Upgrading my system is overdue. As you can see in my signature I’m running an EVGA Nvidia 9800 GT that’s been serving me well since 2008. I’m looking for a card that is more powerful and compatible with my system with no bottleneck. I’m thinking of getting the 2 gig GTX 650 TI Boost but may be a little over my current budget atm (want to stay with EVGA Nvidia cards). If I can do better I’m all ears. The mother board is an ASUS P5QL Pro.
I do plan on trying a dual boot system with 1 hard drive running XP and another running Windows 7. I want to put a 64 bit OS so I can take advantage of my RAM capacity. I never tried it before and can use some advice. I got a 300 gig hard drive sitting empty so might as well. I want to keep using XP because I have software that goes way back and don’t want to let go.
I can get up to 16 gigs of RAM on my current motherboard. I only have 2 sticks that equal 4 gigs right now with 2 empty slots where I want to put 2 more sticks. Currently because of the 32 bit I can only get 3.25gigs of RAM. I want to max out and get four 4 gig sticks.
The main things that I do are 3D modeling and rendering and gaming. The biggest resource hog of a game I have is Flight Simulator X. I also play a lot of SimCity 4 and Call of Duty. The games I have run good on my system but I notice that I can use a serious boost when it comes to 3D rendering. I would like some advice on what parts I can get to max out what I have. I do not plan on changing the motherboard or the CPU. I will be building another system in a few months when I can afford what I really want (like that machine that’s about to spoil me at my job with 8 cores and 32 gigs of RAM).
Thanks in advance.