Yet another computer upgrade thread

[GoinAllTheWay]

I've been toying with the idea of just upgrading my mobo and CPU but the more I think about it, the more I wan't to do almost a total upgrade of equipment.

It's a gaming rig so I do want some quality hardware to go in it. I think the only thing I'm going to salvage from my old system is the dual GTX 460 video cards. I know they are a bit long in the tooth these days but I don't have anything atm that really challenges them so I will put that off off for a bit.

I pretty much know what I want for everything expect the MOBO and CPU. Not sure what's good these days and do want to spend some money to build a good backbone.

Any suggestiions for MOBO's and CPU's, I'd love to hear them.

Oh, and I had one other question. I want to do the SSD for my sytem drive and just a normal one for data. All of my games are purchased through Steam. Can you install Steam on the SSD but have all the games installed on the slower data drive or are SSD drives large enough now that they would be useable to install large game fiesl on? I've never really played around with the setting in Steam all that much despite it's my primary way of buying/launching games.

[PsYcNeT]

Well, Intel's Haswell line (4th gen i series) is set to launch in a few weeks, preliminary pricing can be found here, with the i5-4670k likely being the best bet for gaming. Expect good Gigabyte and Asus motherboards with 2x or 3x SLI support to drop in around $150-$200 around the same time as the chips release.

SSDs that handle the OS can most definitely handle games. I'd recommend a 240+ GB SSD (can probably fit ~20 games + windows), but a 128 GB is just ducky.

[Rathji]

If you don't care about the low power state, why bother with Haswell? Just pick up an ivy bridge one and save some coin.

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by Rathji

If you don't care about the low power state, why bother with Haswell? Just pick up an ivy bridge one and save some coin.

It's about a 6%-7% performance gain over the 3570k (according to the leaked tests), for what looks like about 20$ more.

Intel chips don't really drop in price with the new releases, or at least haven't in a long time.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Oh, and I had one other question. I want to do the SSD for my sytem drive and just a normal one for data. All of my games are purchased through Steam. Can you install Steam on the SSD but have all the games installed on the slower data drive or are SSD drives large enough now that they would be useable to install large game fiesl on? I've never really played around with the setting in Steam all that much despite it's my primary way of buying/launching games.

What's your current system? It probably still has legs. Save your money for a big SSD and maybe something cool like a monitor upgrade.

You can change the directory that Steam installs to in the first place to a slower drive. The problem is that you often want your current games on the SSD so they load faster and to throw the ones you don't play much (or require long loading) onto a mechanical drive. In order to do this, I use symbolic links so Steam thinks all the games are on the SSD but they are actually not and I actually have a separate steamapps folder on my mechanical drive that I throw the less played ones onto.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how..._system_mklink