£400-500 for upgrades, wanting advice

Amakuma

Amakuma

Amakuma

Associate
Joined
26 Jan 2010
Posts
291
Ive allocated myself (aka been green lighted by the girlfriend ;)) £400-500 for an upgrade. My current system is starting to feel aged and has lasted me a good while.

My current system is

E6600 @ 3.1 (startig to feel sluggish)
Asrock P43 Twins 1600 supports DDR2 + DDR3
2GB DDR2 800Mhz (did have 4GB but two sticks became corrupted)
1TB HDD + 80GB SSD
Sapphire 4850 512MB
650W Corsair PSU
19" sync master (starting to seem kinda small)

and Win Vista 64bit

Now heres my rough ideas for what to do

1.The twins supports DDR3 up to 1600Mhz, one option is a Quadcore 775 and DDR 3 memory. And spend the remaining on new GPU or Monitor

2. Put together an i5+new mobo with 4GB DDR3 and crossfire a second cheap 4850

3. Go AMD and put money saved into New monitor or GPU



Primary usage is Heavy Gaming, Photoshop and emulation. Im hoping a big boost upgrading from E6600
 
asdddaa.png


Slightly over but what the heck.
 
UD3R works perfect fine and should get you to 4ghz with no problem and its still within budget.

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard
£152.99
 
Thanks for the input guys, the i7 is outside of my budget range as nice as it would be, spending nearly 200 quid on a motherboard makes my eyes water, the i5 or 955 seems to sit in that sweet spot. The i5 while more expensive needs a cheaper mobo and performers better than the 955 in everything except gaming. Giving me room to possibly dump money on other things.

Would it be worth Crossfiring two 4850's 512MB? as Im being offered one for 40 quid.
 
Amakuma said:
Thanks for the input guys, the i7 is outside of my budget range as nice as it would be, spending nearly 200 quid on a motherboard makes my eyes water, the i5 or 955 seems to sit in that sweet spot. The i5 while more expensive needs a cheaper mobo and performers better than the 955 in everything except gaming. Giving me room to possibly dump money on other things.

Would it be worth Crossfiring two 4850's 512MB? as Im being offered one for 40 quid.
Click to expand...

well for 40£ i think its worth it should see some nice gain and you could still get the I7 build if you just get the cheaper UD3R mobo.
 
Dont really need one, but I would like to fit one in, problem is at 1280x1024 the 4850 is fine, but at 1900x1080 it might struggle, hence im considering crossfiring with another cheap 2nd hand 4850
 
Looking around can anyone recommend me any fairly x8 x8 crossfire capable mobo's for i5 or 955

or does 16 x 4 not make much difference?
 
Last edited:
I would go with the

G.Skill Ripjaw 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL) £93.99

its faster which should help with OCin that i5 and not much more money.
 
A Q9000 series quad core would be the most cost effective upgrade for the system the OP has ATM. They could get some more DDR2 RAM and buy an HD5850. Selling the E6600 and the HD4850 would also reduce the cost of the upgrade.

The OP should also wait an other week or two for the Phenom II X6 six core processors to be released. This should hopefully push down the price of the Core i5 750 as the Phenom II X6 1055T is meant to be around the same price.

The Phenom II X6 1055T runs at 2.8GHZ across its six cores, with upto 3 cores being boosted to 3.3GHZ(whilst the others drop down to 800MHZ) in software which does not scale well with more cores.

This AM3 motherboard does symmetrical Crossfire at PCI-E 2.0 8X/8X:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-366-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1481
 
Last edited:
About the monitor, I do not think you need a bigger one, just buy another 19'' and dual monitor :) It save you little bit since you only concern about screen size not the quality.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom