Sensible upgrade for £430?

Snubber

Snubber

Snubber

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Joined
9 Aug 2004
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Location
Plymouth, UK
OK...looking to upgrade my system for Aliens v Predator, Bioshock 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2.

I have £300 set aside in my secret account ;) plus the following potential funds from resale of existing kit:

8800GTX £50
Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Mobo £30
Dual Core E6750 £50

Giving a total of £430.

Thinking of buying the following:

Sapphire HD5850 £219
Gigabyte MA770-UD3 AM3/AM2+ Mobo £63
AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE £144

Giving a total of £426.

Note that I am keeping my existing 4GB of DDR2 RAM which fits in the selected mobo above. Is there any real difference between DDR2 and DDR3 anyways?

Also I have really struggled to O/C the E675; have had no joy whatsoever so don't really want to go down the O/C route.

Cheers, CH
 
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There seems to be not that much difference between DDR2 and DDR3 with the Phenom II it seems:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/phenom-x4-955,2278-3.html

The Phenom II memory controller seems to be more latency sensitive.

Make sure that you get the revision 2 of the Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 and not the earlier revision 1:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2982

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=3097

The revision 2 motherboard has the improved SB710 soutbridge with ACC and a better layout.

OTH,I would not overclock the X4 965BE with the motherboard you have chosen(it would be better to get a motherboard with an 8+2 phase VRM and better VRM cooling).
However at stock speeds it should be fine.

The other alternative is to get a Q9550 as your motherboards supports it:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ProductID=2551#anchor_os

The Q9550 should be similar to a Phenom II X4 965BE in many cases:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=102&p2=50

The Q9550 and Q9650 have 12MB of L2 cache unlike the lower Q9000 series processors which means they perform better at a similar speed.
 
Success...!!!

Thought I'd give o/c'ing the E6750 (G0 stepping btw) one last time. Spent time trawling the forum for advice and found out that I had been doing everything right apart from disabling some obscure settings in the BIOS which if left enabled made all of the clock settings default back to normal when Windows fired up.

Running perfectly stable at 3.2GHz.

Think I'l forget upgrading the CPU and Mobo and get a HD 5870 for £300 and save myself a few £'s.
 
Snubber said:
Success...!!!

Thought I'd give o/c'ing the E6750 (G0 stepping btw) one last time. Spent time trawling the forum for advice and found out that I had been doing everything right apart from disabling some obscure settings in the BIOS which if left enabled made all of the clock settings default back to normal when Windows fired up.

Running perfectly stable at 3.2GHz.

Think I'l forget upgrading the CPU and Mobo and get a HD 5870 for £300 and save myself a few £'s.
Click to expand...

I would get an HD5850 1GB and overclock it.
 
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