Maximum PC

I've got about $1500 dollars to spend through benefits at my work for professional development and I think its time to upgrade my desktop seeing as I got everything about 5 years ago now. I'm happy with all my peripherals so all the money can go towards the actual hardware of the pc. I do alot of work with software like Maya, Zbrush, Photoshop etc as well as alot of gaming. Its still working pretty well but I'm starting to get annoyed by loss of productivity when it starts hanging up on operations now, and its not playing some of the newer games at a good fps anymore. I'm planning to just buy all the components and assemble myself.

my current specs are:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz
Motherboard: Intel DQ965GF AAD41676-402
Memory: 4096 MBytes DDR2 (4 X 1024)
Graphics: GeForce 8800 GTS 512
Tower: Mid
OS: Vista

I want to upgrade to a 64 bit os, I know I need a new processor in order to do that, but I'm not sure if my motherboard would be capable of handling that? What should I be looking at to determine if I can use this same motherboard with updated components? Do some motherboards have better performance? Also is my old ram just garbage now?

I also need to buy a larger tower because I already have 3 hard drives, and with the graphics card there just isn't enough room. If I got a SSD for the os would I notice the speed increase if I still keep my old hard drives as storage drives, ie save working files on the ssd along with os, then when done a project migrate it to the old hd's?

If anyone knowledgeable is up to it I would also appreciate any recommendations for what I should be looking at to buy as far as cpu, graphics, and ram.

and finally last question - I currently have 2 monitors setup through dvi on my graphics card. I'm looking at purchasing a wacom cintiq (essentially a third monitor) a little down the road and would like to keep my 2 existing monitors as well. This would mean a 3 monitor setup. This would mean I need 2 graphics cards correct? Would it be worth keeping my existing 8800 as well as a new graphics card, or should I buy 2 new graphics cards and sli them? Not sure what the best approach for this situation is.

sorry for so many questions! Thanks.

Practically all system parts made from 2006 on support 64-bit OS's and environments. Some motherboards do have better performance than others, but it's not a noticeable difference in the end. Motherboards are more about what IO you need. And DDR2 memory is obsolete.


Using an SSD over an HDD will yield noticeable performance speeds for most applications. However, most people put programs on the SSDs and all data files on HDDs. It really depends on how big of files we're talking about and if you're impatient or not. However, while the speed increase is noticeable, it's not orders of magnitude greater.


One of the resident parts listers can help you here. I'm kind of generic here.


You could recycle the 8800 and get a new card, if you wanted to.

I apologize if some of these answers are vague, but there is no "right or wrong" way to answer some of these.

Actually, OCZ's RevoDrive 3 X2 MAX series PCI Express SSD's can deliver order of magnitude performance increases with sustained transfer rates at 1500 - 1900MB/s reads and writes of1300 - 1725MB/s - depending on model & capacity. Of course you have to sell your first born or a kidney to afford one of those beasties, but the performance is there for those who can afford it.

My own real world differences with an "affordable" SSD...

On the PC I just gave my mom:
Western Digital Caviar Blue 80GB SATA II HDD with fresh Windows 7 install, boot time average is 68 seconds
OCZ Agility 3 120GB SATA III SSD (I paid $101 shipped from newegg after sale price & coupon code) with fresh Windows 7 install boot time average is 42 second. All other hardware & settings was the same between both setups. If you take POST times out of the numbers the speed difference is more pronounced. With POST taking about 16 seconds regardless of what drives or OS is installed, HDD start-up time becomes 52sec & SSD start-up time becomes 26sec.

On my PC:
Premier Pro CS5.5 startup on 2TB RAID-0 array (twin WD Caviar Black SATA III 64MB cache 1TB drives) is about 11 seconds under Windows 7 pro 64bit w/SP1, Vs about 4 seconds in Windows 8 Customer Preview 64bit on single Mushkin Chronos 120GB SATA III SSD. All other hardware the same.

Don't have a boot time comparison on my PC, never thought to clock it till I had pulled the RAID & installed the SSD. Plus it's not fair to compare Win 7 boot times to Win 8 boot times. Win 8 is optimized for fast boots... On my mom's PC, Windows 8 averaged 26 seconds to boot up on SSD Vs 42 seconds for Windows 7 on the same SSD.

Both the Chronos & Agility 3 bench at over 500MB/sec sustained read & write or about 2.5-3.5x slower than the RevoDrive 3 X2 Max drives

Well, if we're down to double digits, an order of magnitude would be down to single digits.

Also comparing an SSD to an 80GB drive is somewhat unfair, considering that the data density on that would be much lower than say a 1TB or 2TB drive. And data density plays a pretty big role in HDD performance. Like my laptop with a 750GB drive can boot up Windows almost as fast as my SSD on my desktop. It's not the best SSD in the world, but considering the HDD can keep up is something.

Actually, I used the 80GB on purpose... the OP did not list the HDD used, so there's no way you could make such a statement without assuming that he's already using something modern... For all we know, his current OS drive could be a first generation SATA I drive & the performance boost would be even more pronounced than what I posted

145MB/sec (SATA III 600GB VelociRaptor - probably the fairest HDD to compare to any SSD) Vs 1900MB/sec (SATA III 480GB RevoDrive 3 X2 Max) = 13x increase... an order of magnitude is a 10x increase The problem is that with that big of an increase, the bottle neck moves to another part of the system, & you don't see an order of magnitude improvement based on the number of seconds it takes to do something.

No you don't need a new motherboard if you're only looking to improve gaming performance. Just drop a GTX460 or better in there & you're good to go.

IF however you're also looking to improve Maya & Photoshop performance, then yes, you will need a new motherboard, because the only better processor you can move up to on your current board is a QX-6800 Quad-Core @ 2.93GHz stock.

With your budget, I'd go with an Intel Core i7-2600k build:
GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 - $200 shipped
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz Quad-Core CPU - $300 shipped
Crucial Ballistix 16GB DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 RAM - $125 shipped
EVGA GTX 560 Ti FTW 448 Cores GPU - $300 shipped
OCZ Nocti mSATA 30GB SATA II SSD - $55 shipped - for dedicated scratch disk &/or page file - goes into onboard motherboard connector.
Mushkin Chronos 120GB SATA III SSD - $103 shipped - for OS & programs
PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mark II 950 Watt PSU - $130 shipped - after 15% off coupon code that ends 5/21
WIndows 7 Pro 64bit OEM - $140 shipped

Total: $1,353
Enough left off the original $1500 to get a better GPU, or additional hardware as desired!