Upgrading PC for FFXIV {planning time}

Furtively Altruistic Joined : 2008-05-21 Posts : 4384

Been looking over at Newegg and reading all around the net; customer reviews & benchmarks of many parts and for the best value without gouging myself by choosing parts that exceed $1000 or more and will still far exceed my current setup. I'm only planning on replacing parts in my PC instead of buying an all new case, PS, HDDs, etc...all that still works great but the internal power parts are going on 3 yrs old this summer, and while I still have no issues running anything on max to nearly max settings I want even more power...especially a quad-core CPU, and 8GB ram.

After many hrs today I've pretty much decided on these items:

AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz
MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard
OCZ Platinum 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 ~ x2 for 8gb total!

Which total $603.96, and thats before any type of sales or rebates and shipping costs, plus I don't plan to purchase these items for several months yet so they could drop in price even more.

I'm also contemplating whether to try and find a 2nd EVGA GTX 275 video card, and SLi with my current one, or just wait until this Nov or so when FFXIV should be nearing launch, and save up til then and just get one of the newest EVGA GTX 480.
The GTX 480 is currently going for about $629 through EVGA which is whom I'll buy from should I be able to afford one, and I'm thinking as quickly as prices fluctuate on PC parts, especially video cards, I'd image that price would drop by 1/2 or more by Nov or so, making it plenty affordable too me.

Still trying to find a good benchmark site to compare my GTX 275 with the GTX 480, but just looking at the stats of the two side-by-side, the 480 is clearly 10x better as it should be...rofl

I'll be watching out for a chart and post it when I can, but what do you all think of these choices for the value!?

Joined : 2010-02-05 Posts : 229

There's a review of the 480 here: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=24000&page=1 that has the gtx275 in the benchmarks, so you'll be able to compare performance. I was looking at this earlier and have decided to wait until it goes down in price a bit. The 275 will suffice for now!

Furtively Altruistic Joined : 2008-05-21 Posts : 4384