Looking to upgrade for gaming

Barack Obama

Hi. I've a slimline Dell Optiplex 745 that's about 2 years old that I got from work when leaving. Initially I added some RAM to it and upgraded the video card and it helped a lot for playing games. I'm looking to upgrade it and just looking for some advice. Here's some specs -

• 3.4GHz Dual Pentium D, 4GB RAM
• Maxtor 7Y250M0 250GB hdd
• ASUS 4550 Graphics card

I was looking at upgrading the hard drive and graphics card with these -
Saphire 5570
1TB Samsung Spinpoint hard drive

Any advice greatly appreciated. The PC is slimline so this greatly limits what card I can fit . Let me know if you need any more specs from the PC!

Cheers

lmimmfn

depends on your expectations and what games you want to play on it, i.e. you dont really expect to play games released in the past 2 years on it do you?

Also are you sure its an Optiplex 745? they came with a Dual Core( Core 2 ) processor as opposed to an old pentium 4 which would lead me to think its an Optiplex 320.

Personally i wouldnt even bother trying to upgrade it, its 3 generations old, i.e. i5/i7, Core 2, P4 etc. I had a P4 2.8Ghz back in 2002

It should run games before 2006/2007 well enough( before games started taking advantage of dual cores )

Barack Obama

It's definitely an Optiplex 745. The processor comes up as Dual Pentium D 3.4GHz - I just used Belarc Advisor to confirm and got this info -
3.40 gigahertz Intel Pentium D
16 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded

I've being playing games such as Fallout 3 and Civ V without problems but I'd like to put the settings up a bit...

lmimmfn

Barack Obama wrote: »

It's definitely an Optiplex 745. The processor comes up as Dual Pentium D 3.4GHz - I just used Belarc Advisor to confirm and got this info -
3.40 gigahertz Intel Pentium D
16 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded

I've being playing games such as Fallout 3 and Civ V without problems but I'd like to put the settings up a bit...

ahh ok, looks like a Pentium D 945 dual core which is a lot better than the single core P4s

Your mobo is PCI-E 1.0a, and i dont know if it will have compatibility issues with the 5570( cant really check from here at work ). Also your PSU is only 275W, the 5570 uses a lot more power than the 4550 that you have now, heres a comparison

4550 - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/801/9/
5570 - http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/ati_radeon_hd_5570,8.html
Both of those are obviously total power and on different PC's however you can use the 9600GT as a benchmark in both( and its quite similar ) which would show the 5570 to consume approx 80W more on full load

Barack Obama

lmimmfn wrote: »

ahh ok, looks like a Pentium D 945 dual core which is a lot better than the single core P4s

Your mobo is PCI-E 1.0a, and i dont know if it will have compatibility issues with the 5570( cant really check from here at work ). Also your PSU is only 275W, the 5570 uses a lot more power than the 4550 that you have now, heres a comparison

4550 - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/801/9/
5570 - http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/ati_radeon_hd_5570,8.html
Both of those are obviously total power and on different PC's however you can use the 9600GT as a benchmark in both( and its quite similar ) which would show the 5570 to consume approx 80W more on full load

Thanks mate. Fair play to you for looking that stuff up - I'd be pretty clueless. You are spot on - I checked the output of the PSU and it's 275W. If I read those right though, on max power the 4550 uses 178W and the 5570 uses 211W which is only 33W more. I think the highlighted bit in the 2nd link is for a different card (5750).

So basically, the PC wouldn't be able to handle the 5570 because it doesn't have the power power? Is there any utility to find out how much power is currently in use?

Venom

The 275W PSU in your system is going to make upgrading to what you want pretty difficult imho. Do you have the budget for a new build which can be done for €500ish these days but it depends really on what games you want to play.

lmimmfn

Barack Obama wrote: »

Thanks mate. Fair play to you for looking that stuff up - I'd be pretty clueless. You are spot on - I checked the output of the PSU and it's 275W. If I read those right though, on max power the 4550 uses 178W and the 5570 uses 211W which is only 33W more. I think the highlighted bit in the 2nd link is for a different card (5750).

So basically, the PC wouldn't be able to handle the 5570 because it doesn't have the power power? Is there any utility to find out how much power is currently in use?

youre right, sorry thats what i get trying to look stuff up quickly at work whilst doing other stuff, coming back later and not getting any sleep the night before( newborn FTW lol ), so its around 50W more required. My main point illustrating that really was just that your PSU is quite low and that the 5570 uses a lot more power. As far as i know theres no accurate util( a mate used one in the past but i dont know how accurate it was ). You can use online power calculators, listing the USB connections you use, num of harddrives, etc. theyre not that but would give a rough idea.

Also as i stated in the graphics section, im still not sure about your mobe and PCI-E2.0 cards, i had the same issue a few years ago and spent a tonne of time trying to figure out if my mobo would work, thankfully it did.

If i was in your shoes, i would flog your current rig and get something more upto date that will last and you can upgrade in a few years to still keep it a bit fresh as your rig really is old by todays standards. You could build a decent gaming rig nowadays for 450euro in total( excluding the screen ) and you'd probably get 100-150euro for your current rig( sounds like a lot, but it would have value, i.e. if you used it for a year and decided to sell it you would still get a great price for it ).
If you go upgrading that rig, which has a small PSU, is a small form factor( making upgrading more expensive ), then you'll be throwing good money after bad.

Solitaire

Erm, wtf? 50W more? The HD5750 rarely uses that much, and the HD5570 uses about half that in the real world...

lmimmfn

Solitaire wrote: »

Erm, wtf? 50W more? The HD5750 rarely uses that much, and the HD5570 uses about half that in the real world...

my fecking charts are better that yours :P

heres another
http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=264
those show at least 30W for the 5570( approx 50W difference for the 5750 ), either way IS MORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! compared to the 4550, which uses around 10W in total, so its entirely down to total current W usage compared with a new gfx card )
:cool:

Solitaire

Yeah and my HD4850 really uses 140W despite the fact that P-Tuner agrees rigidly with XBit's 85W... :rolleyes:

lmimmfn

Solitaire wrote: »

Yeah and my HD4850 really uses 140W despite the fact that P-Tuner agrees rigidly with XBit's 85W... :rolleyes:

well i dont write these things :P
heres another that puts your 4850 at 140W( albeit full system delta )
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2556/22
and here it states 110W max for 4850 - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/731/17/
Still its 110W max, none of those charts are accurate unless all cards are tested on the same uber cpu to remove bottlenecking issues so at best theyre only indicative( which we all know ).

Either way, point is without calculating all system components theres approx 30W more required going from a 4550 to a 5570 which is a lot on a 275W PSU.

Ptuner results can only be used if youre guaranteed to be completely maxing the gfx card and is dependend on usage. How did you test? Kombustor or furmark?

Solitaire

Sorry, typo, meant HD4830 Which is also nearly 140W according to your charts!

lmimmfn

Solitaire wrote: »

Sorry, typo, meant HD4830 Which is also nearly 140W according to your charts!

lol, im not even going to bother checking now after i spend a while checking the 4850 :P

Barack Obama

lmimmfn wrote: »

youre right, sorry thats what i get trying to look stuff up quickly at work whilst doing other stuff, coming back later and not getting any sleep the night before( newborn FTW lol ), so its around 50W more required. My main point illustrating that really was just that your PSU is quite low and that the 5570 uses a lot more power. As far as i know theres no accurate util( a mate used one in the past but i dont know how accurate it was ). You can use online power calculators, listing the USB connections you use, num of harddrives, etc. theyre not that but would give a rough idea.

Also as i stated in the graphics section, im still not sure about your mobe and PCI-E2.0 cards, i had the same issue a few years ago and spent a tonne of time trying to figure out if my mobo would work, thankfully it did.

If i was in your shoes, i would flog your current rig and get something more upto date that will last and you can upgrade in a few years to still keep it a bit fresh as your rig really is old by todays standards. You could build a decent gaming rig nowadays for 450euro in total( excluding the screen ) and you'd probably get 100-150euro for your current rig( sounds like a lot, but it would have value, i.e. if you used it for a year and decided to sell it you would still get a great price for it ).
If you go upgrading that rig, which has a small PSU, is a small form factor( making upgrading more expensive ), then you'll be throwing good money after bad.

Thanks again for that. I'm hamstrung with very little budget (out of work since end of Oct) so was hoping to spend the minimum to up performance. Maybe I need to check the motherboard info and RAM speed to see if it's worth salvaging...