Need a Couple Upgrades

[UnKnownSoldier41]

So, I quite new here (Boy I'm sure you get that a lot) and I'd like to ask a few of you with more experience a few questions about my rig.

 

First off, my PC is a Dell Precision T7400. I know it's old, I know I should get something better, but, I don't have the cash to do a full upgrade to the things I would like to have on a PC.

My specs are the following:

- Dual Xeon E5450s (3.0Ghz Quad Cores, Each)

- 16GB of ECC Fully Buffered Memory (DDR2)

- A 1TB Western Digital HHD

- Two GTX 660s 2GB Graphics Cards (Not in SLI)

- Windows 7 Pro (Dual Booted with Windows XP x64 Bit)

 

So this machine is coming up on it's 10th birthday, and It's my main machine. I built it back in the 2014/2015 era, waaay before I found Linus's video about "Cheap 8-Core PCs" for those of you wondering. I use it to make digital art/animation, gaming (Mostly World of Tanks...), and It often takes the jobs of wiping other hard drives for my other computers I normally test on, via a removable HHD caddy on the front, and my main file server. This machine is very stable and very reliable and surprisingly quiet for it's size. I do not want to upgrade to a new OS from the two that I have on there.

 

Some of my ideas (some good, some odd) are the following:

- I want to get SOME kind of an SSD for the main boot drive

- I would like to try a few of the new Solid State Hybrid Drives (At least two) to use as storage.

- Possibly use another SSD completely as Virtual Memory (Mostly for VMs, I also want to test how well it works.)

- While the Graphics Cards work great, and I love the 6xx Series, I would like to upgrade them to at least GTX 680s to GTX 980s. (Although AMD Cards are not outta the question)

- Maybe push to get the Top Quad Core processors available for the LGA 771 socket?

- This machine can (in theory) make use of 128GB of RAM, although from what I've been able to find, I could only reasonably push to 64GB at 800Mhz.

 

Keep in mind, I gotta push this machine's life at least 4 more years...at least as my main machine. After that, it will be a dedicated NAS Server. If you can think of anything I might need or want to change, let me know! Any feedback is welcome! 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, UnKnownSoldier41 said:

- I want to get SOME kind of an SSD for the main boot drive

I would do this only for the Windows 7 install, since it's aware that SSDs are a thing. Windows XP will just go "tralalala" and do horrible things to it. Plus XP is more or less speedy even on hard drive. At least that's how I remember it back in the day (I have gotten sub 30 second boots with XP on a hard drive before)

2 minutes ago, UnKnownSoldier41 said:

- I would like to try a few of the new Solid State Hybrid Drives (At least two) to use as storage.

SSHDs only do their "magic" if the data you're accessing is frequent. If you're using it for normal storage and accessing random files once in a while, the SSHD benefits won't really kick in.

2 minutes ago, UnKnownSoldier41 said:

- Possibly use another SSD completely as Virtual Memory (Mostly for VMs, I also want to test how well it works.)

If you have enough RAM and you're not running out, you won't really need a disk for the swap file.

2 minutes ago, UnKnownSoldier41 said:

- While the Graphics Cards work great, and I love the 6xx Series, I would like to upgrade them to at least GTX 680s to GTX 980s. (Although AMD Cards are not outta the question)

Or a GTX 1060. Or RX 480. However considering the CPU is an older architecture, it's probably going to bottleneck the GPU at about this point if not already bottlenecking.

 

[NTDaws]

Mmm you might be bottlenecked, you could go 960, not sure how bad the bottleneck could be though. 64GB Memory is your limit for sure. You could go sshd on storage and ssd on boot. SSHD isn't recommended if your going the route for storage so a normal HDD is fine for that. You will be limited by Sata 2 speeds but it probably wont be a issue. Drive should still be fast enough. You could run Intel® Xeon® Processor X5492, I see support on the motherboard for that.

 

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Intel-Xeon-X5492-X5492-3-4-GHz-Quad-Core-AT80574KL096N-Processor-/162081687429?hash=item25bcd24785:g:enEAAOSwSWJXRGl1

[NTDaws]

These are your compatible CPUs

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/26555/Harpertown#@All

[NTDaws]

Ok this is all you need to upgrade

 

CPU: link x 2 buy from different sellers if they aren't selling two.

Memory: link

GPU: link

 

This is as far as it will go, and when you want it as a NAS buy two 5tb drives.

[UnKnownSoldier41]

Thanks guys, It really helps, wish me luck!