£150 upgrade

RossG

RossG

RossG

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Joined
5 Dec 2007
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Harrow, London
PC is now about 3 years old and is getting rather long in the tooth now. However, I don't have the money to buy a whole new machine. I can spend around £150 on upgrading it. Spec is as follows:

Core2 6300
Gigabyte DS3
X1950Pro 256MB (factory overclocked)
600w corsair
6GB DDR2

Personally I think the mobo PSU and RAM will be fine for a bit longer, its the video card and CPU that will need attention. Question is, can I get a good upgrade for these for £150ish?

For the CPU, I saw this, wondered if its any good:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-321-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567

As for the graphics card, I'm pretty clueless. If I got for that CPU I'll have about £100 for a graphics card. Really not sure what's good tbh. If it helps, I am willing to buy used components off the MM if it'll get me something better.
Games that it will need to run well are CoH, Arma 2, and Deus Ex 3, though the latter is rather difficult to judge due to the fact no system requirements are out >_<

I won't order for a couple of weeks yet, but thought it would be best if I got my research in early.
 
Keep an eye on the MM for a Q6600 and a cooler so you can do some overclocking. (should set you back about £90-95 total)

Use the rest for an HD 4870 or similar.
 
Wasn't planning on overclocking really since I'm a bit ignorant about it. I have a mixture of Geil PC5300 and OCZ PC6400 RAM, which I thought would make OCing more difficult. You reckon is worth upping the budget a bit on the graphics card, gettign a good CPU cooler and just overclock?
 
The PC5300 RAM will indeed make overclocking awkward. If you don't mind giving overclocking a try (don't worry it's not that complicated with your motherboard, I've used a similar Gigabyte DS3 board in the past ;)) I'd suggest replacing the PC5300 sticks with 6400, which shouldn't cost too much.

Then either stick with your current CPU and try and get it close to 3GHz as browney suggested, or go with the quad core option.
 
I could just ditch the 5300. It's only 2GB of it. Im sure the performance drop from 6 to 4 wont be that bad? Though if I'm honest I'd rather take a non-overclocking route.
 
If you're not wanting to overclock then the fastest you can really get (without spending silly money) would be the Core 2 e6700/q6700 then. The Pentium e6000 series like the one you linked aren't supported.
 
Well I guess that's that out the window then. Got a few options now really. Either overclock now and grab or new graphics card, or save up a bit more and get a new set of core components, though that'll take a while and be expensive >_<.
I might just give overclocking a try, not much to lose really. Any suggestions for a good heatsink? Know sod all about those too -_-. Also are there any good graphics cards being released soon for around the £130 mark? I'm jsut wondering whether it'll be worth waiting a bit longer.
 
As Redmint says, due to your board you are limited to the original Core2Duo, Core2Quad and Pentium Dual core (2*** series) cpu's. You should be able to get a E6600/6700 dual core for around £50 second hand or around £80 for a Q6600/6700 quad core.
 
If I were to overclock my E6300, could I not achieve similar results, or would spending £80 on a q6600 and overclocking that be quite a leap over a 6300?
 
E6300 on that board should do at least 3Ghz with a half decent cooler so will give you a significant boost. Q6600 would hit 3.4-3.6Ghz if you are lucky but you will only notice the difference of the extra cores in stuff that actually makes use of them. I would clock the one you have and get a new graphics card and then save up for a new build after Sandybridge is launced at the end of the year.
 
£80 for 4-600mhz isn't worth it then. With that in mind, what cooler should I be looking at? Only running a stock HSF at the moment. Last I heard the Arctic Freezer 7 was pretty good, though I don't know if that's still relevant.
 
I'd go with a video card straight away. I'd save a bit extra for a GTX 460 1024MB over a 5770. That's your biggest bottleneck. All these games will be heavily GPU bound (GTX 460 also supports PhysX).
 
Well just as a bit of a test, I've overclocked my CPU from 1.86 to 2Ghz. Severe clenching moment when I hit F10 and it rebooted. Just going to do some testing on prime95 to see how stable it is. I removed the 2GB Geil memory (both sets were actually PC6400 after all) and kept in the OCZ 4GB gold stuff, since the CAS timings were different.

This is the video I followed for instructions by the way, I hope it's not missed anything out and my PC is about to fry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1atG3g-jmk&playnext=1&videos=Xf5zEmgUqtU

Also my memory is only rated to 1.8v. Will this hold me back if I want to aim for ~3Ghz?
 
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