Graphics cards and SSD
Discussion
need some help and advice.
I have this current spec of dell precision which i got a few months ago (free of course
due to upgrading at work).
I have put a wireless card into it but i would like a better graphics card into it and possibly a ssd.
any recommendations on either would be great
not going to do heavy gaming or anything but possibly a bit of gaming along with some photo and video editing but would be possibly running on a 4K screen so if there was anything out there like that.
dont want to spend huge amounts but something good quality.
I have this current spec of dell precision which i got a few months ago (free of course
due to upgrading at work).
I have put a wireless card into it but i would like a better graphics card into it and possibly a ssd.
any recommendations on either would be great
not going to do heavy gaming or anything but possibly a bit of gaming along with some photo and video editing but would be possibly running on a 4K screen so if there was anything out there like that.
dont want to spend huge amounts but something good quality.
Both are budget dependent, more so for the graphics card.
£140 will get you a gtx 960 which is a solid card for light gaming and should handle medium to high on modern games at 1080.
£250 will get you a gtx 970 (960s bigger brother)
and so on...
(I would not suggest going any cheaper the 960, this is the real entry point for graphics cards)
As for the SSD they are all very similar, you are paying for capacity, speed and reliability, and even then it is mostly only capacity you are paying for, I believe the Samsung 850 EVO is about the best consumer SSD out there, it's down to you to decide on the capacity you can afford, but I would suggest a 256gb and buy a cheap mechanical 2TB hard drive for mass storage.
£140 will get you a gtx 960 which is a solid card for light gaming and should handle medium to high on modern games at 1080.
£250 will get you a gtx 970 (960s bigger brother)
and so on...
(I would not suggest going any cheaper the 960, this is the real entry point for graphics cards)
As for the SSD they are all very similar, you are paying for capacity, speed and reliability, and even then it is mostly only capacity you are paying for, I believe the Samsung 850 EVO is about the best consumer SSD out there, it's down to you to decide on the capacity you can afford, but I would suggest a 256gb and buy a cheap mechanical 2TB hard drive for mass storage.
You probably know this, but what you have there is a heavy-duty workstation class machine that is totally unsuited to gaming. It will do pretty well at photo and video editing, presuming that you are using professional-quality software that can take advantage of all those cores and all that RAM. Typically, consumer-class software does not scale up well on this kind of hardware and most of it sits there doing nothing most of the time. Specifically, your Xeon CPUs have lots of cores, but they all run rather slowly - 2GHz is not much more than half the clock speed you would get from a consumer-grade CPU - and so if your applications are largely single-threaded they will just run slowly, and games, on the whole, do not use multiple cores well.
If you genuinely just want a little light gaming then great - get the cheapest 900-series NVidia GPU you can - the 960 starts from under £150. If you don't want to game, but definitely want to drive a 4k desktop, then pretty much any GPU will do it. If you want to run modern games at hi-res, then frankly I'd start with a different base.
On the SSD front: I am normally a big fan but actually in your case I'm not so sure. You already have some excellent hard drives in there - 10k SAS drives are the dog's nuts - and with 64GB of RAM, Windows should automatically use most of it to cache your most frequently used files, which will go a long way to reducing the impact of a physical drive.
If I were to put it in car terms, what you currently have is a last-generation S-class, which is still a very fine machine in its own right. However it really isn't where you'd start if you wanted to build a track day monster.
If you genuinely just want a little light gaming then great - get the cheapest 900-series NVidia GPU you can - the 960 starts from under £150. If you don't want to game, but definitely want to drive a 4k desktop, then pretty much any GPU will do it. If you want to run modern games at hi-res, then frankly I'd start with a different base.
On the SSD front: I am normally a big fan but actually in your case I'm not so sure. You already have some excellent hard drives in there - 10k SAS drives are the dog's nuts - and with 64GB of RAM, Windows should automatically use most of it to cache your most frequently used files, which will go a long way to reducing the impact of a physical drive.
If I were to put it in car terms, what you currently have is a last-generation S-class, which is still a very fine machine in its own right. However it really isn't where you'd start if you wanted to build a track day monster.
OP - I am a little rusty, but you may have issues with the SSD's and the PERC controller. A few years ago, these were very sensitive to the type of SSD's that could be used.
Also, I would check your motherboard... there may be power supply issues for a large GPU as well as the slot size not accepting a full size card.
Chris
Also, I would check your motherboard... there may be power supply issues for a large GPU as well as the slot size not accepting a full size card.
Chris
Deckster, thank you very much for your detailed reply.
Im not a massive gamer but occasionally i wouldn't mind a game here or there but its very doubt full.
it will be more for photo editing/video and then general usage.
4K to be honest would be a must.
and regards with to the hard-drives i was speaking to one of our guys at work where i acquired it from and they said the hard-drives are also the nutz what are already in it and they said they arent cheap.
i may just upgrade the graphics card and leave it at that.
Im not a massive gamer but occasionally i wouldn't mind a game here or there but its very doubt full.
it will be more for photo editing/video and then general usage.
4K to be honest would be a must.
and regards with to the hard-drives i was speaking to one of our guys at work where i acquired it from and they said the hard-drives are also the nutz what are already in it and they said they arent cheap.
i may just upgrade the graphics card and leave it at that.
Amazon have some good deals on Sandisk SSDs today - just ordered a 480GB Ultra II drive for £79.99 and 240GB Plus is £39.99.
You might struggle running anything recent on a 635w PSU depending on the amperage of the rails.
I bought a 980Ti which wouldn't run on my old PSU, it needed something like 27a on the 12v rail, my last PSU could only muster something like 15a, so when the load got too high, the machine shut down.
After buying and fitting one of these - it is back to its rock-solid stable self.
I bought a 980Ti which wouldn't run on my old PSU, it needed something like 27a on the 12v rail, my last PSU could only muster something like 15a, so when the load got too high, the machine shut down.
After buying and fitting one of these - it is back to its rock-solid stable self.
I use a very similar Dell Precision workstation as a general-purpose PC as it would take a big chunk of RAM to run lots of VMs.
They're designed for pretty beefy workstation cards (and often two of them) so as long as it's not a high-end card with silly power consumption it'll be fine. Check what power connectors you have available as they all need supplemental power these days. The specs on the Dell website for that model should have the maximum wattage allowed too - 300W for the T5600 according to this: https://www.in.tum.de/fileadmin/user_upload/RBG/Da...
I have a GTX960 which does me fine - I did need to cut out a bit of the internal metal bracket on the side panel to clear the heatsink though as it's quite a bit deeper than the Quadro it came with.
For SSDs I just got some 2.5 to 3.5" adaptor plates and mounted those in the plastic trays. The SAS drives in the spec are fast but not SSD-fast and will be noisy. I did away with spinning drives in mine and now it's virtually silent.
They're designed for pretty beefy workstation cards (and often two of them) so as long as it's not a high-end card with silly power consumption it'll be fine. Check what power connectors you have available as they all need supplemental power these days. The specs on the Dell website for that model should have the maximum wattage allowed too - 300W for the T5600 according to this: https://www.in.tum.de/fileadmin/user_upload/RBG/Da...
I have a GTX960 which does me fine - I did need to cut out a bit of the internal metal bracket on the side panel to clear the heatsink though as it's quite a bit deeper than the Quadro it came with.
For SSDs I just got some 2.5 to 3.5" adaptor plates and mounted those in the plastic trays. The SAS drives in the spec are fast but not SSD-fast and will be noisy. I did away with spinning drives in mine and now it's virtually silent.
When you say 4k is a must if you mean for gaming then i'd be prepared to buy a second PC and plough a lot of money at it, the only card which might be able to game at 4k at reasonable frame rate is the new 1080 and you'd probably want 2 in order to be sure of getting good frame rates in lots of games so thats £1200 gone there not to mention the PSU as described is unlikely to cope
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