£250 ish upgrade help

[Tk7]

Hi, i'm considering updating my system and have roughly £250 to spend. This would need to cover cpu, motherboard, ram and cpu cooler. My current system is:-

E6300 (have this oc'd to 2.8ghz)
4GB DDR2
Gigabyte P965-DS3P
4870 1GB

I use a 22" for gaming at 1680x1050. When I built this system Intel chips seemed a no brainer and it has been a really solid system for a few years. Since my original build I have gone from 2gb to 4gb ram and replaced the original 8800gts with the 4870.

It still runs most this nicely but it feels like it's struggling with some new games, particularly BC2 which is the main game i'm playing at the moment.

I have been a bit out of touch with hardware recently and really have no clue as to which side (amd/intel) will give me best bang for buck. I don't mind overclocking either, I don't have to time for anything extreme but a cpu that will clock easily and a reasonable amount would be great. Also i'd like this to be on current tech ie moving away from ddr2 ans socket 775 which I have now.

I hope someone can offer advice, some of the cpu's look great value but no idea where to start on motherboard.

Cheers
Ian

 

[Redmint]

AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720 Black Edition 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £99.99
(£85.10) £99.99
(£85.10)
Patriot Sector 5 G Series 4GB (2x2GB) PC3-12800 1600MHz Dual Channel (PGV34G1600ELK) £86.99
(£74.03) £86.99
(£74.03)
Asus M4A785TD-V Evo AMD 785G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard £74.99
(£63.82) £74.99
(£63.82)
Sub Total : £222.95
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.00
VAT is being charged at 17.50% VAT : £40.59
Total : £272.54

Slightly over budget but if you want all new tech, reasonable overclocking abilities and more than 2 cores (nice to have for BC2) then it'll be tricky sticking to £250. I'd suggest you sell some of your old stuff (the RAM in particular should go for quite a bit) and see if you can stretch your budget a bit?

Cooler wise:

Coolermaster Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940/AM2/AM3/775/1156) [RR-910-HTX3-GP] £13.99 inc VAT

is very nice for the price.

edit: just noticed you should be able to get free shipping so that'll knock a little bit off the price.

 

[Tk7]

Thanks Redmint, looks a good spec, and sort of similar to what I had considered. And yeah, free shipping which is handy.

I do have an Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 pro, the 1st gen one, do you think that'd be up to cooling the new cpu? If so it'd save a little, but i've no objection to buying a new cooler if needed (forgot to add cooler in original request).

Anyhow, thanks a lot, i'll work on the mrs a bit and see how it goes!

 

[Redmint]

As far as I know the 1st generation AC Freezer was only compatible with socket 775 motherboards, not sure if it can be modded for AM3 but it's probably easier to just buy a new one.