£300 upgrade

KNGMNKY

KNGMNKY

KNGMNKY

Associate
Joined
7 Jul 2009
Posts
46
Location
Somewhere
Hi,

I'm thinking about upgrading my pc a bit in the next couple of weeks. I'll have around £300 or so and this is my current system:

Corsair HX 520w
Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 Rev1
AMD 64 X2 4800+
Corsair 2GB 6400 DDR2
8800GTS 512MB
37GB WD Raptor / 640GB WD

Having had a look around, I thought I may be best upgrading the MOBO, CPU and RAM and then further down the line getting a new GPU and PSU. I'm not sure though, would I be better off with a new GPU first as I can't afford it all at the moment?

I mainly use the pc for gaming at 1680x1050. I was looking at the AMD PII X4 955 BE. How much of a performance boost in games will I get from going this route but sticking with the 8800GTS for the time being. Currently, I am playing Men of War but whenever there's bit of action (tank battles) the game tends to pause for a second or two, usually on an explosion. What's the main cause of this, CPU or GPU, or both?! :confused:

It's been a while since I upgraded and I'm not the most knowledgable about components so all suggestions are appreciated.

Cheers.
 
Firstly unless you intend to SLI, you will not need to upgrade the PSU.

The Corsairs have huge 12v rails, and the HX520 could power pretty much whatever you intend to reasonably throw at it.

My recommendation, if you are using W7, or Vista.

Definitely as your first port of call I would double up the memory to 4GB. So either replace the memory you have with 2x2GB.

Or if you have 4 dimm slots get a further 2x1GB.

Or if you use 32bit and have 4 dimm slots then I would buy 2x512mb memory to get 3Gb in dual channel.

Then second suggestion would be to upgrade the GPU. Something like the ATI 5770 would be a superb choice. Forget Nvidia they're done for. ;)

I would get the 5770 Vapor-X if it were me.

Then get a reasonably priced but high quality CPU cooler, and overclock the CPU. Something like the Xigmatek S123 would be a good choice for value for money. (don't go overboard on the cost of the heat sink as you may as well just buy a new CPU if that were the case).

You intend to swap the CPU sometime in the future anyway so no hardship in giving it a reasonably high overclock to it for the time being.

Later on, I would say for gaming a AMD Tricore CPU would be a good, reasonably priced ugrade.

This should see a nice performance increase.
 
Thanks for the replies.

Anth said:
Definitely as your first port of call I would double up the memory to 4GB. So either replace the memory you have with 2x2GB.

Then second suggestion would be to upgrade the GPU. Something like the ATI 5770 would be a superb choice.

Then get a reasonably priced but high quality CPU cooler, and overclock the CPU. Something like the Xigmatek S123 would be a good choice for value for money. (don't go overboard on the cost of the heat sink as you may as well just buy a new CPU if that were the case).
Click to expand...

I looked into doubling my memory originally but then I saw the memory which I bought nearly 2 years ago for around £35 is now £55 or thereabouts, which is why I started looking at upgrading more.

I have actually just bought a new cooler, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro. I've never overclocked the processor up until now. The problem I have though is this blocks the first two ram slots!

I'm hesitant to buy more ddr2 when I could now just upgrade the cpu, mobo and ram to am3/ddr3 for around the money I have available.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom