Spec me...An upgrade on a shoestring

tsgray70

tsgray70

tsgray70

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I hope that you can advise.

I currently have an Athlon 64 3200 and 1gb ram. I would like to re use my Radeon 1900 and IDE HD if poss but would like new chip, mobo and Ram. Apologies but total budget is £150 :O

Any suggestions gratefully received.
 
E5200, IP35 pro XE and 4gb of the Kingston 8500 will come to just over £150 with delivery and make a good bit of kit. Think it's got one IDE socket on for older hard drives? but I'm guessing you X1900 is AGP?
 
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
CP-234-AM_60.jpg
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 7750+ Black Edition 2.70GHz (Socket AM2+) - Retail £57.49
(£49.99) £57.49
(£49.99)
MB-178-GI_60.jpg
Gigabyte GA-M52L-S3 nForce 520LE (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £50.59
(£43.99) £50.59
(£43.99)
MY-026-KS_60.jpg
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C5 800MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX6400D2K2/4G) £32.98
(£28.68) £32.98
(£28.68) Sub Total : £122.66 Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50 VAT is being charged at 15% VAT : £19.82 Total : £151.98
 
Kennysevenfold said:
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
CP-234-AM_60.jpg
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 7750+ Black Edition 2.70GHz (Socket AM2+) - Retail £57.49
(£49.99) £57.49
(£49.99)
MB-178-GI_60.jpg
Gigabyte GA-M52L-S3 nForce 520LE (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £50.59
(£43.99) £50.59
(£43.99)
MY-026-KS_60.jpg
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C5 800MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX6400D2K2/4G) £32.98
(£28.68) £32.98
(£28.68) Sub Total : £122.66 Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50 VAT is being charged at 15% VAT : £19.82 Total : £151.98
Click to expand...

great spec, similar to my rig at the moment.
 
Trunks9486 said:
Vote for this set up.
Click to expand...

you fail :)

come in at just over 150.? more like just under 200

Product Name Qty Price Line Total
CP-251-IN_60.jpg
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 "LGA775 Core 2" 2.50GHz (800FSB) - Retail £68.99
(£59.99) £68.99
(£59.99)
MB-143-AB_60.jpg
Abit IP35 Pro XE Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £68.99
(£59.99) £68.99
(£59.99)
MY-039-KS_60.jpg
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 X 2GB) DDR2 8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX8500D2K2/4G) £42.99
(£37.38) £42.99
(£37.38) Sub Total : £157.36 Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50 VAT is being charged at 15% VAT : £25.03 Total : £191.89
 
True, may be more but the overclocking headroom of that set up is really great and worth the difference for me at least. And i am not a fun of the AMD set up, processor is too power hungry (95w at stock, more if overclocked, older Phenom I technology means it wont clock too well), motherboard doesnt seem to be too great either >_>
 
you could, considering that you don't care too much about overclocking or extreme performance, go down the AMD Athlon X2 route, assuming that the athlon that you have now is one of the pre-X2 athlons.

It's not the fastest stuff out there by any stretch, and it's by no means future proof, but it should still be better than what you have and comes to less than £150 (inc P&P):

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-234-AM
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-016-AK
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-042-AK
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-010-OK

one of the better features of that board is that, even though its old, it's relatively inexpensive and is socket AM2 which will still allow you to use more powerful/faster AM2 processors later on and Sata hard drives in Raid 0 once you have the capital behind you and you should be able to use youre existing hardware without conflict, and with what it will be capable of in the beginning, i doubt that you will require more than 2GB of ram. If i were you though, i'd still consider tearing out that IDE drive.

why appologise for you're budget being £150? If it's all you have, it's all you have. It's harder and more fun to spec an upgrade for someone on a tight budget than it is a large one.

Failing any of the advice that any of us can offer you, you could consider saving up another £100-£150 if that's do-able for you and buying a budget pre-built system from ocuk. It all really depends on what you intend to use the system for once it's been built up. If it is intended to just do menial tasks like surfing the net, emails etc.. you could also consider buying one of the small Asus laptops that are available these days for not much more than £150
 
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^another good spec, but I would leave the arctic cooler; its a great cooler (I have one) but the one included with the chip will do fine, and means you can spend the money saved on some better memory like the kingston/corsair 4gb 1066Mhz kits that are around £40 at the moment.
 
thanks, but the trouble with the memory is that you're not going to notice a hell of a lot of difference between 800 and 1066Mhz, and you'll probably not need more than 2Gb for a standard machine that is not aimed towards gaming (that card would need to be upgraded also if it were aimed at gaming, in its day it was a good card but now it's a bit dated). If you're on a budget you have to be as efficient in you're upgrades as possible whilst getting the biggest bang for you're buck, i don't think that you are going to be able to do that by buying several GB more of memory that you wont neccessarily need, if needed more memory can be added later (and may actually save money if the price come down even more) where as 2GB is more than enough to get you up and running.

If you stay with the stock cooler then you'd be just aswell having 2GB of 800mhz memory (which is the fastest that board can take) and putting the rest towards a sata 2 hard drive, you can get a single platter 320GB Samsung F1 drive for £40, takes the total up to £168 inc p&p though but you would definately notice the difference with that drive over an IDE one (thats a nice spec for a HTPC come to think about it :) ).

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-234-AM
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-016-AK
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-057-SA
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-010-OK

there are not a lot of drives below that price range that offer as much performance/space as the F1 and that is a great drive to own, you could survive just on one drive by partitioning it in to 2 drives but on reflection i do agree that the stock fan would be just as good but that cooler might have given you a little overclocking potential, but still only a little.
 
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I should have mentioned in the original post that the machine is used for net / office etc and WoW. At the moment I have some of the settings turned down and its at about 30fps. However if i go anywhere near a major city it slows to a slide show.

Thanks again for all the input
 
Josh107 said:
E5200, IP35 pro XE and 4gb of the Kingston 8500 will come to just over £150 with delivery and make a good bit of kit. Think it's got one IDE socket on for older hard drives? but I'm guessing you X1900 is AGP?
Click to expand...

I've just upgraded my old machine with almost exactly the same components (had OCZ 8500 Gold ram instead) and its made quite a difference to my gaming using my old x1950pro PCI-e card. I overclocked it to 3.2GHz using the standard cooler by just upping the clock speed.

I've since got a better cooler and have it now running at just under 3.6GHz although I've got to run the stress tests for longer to prove its stable. For a total spend (including extra cooler) of just over £200 its great :)
 
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