PC Hardware Talk

[Marcus Diaz]

So I've got my eye on a GTX 980 as something to buy come Cyber Monday. Now this is currently one of the biggest and baddest graphics card out there. My only question is should I do anything else to upgrade? I've got the power supply to run it. The tower has plenty of breathing room for temp control. But is there anything else I should take into consideration?

 

[Mark Blue]

What mobo chipset and CPU combo are you running Marcus? You may want to consider liquid cooling in the form of a CLC too for that Maxwell beast.

 

[Mark Blue]

I'm not sure why this went nowhere, but I received the Holiday 2014 issue of Maximum PC today and the GTX 980/970 GPUs are front and center on the magazine cover. I also found this information on their website I thought was relevant to your interests Marcus. It looks like the Asus and the EVGA cards are a dream come true for those who care about frame rates when playing games and the price is right to boot. Hopefully this helps a little more than my last post.

 

[Skip Talbot]

One of the best bang for the buck upgrades I've made in recent years is a running all of my software and Windows on a solid state drive. It's wickedly fast. Boot times and game loads are a snap, mere seconds. I have several large hard drives for the rest of my documents and video, which are slower but more more economical for storage.

I haven't had a need to upgrade my CPU or GPU in awhile. I've lost much of my interest in PC gaming and my current rig with an overclocked i7 950 and gtx 280 is more than enough for any of my normal usage. Back in the day, it was all about trying to squeeze a tenth of a frame per second more out of Flight Simulator, but I haven't even touched the game now in a couple years. The only thing I'm looking forward to game wise is GTA V, which has been delayed almost a year now for release on the PC platform.

 

[Mark Blue]

I can't even comprehend not having an SSD these days. Now that prices are reasonable it's an absolute must have. Keep the OS on the SSD and use the platter drives for storage. Good point Skip.

 

[Justin Wilcox]

I remember tying to squeeze extra FPS for Counter Strike lol. I think I had a GeForce 4400. But yeah, SSD's are such a major improvement. My jaw dropped the first time I booted from an SSD.