£300 HTPC/light gaming upgrade

broona · 18 Sep 2011 at 12:27

Upgrading my E8400 to a core i5/i7, just making sure everything I'm looking to buy will work well together!

I'll be keeping the following :-

Fractal Design R3
GTX460 768mb
Vertex 2E 60gb OS drive
3x2tb HDD's
1x1.5tb HDD
Pioneer DVD-RW

Bought 4gb Mushkin DDR3 and a Coolermaster 212+ from the MM.

Ordered a Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 as I need 8 SATA ports for future HDD addons.

Now I'm torn between an i5 2500k and an i7 2600 non k to complete the build. It's main use, probably 80% of the time, is for my HTPC, not much time spent gaming or transcoding, but I want the best I can get for the price now, and hopefully the option to upgrade to Ivy Bridge in the future. Cheers.

stulid · 18 Sep 2011 at 13:01

The i5 2500K,, cheaper and is all you will possibly need.

broona · 18 Sep 2011 at 13:05

stulid said:
The i5 2500K,, cheaper and is all you will possibly need.

I'd be getting the 2600 from the MM, so approximately £160 for either CPU if that makes any difference?

stulid · 18 Sep 2011 at 13:16

Well, two choices then.

1) Overclock? get the i5 2500K, also has HD3000 core.
2) Dont care about overclocking? the i7 2600 is faster, but has HD2000 gpu core.

But you have a separate gfx card so its a useless point.

broona · 18 Sep 2011 at 14:00

stulid said:
Well, two choices then.

1) Overclock? get the i5 2500K, also has HD3000 core.
2) Dont care about overclocking? the i7 2600 is faster, but has HD2000 gpu core.

But you have a separate gfx card so its a useless point.

Going for the i7, just because, lol!