What can I upgrade?

[Subspace]

Hello everyone,

You can call me Louis or Subspace, whichever is fine, I'm fairly new here and I've come to ask for your advice and help.

I have a PC that is fairly old, about 3-4 years old, and despite it being old I'm able to play games like Battlefield 2, portal 2, and Black Ops fairly well on low-medium settings. I originally bought this system to aid me as a 3D graphics artist, thus some of the parts in my system might seem out of place for gaming. Now, with Battlefield 3 coming out and craving for some high-end graphics and smooth action, I began to think about upgrading some parts within my old system. Mind you that this system had cost me close to $4,000 (typical price for a system used for 3D modelling) and so it is hard for me to let go of it, although I do realize that I will have to dump it sometime in the future.

Here are my system specs and I would like to know as to what parts I should upgrade. My budget is limited to $500-$600, so please choose based on priority. My main concern is the graphics card which costed me $1400 at the time but it is not meant for gaming, and so I would definitely like to swap it out for something that is meant for gaming.

Operating System :
Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) (build 7600)
Processor :
2.50 gigahertz Intel Xeon (2 installed)
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
24576 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (8 total)
Drives :
250.99 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
System Model :
Supermicro X7DWA
Main Circuit Board :
Supermicro X7DWA PCB Version
Intel(R) 631xESB/6321ESB/3100 Chipset
Memory :
4096 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory DDR2
Slot 'DIMM x 2' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM x 2' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM x 2' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM x 2' is Empty
Display :
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700
Sound Card :
SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio

Please tell me if you would like more information. This system of mine is very special to me, like an old muscle car that I would like to restore, and so your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Louis

 

[I.M.O.G.]

If you are still using it for things other than gaming, I'd have a hard time letting go of the board and processors - that is a cool setup, sentimental value and all too since you've spent some time with it.

I'm not sure how processor intensive the newer games are, but really I think the only thing that screams upgrade for your games is the video card. (I'm sure a sandybridge would be a better gaming processor, but it wouldn't be as cool as dual xeon setup - whatever that counts for). Someone else should be able to talk more intelligently about the CPU demands from the newer games than me, if you have any doubts about hanging onto the Xeon's.

On your budget if you only do graphics upgrade, that would mean you have the pick of the litter pretty much between the top end graphics on AMD or Nvidia. So basically, I'd not want to leave the duallie behind, and by hanging onto it that gives you lots of room to play on the GPU side.

Interested to see what others say however, I'm not hip on the latest gaming stuff.

 

[Subspace]

Thanks for your input I.M.O.G, glad to have another person who appreciates Xeon's as they have never failed me. But then again, I am open to anything and if these xeon's have to go, then I will.. ..gladly take it into consideration.

As for the graphics card, I agree that I will need to replace it and these Quadro FX cards are so damn expensive, I don't understand why though.

Because I'm a Nvidia fan, I did some searching and found this card,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130661

Would it work on my system if I replaced the Quadro FX that I have on right now?

Lastly, I think that I will need to swap out the memory also because they are DDR2's. I heard that the performance on DDR3's outweighs DDR2's by a big margin. Plus, I would like to increase my memory to 6gb instead of having just 4gb.

 

[snowbrd]

I believe it will work. You will need a new motherboard if you want to use ddr3 and that will go with a new cpu i think. Quadro's are optimised architecturally for applications such as Autocad which is why they are so expensive

 

[Theocnoob]

I was under the impression that Quadros were ultra high bin standard GPUs (ie, GTX 480) with ECC RAM?

 

[Subspace]

I don't know too much but from my understanding Quadros and Geforce cards are similar, albeit the architecture is very different between the two cards. One is meant for professional applications (Maya, 3Ds Max, AutoCAD, etc) and the other is meant for gaming but not limited to only gaming.

After more thinking, I am considering getting the Nvidia Geforce GTX 560, 4gb more ram as a DDR2, and possibly a bigger harddrive. What do you guys think?

 

[ScrewySqrl]

I'd suggest a 570, which is recognized as having CUDA cores by those programs, maybe a 1 TB HDD, and a small SSD (60, 80, 90 GB) as a boot/swap file drive.

 

[Subspace]

I'd suggest a 570, which is recognized as having CUDA cores by those programs, maybe a 1 TB HDD, and a small SSD (60, 80, 90 GB) as a boot/swap file drive.

Do you think my CPU will be able to handle a GTX 570?