Little upgrade for £500

mattjd

mattjd

mattjd

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Joined
16 Feb 2010
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Location
Malvern, England
I currently have a pre built system an Acer M7721.

Specs:
i7 920 @ stock
Acer's own motherboard (doesnt allow me to overclock :()
6gb DDR3 RAM 2x2gb and 2x1gb (Kind of strange but oh well)
Some cooler which I dont know what it is but its a Heat sink about the size of a large fist with a fan on the top of it.
nVidia Geforce GTS240 2gb Dual GPU card
1tb HDD with Windows 7 on it.

So I am getting £500 next week and I wonder what I could upgrade on here first of all which popped into my mind is the GPU so i was thinking a 5870 but was not sure because I cant overclock my CPU because of this annoying motherboard it also makes my RAM run at 1066MHz :/

I was also looking at the asus xonar DX 7.1 sound card because I currently I am using on board sound and I think i am not getting the best out of Logitech X-540 and I also like the look of the Sennheiser PC-350 gaming headset.

So what would you do to make this system a bit more gaming friendly? :)
 
i would get a 5850, it will cost less and can be overclocked to perform as well or some times better then a stock 5870 - not too sure about overclocked but is it really worth the price tag for a little bit of performance gain?

i will be getting the same soundcard, just bought some USB speakers (under 10) and they work perfect for me at the moment, as i will will replace these in the future with that soundcard and a nice speaker system :)

everything else seems okay, maybe look at another HD if you are running out of space?
 
IMO the best thing you could get is a new mobo,a HD5850,a new cooler and maybe new RAM.However if you wanna go for new RAM it will cost about 540 quid.
 
I wasnt really sure about the 5850 because I am buildiung a new pc later in the year and I was just going to put these parts in temporarily in this pc when I save up for the new pc. The 5870 overclocked to 1GHz looks to be the best single GPU card in the market.
 
5850

Leaves £280 for a good motherboard and proper triple channel ram.

Patriot viper 6gb kit is on special offer. £129.99

Asus P6T se is £144.98
 
aint the 5870 like twice the price and some times a bit more then the 5850?
i would just get the 5850 its still very powerful and can be overclocked well
could add a new cooler depending on what one you have
adding a new Mobo will allow you to overclock the CPU as well (as long as you get one that allows it) :)
 
Ast3r said:
IMO the best thing you could get is a new mobo,a HD5850,a new cooler and maybe new RAM.
Click to expand...

I would do that but the Mobo is smaller than usual and the case cant fit a normal sized one inside of it. I noticed the Rampage II Game intel would fit but like I said the parts are only going to be temporarily in this pc. Thsi pc atm is going to end up as a HTPC when i build my new one.
 
I wouldn't bother with the 5870. As Kellaway suggested the 5850 seems to be the best price to performance.
The cooler you mentioned sounds like a generic intel stock cooler. If so you probably wouldn't get much of a OC out of it anyway. Any ideas what temperatures you're getting?
The other thing I would say is your RAM is a bit messed up! You seem to have DDR3 RAM effectively running in dual channel mode. I would look into buying 1x2Gb and 1x1Gb stick and then running them as 3x2Gb and 3x1GB. I'm assuming as it came with 6Gb you have windows 7 64bit?
On board sound is usually sufficient on most MOBO although I have no idea what you have. If you feel you could do with better audio then I'd go for it, it's not exactly a bank busting card :)
 
I think I ran it on prime once and I was getting 59-61 degrees on full load with this crappy cooler.
 
I think I will just get a 5870, Asus Xonar DX and the Sennheiser PC-350's because first of all if I bought a new motherboard and RAM and I went to overclock I would have to buy a new cooler which wont fit because the case is quite compact and the only motherboard that will fit inside is the Asus rampage II game intel and I dont think its worth it because I am building a new wate cooled system in the summer and I can just put the sound card and 5870 into my new build which will save me some cash and put the old GPU back into this one and put it down stairs in my home cinema system.
 
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Umm its a Delta PSU and it says 727.8W Max on it. It has 3 6 pin connectors and 1 8 pin I think it has enough juice to power one 5870.
 
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