you pick up more memory from a video card upgrade. Generally, populating all the memory slots on a OC system will be more unstable since it's just more memory sticks that must be exactly the same, especially OC.

Generally, AMD cards are better suited and supported for multiple monitors. Allen can help you with that. Some others here also run more than one monitor.

Bottlenecks are no problem since that CPU can run at around 4Ghz when OC fairly easily unless you happened to get a poor sample.

So the vid card is where you should spend all your money, either on AMD or Nvidia. That is my two cents.

Right now your GPU is the biggest bottleneck.

I'd go the single GTX 580 route, or the single AMD 6970 route. With the AMD 6970, triple screen (Eyefinity) might be easier as you wouldn't need 2 cards like you need if you go NVidia. BUT you will either need native displayport monitors or active displayport adapters.

Also, overclock that i7 940. I'm running an i7 920 overclocked to 3.5Ghz on air. The i7 9xx series of CPU is still very powerful.

Do NOT go back to WinXP. Instead if you have the cash get Win 7 Ultimate 64bit. It runs a little bit better than Vista and has better older software compatibility.

Lasty, if you still have any extra cash after all of the above, go 12GB of mem, just for the sake of having more mem at such a cheap price these days.

I take back my statement about needing native displayport monitors or active adapters... Sapphire makes a FleX Edition of the 69xx series of graphics card inwhich it negates those needs.

Outstanding guys, now I'm just trying to do homework on what you guys have listed with this poor connection Afghanistan calls internet. Can't wait to get back and start finishing this thing up.

What are you running on the triple channel memory Argon? Three sticks of 4Gb or six times two.

Three sticks of 4GB.

Does the triple channel board have limitations as to which sockets can be populated.

Like my 1156 socket board has to have from 0, 1, 2, 3.... 1 and 3 must be populated first, to boot.

I may be stuck, looks like the mobo may be an issue. Its PCIe 2.0, not 2,1 which seems to be an issue with the 6900 series Saphhire cards.....anybody see anything I'm missing here?

It's not going to be a problem, 2.0 or 2.1. Bandwidth is the same.

Cool, I hope Im reading some issues about needing to update bios to support it that way. Trying to find out if it can be done. Thanks for all the support guys!

My X58 1366 board is a bit different than most. It has 4 total slots for mem instead of 6. The Intel reference design is only 3 slots for memory. This board was one of the first to go over the stock reference design. It's also a bit of a budget board so it went four slots of memory, only has 1 NIC instead of 2 and no USB 3.0 (It's a 1st gen X58 budget board before USB 3.0 was a standard). It also doesn't have eSata (I don't own any eSata drives anyhow).

For it to post with triple channel enabled it needs 3 sticks in slots 1, 2 and 4 or memory in all 4 slots.

Wow, I'm not familiar with a board that has four slots for triple channel memory.

Yup it's a strange one! I've even tried it with 4 sticks of the same DDR3 triple channel memory to test to be sure the specs and manual were not lying to me. CPUz and Memtest confirm that the board works in triple channel with all 4 slots populated with the same type. The whole reason why I got the board in the first place is because I needed the regular PCI slots for my sound card (I loathe onboard sound chips) and my USB 2.0 card (I have a lot of USB devices!). It just so happened that this board had 2 PCI slots as well as 2 PCIe 16x slots, a PCIe 1x and PCIe 4x. The max supported amount of mem is only 16GB instead of 24GB though...

GTX285 -> GTX580

Bit of advice...dump the kingwin. You got 3 years out of it and it made it this far but dont push your luck. Pick up a quality 80_ certified PSU from Seasonic or Antec.
Get a 600-700 watt PSU if you will stick with a single GPU
If you will be doubling up
then grab a 800-1000psu
The higher the efficiency the better.

Pick up an SSD and reinstall windows. Either use your current drives for storage or pick up a nice checp tb drive (WD black series are always good)

With a fresh install, GTX580 (or whatever dual card solution you prefer) and the SSD your system will fly.

ASUS P6t Deluxe V2...Good

EVGA GTX 285...Was a Beast for a While, but its quickly dropping in rankings as new cards come out.
1000W Kingwin PSU...Good

Core i7 940 2.93 Ghz...ok, Overclocking will be Cheaper than Buy New CPU/Mobo/Ram Combo. You can get to 3.5+Ghz on Air w/ no Problems

Corsair 2Gx3 RAM...Good

2x 640 GB WD HD...Good

Win Vista Ultimate 64...Ok, But Seriously, Find a way to Upgrade to Windows 7, Its worth it.

Full CH HOTAS setup...Good

So

Windows 7 Ultimate/HP 64-Bit
AMD radeon 6950 2GB and Flash it to 6970 2GB

After that, OC the CPU and Ram.

Not sure how much performance you could pick up going from Vista 64 to 7 64, but 7 would sure be less aggravating.

You can probably sell that 285 to someone pretty easy as it has not been that long ago it was top dog. Looks like it falls about even with a GTX 460 1Gb.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2964-7.html