Upgrade time!

Posted by admin on March 17th, 2015

This is going to be a bit of a ramble about what to upgrade and when.

Upgrade what though?

Ah, yeah, sorry told you this was going to be a ramble. Let’s start at the beginning. I built a PC a few years ago, it’s a really capable build in a Corsair 650D case which I really like and suits my style of liking understated things. I splashed out at the time on a pair of GTX 780 graphic’s cards which I run in SLI. To be honest (and this is going to sound greedy) I’ve never been that impressed with the performance. I have two displays connected a fairly basic LG 1080p panel and one of the very first affordable 1440p screen from Hazro.

However gaming at 1440p is still a bit of a dream. I actually use the 1440p monitor for video editing and coding, I love the real estate that the display gives and it makes using complicated applications with many windows a breeze. I can game in 1440p but there’s always a level of compromise and with the added problem of trying to capture gameplay footage as well I’ve stuck to gaming in 1080p. I have upgraded one component in the machine which is to add some memory but that’s all I’ve done.

Now I want to treat myself to an upgrade but I’m not sure what to do. Should I aim for a 1440p gaming experience at no compromise or should I just get myself some more real estate at 1440p (or 4k even).

So I started into the (seemingly never-ending) research that these upgrades require, computers are bloody complicated and I like to get things right, especially if I am going to spend a bit of money. The first thing I found is that in-theory a pair of 780s in SLI ought to be fine at 1440p but I’m still not sure if that’s at 60 fps at generally high settings or not. I’ve also found that SLI doesn’t play too well with Shadowplay which is what I use to capture my game footage.

Do you know what I still don’t actually know what to do and this post was just going to wither and die. Then I realised, blogging was originally about publishing an online diary, the term has changed now and for myself as a professional techie there always has to be a point to a blog post. This post has a point but not the one I thought it was going to be.

Life can be frustrating, technology is frustrating and when you try to have cutting edge technology it can be very frustrating.

Writing things down really helps, even if it is in a rambling blog post that no one will ever read.

When I’ve sussed out the answer to my upgrade issue I will post an update.