£100 to upgrade

tomanders91

tomanders91

tomanders91

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guildford, surrey
My computer is good, but i think i could get a little bit more out of it if i spent some money, is there anything for £100-£120 that might make it a little better for desktop use and gaming? Ill post the full spec.

XFX 8800GTS 640mb (Fine dont want to change untill at least september)

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ Stock w/ stock cooler (need to oc but cant!)

2gb of No name DDR2 ram (677mhz, fine for now me thinks)

Hiper Type M 530w PSU

Foxconn P9657AA Motheboard, (i no this is probably **** compared to gigabytes and stuff, but its fine for me for now, supports C2D, up to 800mhz ram and PCI-E, thats all i need, plus my mate overclocked his E4300 to 2.7ghz on his.)


So my thoughts are i need to buy some stuff so i can overclock it, meaning a CPU cooler and a decent PSU.

What do you think?
 
The stock cooler should allow some overclocking at least but if you want a new one then I'd suggest any of the following - Noctua, Scythe Ninja or Tuniq Tower.

PSU wise it is difficult to go wrong with a Corsair 520w. :)
 
I dont think there really is anything to add to the setup. If i were you i would upgrade the motherboard to something like the DS3 or DS3P. I would strongly advise trying to overclock the CPU. It will give a significant performance increase at no cost. Spend some of the money on an aftermarket cpu cooler like the Tuniq Tower or Noctua NH-U12F. And i would also get rid of the Hiper PSU and go for the Corsair like semi-pro waster has said.
 
Well, you have a good base.

I would immediately suggest switching from that Hiper. I don't think it is the high failure rate model. It is an expense though, even if you recoup some money from selling it in the member's market.

'Everyone' and their mother is recommending the Corsair PSUs. The same 'everyone' who recommended Hipers! Personally I prefer Enermax through long experience. I don't think Corsairs will suffer like Hipers in a year though as they are rebadged (and higher spec) Seasonics. A brand with history.

http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103 Has more time to take a fine comb through PSUs than we shall ever have.

However switching the PSU itself is pretty dull. You want something exciting for you 100 - so get the most ludicrous fan. Also think about RAM sinks and increased cooling for your northbridge. For when you do overclock.

[edit]

Switching the motherboard would be more fun as suggested above, but you are not going to see any real eventual difference.
 
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You will not get the DS3P, Corsair HX520W and a cooler for £100.
It will be about £180 odd.
I would get the PSU (~£70) and the cooler (~£35).
That psu you have now is a ticking timebomb.
If that goes, it may take out all your other components with it.
Then i would save up a bit, and get the DS3P (~£90) it may well come down in price.

Jay
 
so basicly a corsair 520w and a cooler, got 2 questions about them, are they both relatively easy to fit? I dont wanna break anything, and the 520w corsair ,that will take a 8800gts and and overclocked E6400? plus all the other stuff, i really think i need to overclock though as i think im getting severely bottlenecked currently.
 
The Corsair will easily cope, it's bigger brother (the 620w) can handle a quad-core and SLi'd 8800 series cards along with watercooling and lots of hard drives. It is as easy to fit as any PSU, I'd assume you've already fitted the Hiper so you know what you are doing there. :)

The CPU coolers aren't massively easy to fit I believe but they are well worth the effort.
 
if you eant ease of fitting get the scythe ninja due to it not using a back plate so you dont need to take the mobo out... its a great cooler i have one
 
The PSU will be trivial to fit and will happily power your components. Unless you have 8 HDDs and 5 Optical Drives you didn't mention!

The HSF is slightly more involved and will require you to remove the motherboard from the case to get at the retaining pins.

You will also need to clean off the TIM (thermal interface material) from between the old HSF and the chip, and apply your own.

Not difficult, but certainly something to research to see if you feel confident doing it with one of the most expensive and potentially fiddly elements. Applying TIM to your chip is an art. Less is more.

As noted above - you will get some overclock with standard cooling, which is worth exploring now (i took a E4300 to 3.0Ghz with stock cooling and a good case). You don't need to spend to have fun. In fact you should try now so you can see just what is different afterwards.

Tweak first with your current kit, get stability with Orthos, benchmark with Super Pi, and only then spend money, install, get stability, tweak again, get stability, benchmark, bask in warm glow of geek satisfaction.

Also it makes sense to change only one thing at a time, just so you can narrow down problems to the thing you just changed... so do it in steps when you do get new gear.
 
thanks for the replys and yeah i would overclock now but i no that hipers have a bad repuation when put under stress or when somethings been overclocked.
 
As far as I can tell, it is the 580 Modular Hiper that is going kaputt? Is yours the modular? If not you are not in as much danger as other Hiper users.

Anyone want to chime in and tell me how wrong I am?
 
It has been mostly the Hiper Type-R 580w modular that is failing, confusingly it seems there are two versions of the Type-M 530w so tomanders91 might have a modular one. The other factor to take into account is that the 580w Type-R seems to be the most commonly sold Hiper so it isn't entirely surprising that more problems with it are highlighted as well due to it's superior sales to the rest of the line.

I'm personally not overkeen on Hipers in general and never have been for some reason but it isn't as if all of them have failed or will fail. Most of the time I'm not in favour of replacing something just for the sake of it though, if the system works I'm usually tempted to just leave it as it is. :)
 
Thanks for that!

I would not hesitate to overclock the current system. At the very least you need to evaluate how far your components will go before you think of replacing them. Otherwise you are just upgrading blindly.
 
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