New build - haven't upgraded for a couple of years

The_Abyss

The_Abyss

The_Abyss

Soldato
Joined
15 May 2007
Posts
12,804
Location
Ipswich / Bodham
I haven't upgraded for a couple of years now, and equally haven't kept up with hardware developments - used to be fairly much on top of it. I haven't had much time for PC gaming, but want to ditch a couple of hobbies and catch up with some old favourites as well as some of the games coming out later this year.

I play Civ 5 and a few FPS titles - the last ones I played seriously were COD4 MW, the BF2 titles and some of the Orange Box. I like to play with detail, and at 1920 x 1200 things are starting to slow down a touch, especially on Civ 5.

In addition I also do a fair amount of photo-editing with CS5 and Lightroom 3. I no longer do much video, but do use Handbrake to encode for my phone.

The old system is:

Win 7 64 bit
Q9450 - running at 3.2 ghz
4870 512 mb
4 x 2gb RAM (can't remember the speed now)
Assorted HDDs, ranging from 500mb to 2 TB
Honestly can't remember the motherboard - it is an Asus

I'll salvage the HDDs from the old system along with the OS. The monitors are fine for now too.

I've tried to do sufficient research to avoid asking a bunch of pointless questions here, and think that I've more or less narrowed down my decisions to the below. I'm now happy to be guided otherwise, or fine-tuned into different brands etc.

The reason I've decided to get a new case is that the current one can get a little loud, and I'd like as much silence as possible. The build-quality of the R3 seemed a bit hit and miss but seems to be worth a shot for the acoustic properties (or lack of them).

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6950 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with FREE DIRT3 Game £203.99
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor £173.99
Intel 320 Series 80GB 2.5" SATA-II 25nm Solid State Hard Drive - OEM £127.99
Corsair Vengeance 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Triple Channel Kit (CMZ12GX3M3A1600C9) £107.99
MSI P67A-G45 Intel P67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard (Sandybridge) ** B3 REVISION ** £99.98
Fractal Design Define R3 Midi Tower Case - Arctic White £94.97
Corsair Hydro H60 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (Socket LGA1366/1155/1156/775/AM2/AM3) £59.99
Akasa Internal Media Card Reader (AK-ICR-07) £9.98



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Thanks in advance.
 
New power supply required? if not tell us what you have already have & we can advise whether to keep or upgrade that too. :)
 
Oops - sorry - I forgot about the PSU. It is a Toughpower 850w.

In addition, I'm not going to bother with a floppy drive again.
 
What kind of price are you looking to go up to?
I know CS% and lightroom both take advantage of hyperthreading so depending on the budget it might be worth squeezing a 2600K in...
 
The_Abyss said:
2 sets of that for 16 gb - I take it that there'd be no problem with that? I hit the limit of 8 gb from time to time in my current system.
Click to expand...

Worth mentioning- Windows aggressively caches into RAM and maximises the use of whatever it has available, because it improves load times and essentially the speed that you can do things in whatever software you're running. If you're barely touching 8GB at the moment, that means that Windows can occasionally think of enough stuff to throw in there. Even if you're fairly regularly hitting the 8GB limit, I doubt it's affecting performance much, and an upgrade to 16GB is of questionable merit at best.

Otherwise, your system is brilliant, but as RO88ie says, an i7 2600K would be a pretty mega boost for non-gaming purposes, with essentially the same performance for games. That said, an i5 2500K- especially overclocked- is a massive boost from your C2Q already. Also worth mentioning that the H60 cooler is very expensive for the performance- a £20 Hyper 212 Plus would do the job just as well for less money.
 
The_Abyss said:
Oops - sorry - I forgot about the PSU. It is a Toughpower 850w.
Click to expand...

Yep keep that. Dunno how quiet it is though. I'd unplug it then use the PSU paperclip test (google that) to test it without it being plugged into a PC. Then you'll know if its the PSU that's the main cause of your old PC's noise.
 
Toughpowers are CWT units, which are pretty good but certainly not as quiet as a typical Seasonic. I'd advise trying to get a fairly soundproof case, if it bothers you. I believe your choice of the R3 is a good one in this regard, although I know little of cases.
 
Ok chaps, thank you, that's useful. So, by binning 8 gb of RAM and cutting down on the cooler, I may well have enough to get the top i7 for the hyperthreading benefits.

Thanks also for the tip on the PSU - I guess that's to fire it up in isolation. My sense is that it is ok, but it is a test worth doing.

Any recommendations on straightforward ways to clone over the existing OS drive, or seeing as I'm moving to a SSD and plugging in a new mobo etc, should I just install all from new?
 
No problem :) A cheaper air-based cooler and 8GB of RAM with an i7 2600K will far outstrip your performance with the H60, 16GB of RAM and an i5 2500K.

Best way is to go for a clean install, you'll get a far faster and cleaner system, and none of the problems that always happen when trying to save time will happen. Besides, SSDs are *fast*. I should suspect that Windows and your other apps will install very quickly.
 
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