£200 upgrade

powelly

powelly

powelly

Soldato
Joined
3 Aug 2010
Posts
3,898
hi i got £200 for xmas and i was wondering what i should upgrade

current spec

amd phenom ii x4 b45 @ 3.0ghz
asus m4a785td-v evo xfire mobo
4gb g skill ripjaw @ 1600mhz 8-8-8-8-24
500gb wd drive
sata dvdr super multi drive thing
ez cool 700 watt psu
xfx 5830
avenge power hummer atx case

things i have thought about are

buying another 5830 for xfire plus small ssd
also selling current 5830 is not an option as i have just got it

opinions would be nice as i am not to sure what to so and the money is burning a whole in my pocket ;)
 
Cookeh said:
Whats the main uses?

If your PC isn't struggling atm then save the money.

If you're big into gaming, you can get a HD6870 for less than £200. Personally wouldn't bother with Crossfire 5830's - not the best scaling cards.
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you see it kind of is because im doing eyefinity i have to turn shadows down in most games and everything else on max settings in games to see a decent fps.

i like to game a lot and like i said selling 5830 and going for another card isn't an option. and from the review i have seen 5830 has good scaling?


also about the 27" i am doing eyefinity atm but i like the sound of this, were would i get a 27 inch sub £200:confused:
 
The Halk said:
Two choices.

1) An SSD. Go for a small one as a Windows/boot drive. Add another 4GB of memory.
2) 25 x KB-046-LG and 6 x CC-001-AK for the ULTIMATE in control.

I'm only being serious about 1)
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im stuck for choices but atm i like the sound of ssd's and more memory and the 27" screen
 
The Halk said:
If you like the sound of SSD then you could opt to drop the whole 200 on an SSD.

I do not recommend running RAID on SSDs, so it's not ideal to buy one and then buy another later for more capacity. However you can't really buy enough SSD to reasonably hold all the games you'd want. If I grabbed everything I have on Steam plus my other games I'd need way more than the 200GB of SSD I have... So you need to have a think about capacity and what goes where. 50GB is plenty for Windows, but all games would need to go onto the 500GB drive. 100GB would get you a very few games... and 200GB would get you most games as long as you were prepared to uninstall/archive some games. At 50/60GB the best chocie is OCZ Vertex. If you go above that then the Crucial C300 is widely perceived to be the best around (their 64GB is a bit of a dog).
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put it this way i have 80gb free on my 500gb drive and all that is is games and software so i would only be using and ssd for windows/boot and my main applications, and im not realy prepared to drop the whole lot on a ssd;)
 
anyone else got any ideas? like would it be worth upgrading my cpu to a 6 core as my current one is like the lowest phenom ii possible and was unlocked from a x2 to a x4 so not much performance compared to other x4's
 
Cookeh said:
But if I'm reading this correctly he already has one for a boot drive, and isn't willing to spend the money on one for his games.

Surely he'd benefit much more from a graphics upgrade?

If you sold the HD5830, you could get two HD5850's and Crossfire them - that would be a lot more potent than Crossfire HD5830's :p
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no i don't have an ssd at the moment,if i did get one it would be a boot drive though and as i have said selling the 5830 is not an option as i have just got it and tbh imo it is a lot better card than everyone is saying it is runs most games at 4000x1000 maxed out no prob at 60+fps it's just a few that i have to turn settings down, this is with an overclock ofc tho
 
cammy5477 said:
sorry for having a laugh mate...i thought it was you who asked for my advice?

buy something with a sandforce controller in it otherwise your wasting your

money.... as far as i know theres nothing at 32gb with a sandforce :(
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kk lol :P sorry for being a party pooper :( so 32gb is no go?
 
im not very up to date with this sandforce/indilinx thing anyone care to explain?

and i am willing to spen £100 maybe a little over on a ssd but what can i get with the other £100? that will benifit be in gaming, things like photoshop and in design
 
The Halk said:
I'm still saying the other 100 would be best spent on memory, assuming you have a use for it - photoshop for example - and that you're running 64 bit OS.

Indilinx was the first non-intel SSD controller in what's seen as the second generation. It was the first with TRIM support (although it arrived across the board pretty much at the same time). It was a great step forward from the previous generation of SSDs which had almost no processing power. Sandforce is a rival that came to market much later than Inixlinx and is a great improvement on it, though nothing like the difference between JMicron and Indilinx. If you have the choice between Sandforce and Indilinx then go Indilinx every time. Sandforce is still fine though, and if you wanted to go for something as small as 32GB then that'd be where to go - I don't think it's a good option to go that low capacity though.

I've been looking into cases recently - I'm just about to replace mine - and the Fractal R3 seems to be the best around (I have a thread in the Cases forum where I explain why it suits me), so that's what I'd go for there.

If you wanted to add another 4GB of memory you should go for the same as what you have already.

That comes out above £200 - I think around £250.

Other than buying little things to improve the cabling inside your case, or replacing fans, adding lighting etc I can't think of anything else.
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would i be able to mix memory? as i cannot find my current memory anywhere except ebay which i don't realy want to use
 
The Halk said:
Yeah, you can mix mmeory, sometimes you end up having to relax the timings more than what you would normally. Rarely it may not post or be unstable.

OcUK do seem to sell 2x2GB kits of Ripjaw, I had a quick look and assumed one of those would be what you had already.
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no my ripjaws have different timings, i was thinking of something with same timing as my current set which is 8-8-8-8-24 i think to avoid issues and dosn't matter which 1600mhz or 1333mhz wouldn't be an issuse for me as i dont mind going down from 1600 to 1333 on my current set, if that made any sense

EDIT: oh and would it matter with the voltage? my current voltage is 1.5v i think on the ram
 
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hmmmm thinking about the psu bit. here are the spec of my current psu so you can tell me how crap it is :P

.green power <70 (high efficiency)
. thermal control
. over voltage protection : +3.3v, +5v,+12v
. suited voltage ac input 115/230v
.100% burn in test / vibration test/ hi-pot tes/leak current test
.special pfc technology
.2.0 or 2.2 version support dual core and multi core gpu tech
. 2x pci-e connecter for multi gpu
.700 watt
 
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