need suggestions for upgrading my desktop

exodortch, Welcome to SF. First off you have quite a bit of stuff running off 500w PSU what make and model is that? I like you system and was wondering have you tried the ReadyBoost feature? As soon as you add your SSD it likely won't need it but till then do you have a RB usb or sd flash drive and try it?

The addition of the SSD will make OS and Appl. loading a snap and you will be addicted but as far as running code will that code be on the SSD? I'm guessing not, so you may want to investigate running a couple of 10,000 rpm drives in Raid. You'll get some good advice here. Have you run any benchmarks like WEI and PassMark you could offer? Looking over the system spec's I'm not finding any thing to fault it's for sure a sweet rig and my hats off to you.

I think for your kind of application only raw processing power will help. The top dog for your socket is the Intel i7 980x ( Newegg.com - Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Gulftown 3.33GHz 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80613I7980X ). But the beginning of the year they will come out with a 990x which will drop the price of the 980x. I read reports where people have overclocked it to 4.5GHz on air - but that may not be your thing.

The Patriot Inferno has good specs and will help. Make sure you leave the pagefile on it and give it a LOT of space - e.g. in case you do matrix inversions.

Other than that I cannot really think of much. Your system is pretty rich already.

thanks for the suggestions. I have a 500 Watt ATX 12V Power Supply. what wattage should i move up to 600 or 700 series? they are fairly cheep$100 or less so that is possible.

I do not have a readyboost flash. the SSD will be here in a week, so i can wait and see how it does first.

the i7 980xis a good idea as the GIS only uses one core (ESRI is slow at updating software and announced they do not plan on changing this any time soon) so the speed is the primary thing there. MatLab has a parallel computing tool box, so more cores would help there. its just so expensive. I would have to save for a few months. not that i am in a hurry.

as far a page filing goes, i read that i should move it to the HHD (which is where the raptors would come in) because the SSD wearout quickly from the repeated use. if i left the page filing on the SSD how long would it last? also, 2 raptors are expensive as well, another thing i would have to save for. so for the next purchase should i go with i7 980xor 2 10,000 RPM raptors?

as far a page filing goes, i read that i should move it to the HHD (which is where the raptors would come in) because the SSD wearout quickly from the repeated use

Sorry to say that, but you are reading the wrong story. The SSD will not wear out in the next few years and I bet that in 3 years you will have a newer one anyhow.

It absolutely makes no sense to move the pagefile to those slow raptors. Compare the access times - the SSD is at 0.1ms and your raptors are probably 100 times slower (check with HD Tune - but let it run al the way to the end. Else you get no access time).

I would say forget the raptors all together. Unless you write and read enormous amounts of data all the time, they are pretty useless (7.200 or 10.000 RPM). For system operations, the SSD cannot be beat.

Just another thought: When you run those demanding programs, what is the paging activity. Go to Resource Monitor (type into start/search), there click on the Memory tab and have a look at the bottom right graph. Does it show any activity and how much.

I guess you are OK for the paging file. No need to make extra arrangements. Just keep an eye on it when you have a heavy load. The little bumps are most likely from the AV program. Some programs use the pagefile even when most of the RAM is unused. You can see which program does it on top of the page. Set "Hard Page Faults" such that is shows the faults (click on it).

Does a GPU help with your kind of applications?

And 60GBs of SSD are plenty for the system. I have two Intel 80GB and one OCZ 60GB SSDs (on 3 different systems - one 32 bit Win7, one 64 bit Win7 and one Vista) and more than half the space is empty on all three. In fact the Win7 takes less than 20GBs but I moved my data files to the HDDs. Only those I access all the time stay on the SSD.

One file you can get rid of once installed is the hiberfile (unless you use hibernation). The cmd command is powercfg -h off. That will save you 12GBs (size of RAM).