Calling all computer nerds (Know computer parts)

I agree, but when I built my rig I couldn't justify spending $700 bucks for something when I can spend $250 for something that does the same thing. I don't do anything highly CPU intensive except rendering a video every one and a while

Oh I own an MSI GTX 680 TwinFrozr II, and it's imo really good! Although I am not the most up to date person with graphics cards, I see MSI as a pretty good manufacturer. EVGA of course is also really good. I think for this decision, it's mostly what Shyguy prefers himself, or there is something wrong with some card that I don't know of.

Will look at your new list later this evening.

I would be keeping mine if I wasn't upgrading to the FX-9590

Not going into detail, I'll just say a few things about my computer...

I have a very run of the mill motherboard and I run my PC perfectly well, in fact it's really pretty good!

I use an MSI graphics card (GTX 960) and it's run perfectly, as has my dad's MSI graphics card

4 years is nothing. (knocks on wood), for all the 4 prebuilts I got (for free), the motherboards still work. The youngest is from early 2008. That specific motherboard has to withstand a terrible power supply, a CPU with a twice as high TDP as original (I think), and a GPU of 50+ Watts (it was designed for max. 25 watts). Still works perfectly fine, even with 8 GB of random DDR2 RAM. In a cheap prebuilt. Beat that lol (knocks on wood again )

There is no need to go buy an extremely fast SSD for no reason. Unless you've got huge files to move around then there is only a slight performance increase in comparison to an HDD. Since upgrading to Windows 10 my PC runs way faster. The software plays a part, not just the hardware.

If you currently have an FX 8350, please, for the love of your beers lol, don't "upgrade" to the 9590, unless it works fine and costs like 30 bucks. The 9590 is basically a massively overclocked 8350, and you won't really have much improved performance. Look up what a 9590 can do with not good enough motherboard, on google or whatever

Yeah my grandpa uses some computers for his small business. The PoS software (which he had custom made for him) runs on Windows ME so you need a Pentium 4 PC to run it. I have to service them sometimes, like doing backups (I eventually setup auto backup) and sometimes things break of age. The one and only dead motherboard that I had out of the 4+ PCs in service is nearly 20 years old and it's nothing special at all. All the others are between 15 and 20 years old and are still working great.

Please don't do this. I don't like money being burned.

The FX-9590 is expensive, requires water cooling (like the stock cooler is an AIO water cooler) becauase of how hot and inefficient it is, and is hardly better than the FX-8350. It's still the same crappy IPC that you get with the FX-6300 and the FX-8350. If you have anything better than an FX-6300, the only reasonable upgrade would be for you to buy a mid range i5 and a board to go with it.

Upgrading from anything over a 6300 to a 9590 is burning money. It's not much better and is unreasonably inefficient and hot. Not to mention the insane power draw for a CPU.

True, you definitely don't need one of those crazy fast, but crazy expensive SSDs for our use case scenarios, but it does really improve the snappyness of your PC. Also, it isn't really that expensive, I think (not sure, not from the US), 120/128GB SSDs only cost like 50 $, maybe even cheaper. Not that much, considering he's willing to put over 2000 $ into the whole pc.

EDIT:

Literally... Oh no, wait, you're not burning money, you're burning motherboards

Yay somebody understands how useless upgrading AMD is besides me

This is also true. If you are investing into a PC >$800, IMO you owe it to yourself to at least get an SSD boot drive. Just the OS alone will be super snappy compared to a HDD.

Sorry haha, I was going to upgrade to that until I saw the water cooling aspect. I forgot about that until you brought it up. I was going to go with an 8350. The first Sabertooth isn't comparable with it (if I read correctly) and I would go with Intel but I like to have my chipsets match, and since I have an R9 GPU I want to stay with AMD..

I didn't say to buy an extremely fast SSD. I never said you need an NVMe SSD for your boot drive. Any SSD for your boot drive, granted it's not terribly awful like the V300 from Kingston which is just as bad as an HDD, will be worlds better than an HDD. There are lots of budget SSD solutions that still blow away HDDs for 4K reads and writes.

There's also a limit to how much software can do. Optimizations like defragmenting can improve the speed of an HDD, but over time it'll just get fragmented again and the speeds will go back to how they were before unless you keep doing it.

It's physically impossible for magnetic media like a spinning hard drive to be as fast as a flash storage solution like an SSD where all the data is accessible at the same time instead of having to physically spin a platter to access something else. For things like drivers or programs that may have dependencies on things that are on the physical opposite side of the platter, their speed will be corrupted.

That literally makes no difference at all. I mean, otherwise, how would an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU work well together? It's not like Intel and Nvidia belong together

What do you mean by "have my chipsets match"? And which R9 GPU? An FX CPU will bottleneck anything above an R9 380 anyways, even AMD themselves use Intel CPUs for benchmarking their GPUs in press releases. Even AMD knows their CPUs aren't competitive.

There's also no advantage for having your CPU and GPU brands match. You will see no performance increase at all (and actually a decrease) by matching an AMD GPU with an AMD CPU. There's no logical reason why anything your AMD chipset CPU can do can't be done (even better) on an Intel chipset CPU.

Though they kind of do belong together, since their only respective competitors are held by the same company

But yes, their architectures are totally different and that's totally fine. Your GPU and CPU do not have to share chipsets or architectures. That's impossible anyways since GPU and CPU architectures are completely different.

I have the 290 Double Dissipation. I've thought about going Intel, but like I said I'm an AMD fanboy. I don't mind the slight differences compared to the price difference. Especially when I have car payments and rent that I would have to cut into if I decided to go that route. To each their own eh?

But is there any explanation at all as to why you like AMD so much as to cripple your own computer's performance over it? Is there some feature or something that you're after that explains why you side with AMD? Or is it simply because of a reason like 'I like the way the letters in AMD work together, ay-em-dee sounds nice'?

The difference isn't very slight. Your R9 290 is being held back by your CPU. It would perform a lot better if it wasn't being bottlenecked.

Honestly I haven't noticed a difference. I can still run the games I play on ultra with no performance issues at high FPS and have no problem multitasking. And when I built this the price was a big thing. Now of i do more research and find a better idea of what I want when I upgrade then I would consider going with something different, but as of right now I'm happy where I'm at