Upgrade for current PC

craigt1989 · 29 May 2011 at 21:46

ATM I have a Coolermaster HAF 912 case, Intel Q8300, Coolermaster Hyper 212+ CPU Cooler, Foxconn G31MX-K, 4GB DDR2 RAM, GTX 560ti and an Antec 520w Gaming PSU.

Thinking of changing the motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Was thinking of a MSI P67A-GD53 motherboard and an i5 2500K and DDR3 1333MHz RAM.

Other motherboard I have looked at are:
MSI P67A-GD55 &
MSI P67A-GD65
What, if anything, do these motherboards do better than the MSI P67A-GD53?

I would probably do SLI next year. I would also be overclocking the i5 2500K CPU as well as far as I could do using my current CPU cooler.

I heard the Z68 motherboards are good for video encoding which I wont do and if I ever do it will not be a lot so I don't really care, also 2 way SLI is more than enough for me, I will never do 3 way. So with this in mind is Z68 pretty much a waste of money?

Buchanan0204 · 29 May 2011 at 21:54

I'd personally wait until AMD release their Bulldozer series of cpu's. Due out very soon.

olivier renault · 29 May 2011 at 23:23

craigt1989 said:
ATM I have a Coolermaster HAF 912 case, Intel Q8300, Coolermaster Hyper 212+ CPU Cooler, Foxconn G31MX-K, 4GB DDR2 RAM, GTX 560ti and an Antec 520w Gaming PSU.

Thinking of changing the motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Was thinking of a MSI P67A-GD53 motherboard and an i5 2500K and DDR3 1333MHz RAM.

Other motherboard I have looked at are:
MSI P67A-GD55 &
MSI P67A-GD65
What, if anything, do these motherboards do better than the MSI P67A-GD53?

I would probably do SLI next year. I would also be overclocking the i5 2500K CPU as well as far as I could do using my current CPU cooler.

I heard the Z68 motherboards are good for video encoding which I wont do and if I ever do it will not be a lot so I don't really care, also 2 way SLI is more than enough for me, I will never do 3 way. So with this in mind is Z68 pretty much a waste of money?

You seem to have a decent setup already, but fair enough.

The GD55 compared to the GD53 iirc has an extra firewire / esata port of some such. The GD65 has extra SATA3 / USB3 ports, something like that (look up the specs), but it also has uprated VRMs and VRM cooling heatpipe for more stable overclocking, although any of them will hit 4.4GHz and beyond without much trouble.

All of them do SLI / XFire 8x8x.

Z68 is overkill for you it would seem. A Good P67 board will provide all you need. The GD53 is very good value for money. The GD65 is more posh and a bit overkill for you as well.

You can use the Hyper 212+, I would expect up to 4.2, 4.4Ghz. If you have the socket 1155 mounting brackets.

Your PSU, while not very powerful, should do as a 2500K would draw not much more power than a Q8400 (Anandtech site is down so can't double check on their charts).

craigt1989 · 30 May 2011 at 03:10

My CPU seems to be holding my graphics card back in some of my games so I was thinking of getting a new motherboard and CPU.

Is Bulldozer still meant to come out this month??

sk82jack · 30 May 2011 at 03:28

They was meant to be released around mid-june but heard it got postponed until Q3 (July is technically Q3 so could be beginning of July).

Check out the AMD Bulldozer Finally! 25 Day Countdown! thread, and here is a post from that thread which may be of interest

Blue160 · 30 May 2011 at 07:42

You seem to have picked the right stuff

DDR3 is so cheap at the moment it might be worth picking up some 1600 or faster though.