Dragging a rig out of retirement. Suggestions please?

Hobojim

Hobojim

Hobojim

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Joined
10 May 2007
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36
Hello all, I've spent a long time lurking since I built my PC in 2007ish. I have recently dragged it out of retirement and I'm looking to give it a little refresh at minimum expense, 2nd hand ebay stuff is fine. Can't remember the exact model numbers but you will get the gist. Currently:

Gigabyte LGA775 mobo
2.4ghz C2D
2gb pc-6400 @800mhz (2x 1gb stick) 2 slots free
500gb HD
8800 GTX gfx card
Decent PSU corsair - 600w ish

My thoughts were: 2 more 1gb sticks of ram, small SSD, Core 2 Quad Q9550 and a new GFX card. I'm struggling with what GFX card to go for the most. Looking to play modern games at 1600x1024 with medium settings. Running a 2nd screen at same res at same time. Any suggestions very gratefully received. Jim
 
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Tbh Hob I'd say the 750Ti is a perfect choice for you. Will run what you want to run whilst being low-power enough for your rig :)

The rest of your plan seems sound :cool:
 
You will have to get the latest mobo bios installed. Or new gfx cards wont work !
May need it for cpu change also.
 
My friend is still gaming on a E6600 with a 660Ti and runs everything he plays fine at 1080p. The Q6600s I seems to remember are very cheap on ebay at the moment.
 
Lemin said:
You will have to get the latest mobo bios installed to ensure compatibility with a Q9550.

You may need it for a video card upgrade too.
Click to expand...

Fixed.

Chances are it will work fine with any modern graphics card, he'll more likely have an issue with the later Core 2 Quads if he's on an older BIOS.
 
Wouldn't even bother with a DDR3 option - IIRC those LGA775 boards that could take DDR2 and 3 had some restrictions in regards to DDR3 voltages which didn't translate well to useful RAM on later platforms or something. (Might be less of an issue with a wider range of DDR3/compatibility than at the time).
 
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If you don't mind a bit of modding your board you could try the skt775 to 771 mod and get a xeon processor. They are cheaper than the skt 775 quads and seem to clock higher. I replaced my q6600 with a xeon x5460 and it overclocked t 4.3ghz (3.16ghz stock) no problem.
Plenty of info here http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/3/#gigabyte and it looks like your board should support the xeon.

The upgrade cost me £14 for the xeon and £2 for some adapter stickers. Upgrades don't get much cheaper!
 
I would list with as much detail as you can, including sata or IDE drives, your complete system and OS.

I would suggest you try and find out more about your memory voltage settings and if possible get DDR3 2400Mhz, it can be ran at 1600Mhz. This would at least leave you with something you can take to the next PC. I am sure the Gigabyte has some voltage adjustment for the memory which you could manually set.

By far the biggest difference you can make is by adding an SSD, 120gb minimum for the OS with an HDD for storage.

Q9550's may not be too expensive these days, and that 771 fix looks interesting if you can get 4Ghz per core with an overclocked Xeon, but good luck getting one for £15, as they usually go between £25 to £40 and they are not always just drop in and go. Remember though, even a new G3258 punches well above it's price, and any second hand LGA 775 CPU will be taking a fair chink out of the cost of such.

Graphics card wise, well you should be able to run AMD 7950/270/280/285 and Nvidia equivalents with ease and not too much of a CPU bottleneck. Previous an AMD 270X was what I was going to add to one of my LGA 775 systems, and I have ran MSi Twin Frozr 7950's too.

I run a few old 775 systems here, one is a Gigabyte P45 system currently getting rehoused in an NZXT S340 case, with a Q9550, 4x2gb Corsair PC8500 ram, Cooler Master 240m AIO cooler. It is awaiting a Seasonic X-650 PSU from another PC, and an SSD upgrade, and will be getting an MSI 7950 GPU for a short period.

My sons room has a Silverstone TJ08B-E with an Asus Maximus II Gene, C2D E8500, 2x2gb of Dominator GT, BeQuiet cooler, BeQuiet 630w psu, Samsung SSD, and HD 5750 GPU (it had a 7950 for a bit too). This was also running Windows 10, and was the 1st time I had seen a memory warning, I was asked to shut down some programs due to only having 4gb at one point by Windows 10, but I do at times use around 6gb of memory.

I also have a little Fractal Core 1000 with an Asus EPU 775 motherboard, Pentium E6300, 2x2gb PC6400, and a 350w Corsair PSU, DVD drive, 500gb hdd, for playing around with server and linux software.

The above are old systems, much of it leftovers due to past upgrades, SSD's have been about the best thing, but they are not a patch on a new CPU/Motherboard/ram bundle.
 
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