Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I figure my few year old i7-920 has some life in it. I can play Xcom, and street fighter, so in general i'm happy. It isn't always quite as fast as I want though.
I had two upgrades on my list, and thanks to a $130 deal on Intel 250 Gig SSD, I took the plunge. I am hoping someone gives me my second upgrade ( Geforce 650 TI I believe to replace my 9800 GT).
It was pretty easy to do.
1) opened the NZXTA case, found out I needed NZXTA rails. Oh well. NZXTA is great, 3year old PC and they are shipping them free of charge.
2) unplugged the two drives
3) plugged the SSD drive into one of the connectors on the motherboard, and to power
4) made sure the BIOS was AHCI (or whatever)
5)set boot order to CD first, Drive 2nd.
6) booted into a windows 7 professional (that I had to format again with a premium when I couldn't find my professional key. . and couldn't get a hacked one).
7) re-connected the other drives, but kept boot order to SSD and CD
I ended up cleaning off the old windows after moving my documents over to a connected esata.
I know my mother board is not the full 3gbps sata, but haven't noticed. It is a really fast boot, and quiet as all hell.
I reinstalled apps onto the drive, as I saw fit (i.e. office/chrome on the SSD. Some games on the hard drives. Documents on hard drives)
I also followed some SSD tips (updating intel driver, etc) but I haven'tinstalled the latest firmware yet.
My Q9550 has been great for a few years now, and your i7 is better than mine so I'd say there's quite a bit of life left. However my Q9550 is OC'ds so I'd consider that for your i7 as well.
I also installed a SSD and an Nvidia 550ti over the summer. It runs most games and programs the way I want them too with no complaints.
I slapped an SSD in each of my laptops a year ago. Best thing I did. I got a USB enclosure and using Macrium free I just cloned the drive to the new SSD. After that's done, swap them out and you're good to go. Nice thing then is that you've got the original drive to fall back on if you ever need to. Of course, if you have an empty drive bay, use it to put your HDD in as a secondary drive.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
