£370 Upgrade required

Sweetloaf

Sweetloaf

Sweetloaf

Soldato
Joined
5 Mar 2004
Posts
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Southport
Due to a bit of a weird PC meltdown situation I'm looking to upgrade. More for music App performance than anything else.

Current spec:

Opteron 180
2Gb Geil Ultra
MSI K8N Platinum
Nvidia 9600GT
Tagan 480Watt.

I'm keeping the current graphics card because I only really play WoW and it's fine for that. I'm not looking for a monster spec, Dual core is fine for my needs over Quad I think. I'm also running XP so 2Gb RAM will do me for now

Here's my starting point:

23034983ii6.jpg


I would consider a Q6600 if it's pretty much a given that it will run at 3Ghz+

I'm running 3 Hard drives, with that in mind would my Tagan 480W be sufficient? Do I really need the Corsair?

Thoughts gentlemen please.
 
Sweetloaf said:
Due to a bit of a weird PC meltdown situation I would consider a Q6600 if it's pretty much a given that it will run at 3Ghz+
Click to expand...
It's never a given that something will overclock right, and the only way to fall back on anything is if you get it pre-overclocked via Overclockers (If they still do them).

However, I know 4 people with a Q6600, including myself, all of us have it running at 3.2Ghz. We tries mine at 3.4 but it wasn't stable enough.

I have also seen a lot of people here with Q6600's at 3.2+ easily.

So it's not a given, but with an aftermarket cooler it should be fine. And there's no reason to shell out much, I spent £17 on an Artic Pro 7 and it works a treat :)
 
Redgie said:
So it's not a given, but with an aftermarket cooler it should be fine. And there's no reason to shell out much, I spent £17 on an Artic Pro 7 and it works a treat :)
Click to expand...

Same here. I could probably take things above 3 GHz if I was so inclined but I'm happy with the performance as it is. And I fear my motherboard and RAM would start holding back the overclocking before the Q6600 did.
 
Another point to make that blackberries has reminded me of. You only need to overclock to what you need. if you don't want a beast, go for reliability, life expectancy. The more you overclock, the bigger risk of failure, and the likelyness of it dieing sooner. Try it unoverclocked perhaps, then if you really think you can improve, do it :)
 
I understand that nothing is 100% but in reality I would have thought that 3Ghz would be a reasonable expectation. If it weren't I'd expect a few more "Mine doesn't" posts :)

Yes. yes, I could run it at stock for a while, but that doesn't really happen around here does it? :) As far as overclocking to what I need, it's more a case of the higher I can go the more convenient it is for me, running several instances of VST plugins can really drain a CPU I don't need it to be all powerful but the higher it goes the easier things will be.

Just looking at the Phenom II 920 now as well, It would mean a cheaper mobo and set me back about another £20
Hmm...choices choices.

Any more opinions on what a Tagan 480 can cope with?
 
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i cant comment on your power supply, but i can say that if you do get the corsair, it will be good for many builds to come.

about the Q6600, mine runs at 3GHz on stock voltage...easy. i run it at 3.6GHz 24/7 on air, and im limited by temperature more than anything.

im using a tuniq, although i think you could expect ATLEAST 3.2GHz which ever cooler you chose.

im on a p35 mobo with 2gb corsair pc2-6400.
 
Just testing the water :)

I am 99% sure you'll get 3.0Ghz+

I haven't really been in tune with AMD recently, but I have heard Intel is better for overclocking, don't know if that's still the case with the Phenom.
 
Phenom 940 is now looking tempting but I don't want to be faffing with bios updates, anyone know if any boards recognise them out of the box?
 
another option for you would be to just get this board, P43, more or less same and save you £25. If youre happy OC'ing and looking to do it on a budget you could take the CPU down to an E7400 (2.8@stock) or even lower, and clock it back up, that'd save you another £55. Keep your current PSU which will suffice and get a 4 gig kit of RAM, this'll set you back less than 250 total
 
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95thrifles said:
another option for you would be to just get this board, P43, more or less same and save you £25. If youre happy OC'ing and looking to do it on a budget you could take the CPU down to an E7400 (2.8@stock) or even lower, and clock it back up, that'd save you another £55. Keep your current PSU which will suffice and get a 4 gig kit of RAM, this'll set you back less than 250 total
Click to expand...

Having read up a little more it appears that Cubase SX3 utilises quad core CPUs so I think that's probably the way I'm now heading, I've upped my budget to about £450 and I'm now looking at the Phenom II CPUs they seem to outperform similarly priced Intel quads at present but I sense a price war coming on so I'll keep my ear to the ground for a week or so :)

4Gb is a little bit of a waste running XP 32.
 
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