It's been a while since I've upgraded and my current PC cost me about £330 for the motherboard, CPU, RAM and cooler.
I currently have the following:
I must confess that I've not overclocked the above for any length of time - only once to see how far the CPU would go and I think it went to about 4GHz. Being honest, I rarely have the need for that amount of power unless I want to quickly encode the (rare) video.
With me using virtual machine, I finding myself wanting more RAM. 8GB would make things a lot more comfortable, but I'm thinking that 16GB would future-proof me for a good while to come. I could spend about £30 to get another 4GB of RAM, but I'm wondering if I'll just be sending good money after bad.
Being close to a year old, the graphic card is more than adequate for my needs. I do plan on buying an SSD drive in the future, along with a harddrive for storage.
My main concern is power consumption. Right now my power meter says the system is pulling around 80w at the plug. I don't expect this to get any higher with a new system; quite the opposite. I expect there to be a drop - not big, but to perhaps about 65w or better. Quad-core processor would be nice, but I'm concerned it will negatively affect the power consumption.
I'd like the new motherboard to be of an Asus brand, with support for USB 3 and onboard gigabit network. A PCI slot would also be handy, to support my soundcard.
I'm going to set my budget at a maximum of £350 and take it from there. From that budget, I'm looking for a motherboard, CPU, RAM and perhaps a cooler.
Let the speccing commence!
I currently have the following:
- Asus P5Q Pro motherboard
- Intel E8400
- 2 x 2GB DDR2
- GTX 660
I must confess that I've not overclocked the above for any length of time - only once to see how far the CPU would go and I think it went to about 4GHz. Being honest, I rarely have the need for that amount of power unless I want to quickly encode the (rare) video.
With me using virtual machine, I finding myself wanting more RAM. 8GB would make things a lot more comfortable, but I'm thinking that 16GB would future-proof me for a good while to come. I could spend about £30 to get another 4GB of RAM, but I'm wondering if I'll just be sending good money after bad.
Being close to a year old, the graphic card is more than adequate for my needs. I do plan on buying an SSD drive in the future, along with a harddrive for storage.
My main concern is power consumption. Right now my power meter says the system is pulling around 80w at the plug. I don't expect this to get any higher with a new system; quite the opposite. I expect there to be a drop - not big, but to perhaps about 65w or better. Quad-core processor would be nice, but I'm concerned it will negatively affect the power consumption.
I'd like the new motherboard to be of an Asus brand, with support for USB 3 and onboard gigabit network. A PCI slot would also be handy, to support my soundcard.
I'm going to set my budget at a maximum of £350 and take it from there. From that budget, I'm looking for a motherboard, CPU, RAM and perhaps a cooler.
Let the speccing commence!
16GB of 2400Mhz RAM for £90 is a great deal!! I got the 4670K instead of the 4670 because it was £3 more and you might change your mind about overclocking. The mobo says this:
