My upcoming PC upgrade/rebuild

[Toxic Dover]

Hey everyone,

So I built my current rig going on 4 years ago, and while it's been an excellent PC, it's starting to show signs of age and it's time to give it some TLC, although as I've gotten deeper into it, it's more of a complete rebuild than an upgrade. Anyway, I've got a few areas of this build that I'd like some advice/opinions on and figured I'd pose the question for you guys.

My current setup:

MSI P67A-GD65 Motherboard
Intel i5 2500k Sandy Bridge CPU (stable OC at 4.5GHz)
16GB DDR3 1600 G.Skill Ripjaws RAM
HIS IceQ X Turbo Radeon HD 6950 2GB video card
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU cooler
256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD (for OS and programs)
1TB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda HDD (for mass storage)
Thermaltake TR2 RX 750W PSU
Rosewill Challenger Mid-Tower case

My current rebuild list:

Corsair Graphite 760T full-tower case
32GB DDR3 2133 G.Skill TridentX RAM
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G-1 Gaming video card
3x 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSDs (put in RAID 5 array for OS and programs)
3x 1TB 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda HHDs (put in RAID 5 array for mass storage)
Corsair H100i AIO liquid CPU cooler

That's it as far as planning goes... This probably won't be a "buy everything at once" type of rebuild due to the costs of everything, so I not only need to prioritize the parts but also wanted some input. I haven't done much in the way of heavy gaming for the past few years due to college getting in the way, but since I'm finished now I want something that can handle pretty much anything I want to throw at it. I also want this to be able to handle multiple VMs for lab and other purposes, thus the doubling of the memory... Photo editing is also something I do a good bit of, so I need it to handle large amounts of .RAW files without trouble.

My questions are these: I haven't decided whether it's worth it (from a cost to gained performance ratio) to upgrade my CPU and motherboard... My 2500k i5 is rock solid at 4.5GHz, and (without having put a ton of time into researching it thus far) I don't see a real reason to dump the extra money into a new CPU and motherboard, so I'd like some opinions as to what I should do there. Secondly, the GPU... The single 970 will certainly kick the crap out of my existing HD 6950, but I've also been looking at 980s OR a pair of 970s in SLI. I'd like to be able to push around 2k resolution right out of the gate (still waiting for 4k displays to come down in price), and I've seen mixed things in benchmarks... Opinions on whether or not the single 970 would be sufficient, or if a 980 or 970 SLI pair would be beneficial enough to warrant the price tag?

I haven't given much thought to a new PSU yet, simply because I haven't finalized the build list yet. So, aside from the specific questions I've posed, I'm also very open to suggestions about things I've already selected. Again, college kind of took me out of the game for a while and I haven't been able to keep up with things as much as I've wanted to these past few years, so suggestions across the board would be appreciated. Thanks for all the help!

 

[EarthDog]

I'd see about getting a 2600k, the extra ram (if needed... confirm you do), psu wouldn't be high on my list to replace eitber.

Get a single 980 for 2560x1440.

 

[caddi daddi]

I have to agree with earthdog, the 970 will do it all at 1080 but, at 1440 you have to turn a few things down, it's not the ram thing nor fps but frame rate drop that I run into.

 

[Janus67]

Agreed with the others.

As a side note, regarding your potential storage setup:

I wouldn't bother getting 3 SSDs and putting it into a RAID5, I would just get a single 1TB drive or if you wanted to be safe in the unlikely case of one drive failing get a second 1TB and run in a RAID1. Alternatively just use a good backup solution (like macrium reflect, etc) to make consistent backups.

Regarding the physical drives, I can't recommend Seagate drives at this point. I've experienced (in business) and read enough reports of the drives failing unexpectedly that I stick to recommending drives from HGST (Hitachi) and Western Digital.

 

[Toxic Dover]

I'd see about getting a 2600k, the extra ram (if needed... confirm you do), psu wouldn't be high on my list to replace eitber.

Get a single 980 for 2560x1440.

Thanks for the input! I'll do some looking into the 2600k. The memory and processor will probably be towards the end of the list to replace. I could use the extra memory for VMs and such, but it's not a huge priority right now.

I have to agree with earthdog, the 970 will do it all at 1080 but, at 1440 you have to turn a few things down, it's not the ram thing nor fps but frame rate drop that I run into.

Yeah, I'm starting to realize that... I've been doing some reading in between things going on at work this morning, and it's looking more and more like the 980 is the way to go. I'll probably spring for a 980 TI of some flavor...

Agreed with the others.

As a side note, regarding your potential storage setup:

I wouldn't bother getting 3 SSDs and putting it into a RAID5, I would just get a single 1TB drive or if you wanted to be safe in the unlikely case of one drive failing get a second 1TB and run in a RAID1. Alternatively just use a good backup solution (like macrium reflect, etc) to make consistent backups.

Regarding the physical drives, I can't recommend Seagate drives at this point. I've experienced (in business) and read enough reports of the drives failing unexpectedly that I stick to recommending drives from HGST (Hitachi) and Western Digital.

This makes sense... I've always been slightly concerned with SSDs as far as write life goes, but in all actuality I'll be keeping anything important or long-term storage items like photos and movies on my storage drive anyway... The single 1TB SSD would save some money, no doubt. I think I'll go that route. I have heard some increasingly bad things about Seagates; I've never had a problem with them personally but the more I'm reading into it the more weary I'm becoming, haha. I'll definitely look at WD and HGST a bit more. Thanks for the input!

 

[Janus67]

The length of time it would take you to kill an SSD (unless you are using it in a very busy database) would outlive it's usefulness almost certainly.