Looking for RAM and Video Card - Need Help

Hey everyone, I am at the last part of my build and am looking at a new video card and new RAM. I want to get a new of each as I will be using my old ram and video card to place in to my gf's new build.

I use my computer mostly for gaming and want to be able to hit the caps as far as frame rate goes with Skyrim and the upcoming Star Wars game.

Currently I have :
Power Supply -- Corsair 750W
Motherboard -- ASUS P8Z68-V PRO
CPU -- Intel Core i7-2600k @ 3.4 GHz
RAM -- x4 - 2G A-DATA Technology - HY63I1B16
Video Card -- NVIDIA GeForece GTX 275

I have my cpu cooled with a Corsair H70. Otherwise the stock fans of the Antec 1200 cool my computer.

Any input or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Money is not really a deciding factor at this point. Thank you guys and gals!

How much are you looking to spend on this?

I don't have a cap at this point.

Dhuss said:

I don't have a cap at this point.

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Ha, that is a very dangerous statement around here.

Just to keep things reasonable and not go nuts I'd have to take this card.
MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III PE/OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Good factory OC, top of the line cooling, unlockable shaders this card is as good as it gets in this price range.

If you prefer Nvidia, wait and see if 580's drop in price or get the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 448 Cores Classified. Another solid board.

Ram is easy, get whatever color gskill looks good to you

Haha, thank you for that warning.

Are their any real big differences between a Radeon and Nvidia?

I have always ran with Nvidia and never really explored anything else.

None I can think of. People have preferences and often if they run into one odd game they can't play or has a visual error they call the drivers crap and never use that brand ever again. I've never run into a single game I wanted to play that I could not and I've gone through just about ever series of card on both sides.

My wifes rig runs radeon dual graphics and I havent run into a game that didnt run well on it. I run 460s in SLI equally I have not found a game that didnt run well on this combo. Other than the occasional game that doesnt like SLI/CFX, but you cant just disable it if thats the issue.

The 560TI 448 core is a new card that uses a cut down 570 core, its a great value on the nvidia side. The Radeon 6950 is another great card for about the same price range.

For ram Id suggest anything in the 1600-1866mhz range with cas 8 timings. In 2x2GB or 2x4GB depending on how much ram you think you need. In general 4GB is plenty for pretty much any game or program you could want to run. 8GB is a bit more future proof and cost about the same when you look at DDR3-1600. Whatever you do get a 2 stick kit because you can probably run faster timings this way.

The other big performance booster you can add is a SSD. I got my first SSD about a year ago and I will never build another system without one. I can open photoshop CS5 while running LW3D and LW modeler, while surfing the net, in about 7 seconds on my core2duo laptop.

Awesome, thank you for letting me know.

One more question if you don't mind me asking. Are there good ways to sort of tweak everything to get better performance? Or if I should redirect the question else where?

ssjwizard said:

The other big performance booster you can add is a SSD. I got my first SSD about a year ago and I will never build another system without one. I can open photoshop CS5 while running LW3D and LW modeler, while surfing the net, in about 7 seconds on my core2duo laptop.

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I forgot to mention that I am running with 120g OCZ ssd.

I have been doing more research and am really liking the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III.

ssjwizard said:

For ram Id suggest anything in the 1600-1866mhz range with cas 8 timings. In 2x2GB or 2x4GB depending on how much ram you think you need. In general 4GB is plenty for pretty much any game or program you could want to run. 8GB is a bit more future proof and cost about the same when you look at DDR3-1600. Whatever you do get a 2 stick kit because you can probably run faster timings this way.

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So what you suggest here is if I wanted to stick with 8g of ram to go with 2x 4g instead of 4x 2g?

Dhuss said:

Are there good ways to sort of tweak everything to get better performance?

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Oh my, have to repeat this line again!

Daleon said:

Ha, that is a very dangerous statement around here.

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Dhuss said:

So what you suggest here is if I wanted to stick with 8g of ram to go with 2x 4g instead of 4x 2g?

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Correct.

As far as tweekinng everything, yes there are guides for tweakinng ram, guides for overclocing your guides for your CPU all in there respective sub forums.

Sweet, thank you. Never really been a huge hardware guy, just a programmer. So I appreciate everyone's help on explaining these things to me.

You should easily be able to find a OC guide for your mb model for bios settings. You should be able to set it to 4.5 and call it a day.