Quote Originally Posted by daredog4 View Post
Just wanting to know if I have any "go to" guys on here that have also built there own PC. I just finished replacing an Antec power supply in mine that crashed. Looking to the future I put in a Corsair 850 watt that is working flawlessly. Has anyone upgraded to the new Intel i7 chipset, and if so do you think it is a good investment? I am currently running a Pentium D that still works great but the 800mhz frontside bus and 667 mhz memory are really my limiting factors at this point. I really noticed how outdated it was when i tried to play Crysis. I cringe when i have to start putting my graphics settings on med-low and turn off anti-aliasing......grr. So im thinking a new mobo, cpu, and memory are going to be my next upgrades....and possibly add another graphics card to run in crossfire. Current rig is:

Case: Coolermaster Praetorian ATX Mid Tower
PSU: Corsair TX850W 850 watt (single 12v rail)
Mobo: Intel D955XBK LGA775 chipset
CPU: Pentium D 3Ghz (coolermaster cpu cooler with 120mm fan)
Mem: 2GB Kingston DDR2 667Mhz
GPU: Sapphire HD3870 Toxic edition
Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Pro
Hard Drive: 2 Western Digital 500GB (1TB total)
DVD Drive: 2 LightScribe DVD+R drives
Sounds to me like your logic is sound.

I assume you're running XP so you're bottlenecked at 2gb of ram, otherwise that'd be an upgrade.

What speed PCI-X are you running? I assume 16x? Many times, the speed and spec's of your video card make a huge difference, too. I'm also not a fan of stock mobo's, they tend to not overclock well.

I didn't look up your board/card specs cuz I'm a little lazy and haven't been in the computer rig game for like 2 years, but FSB is definitely a HUGE factor when you're streaming such massive amounts of data.