£200 Budget Upgrade

Predicament · 7 May 2014 at 06:51

May someone please help me come up with a few upgrades within a £200 budget please. I am mostly looking to get better performance on FPS and RPG games.

Current Specs:

Processor

3.20 gigahertz Intel Core i5 650
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
4096 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Hyper-threaded (4 total)

Memory:

8120 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM0' has 4096 MB
Slot 'DIMM2' has 4096 MB

GPU:

ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
http://i.imgur.com/oqmoHCP.png[Display adapter]

HDD:

1000.11 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
691.86 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

snips86x · 7 May 2014 at 07:01

Do you have access to the MM?

I would suggest finding a AMD 270x or nVidia 760 and a 60/128gb SSD. That should just come in on budget!!

Predicament · 7 May 2014 at 23:59

snips86x said:
Do you have access to the MM?

I would suggest finding a AMD 270x or nVidia 760 and a 60/128gb SSD. That should just come in on budget!!

Thanks. Currently, I do not because of bumping infractions. Would you recommend looking for an AMD 270x or nVidia 760 and a 60/128gb SSD on eBay or Gumtree?
I'd love to hear other input. Also, could I find a graphics card under £100 that would be a solid upgrade compared to my 5700 series AMD? What about a GTX 650? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-350-MS&groupid=595&catid=683

barnettgs · 8 May 2014 at 01:13

Have a look at Pentium G3220 CPU which is cheap to buy and this will give you more headroom to buy a better GPU - have a look at this link and scroll down to the bottom of the page: http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/68797-intel-pentium-g3220-22nm-haswell/?page=7

This might surprise you as the difference is very small in comparsion with a top-end i7 CPU with same mid-range card (GTX 750 Ti).

David Bisset · 8 May 2014 at 11:22

He already has a CPU and going to the G3220 wouldn't be an upgrade really. He could overclock his current CPU if he needs.

GPU & HDD are the weakest areas so I'd say stick to upgrading these, your CPU & RAM are fine for now. I'd go for a 270 myself over a 270x and then clock it up a bit. An SSD will help lots with the general feeling of speed, boot up times etc.

If you do want to upgrade your CPU you could get a 2nd hand i5 760 or i7 860 or something if you wanted.

Edit: Given your limited budget maybe just the graphics card, as that'd allow you to stretch to a 280

Edit2: Actually, I've got SSDs in all my machines and can't imagine going back. A small SSD and a graphics card for me after all

Martini1991 · 8 May 2014 at 11:23

Second hand i5 and a new GPU would be my port of call.

t31os · 8 May 2014 at 11:38

270X(second hand) + SSD(new is still affordable) would be my choice, if it were me....