5 year old pc upgrade

Muso

Muso

Muso

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Joined
15 Mar 2006
Posts
243
Hi guys,

Surprisingly I've not felt the need to upgrade my pc which I build back in 2010 but am feeling it start to struggle a bit and as was wondering which component would give me the biggest upgrade?

PC Spec:

GTX 570 1280MB
i5 2500K
Asus P8P67
4 Gig ram
Samsung F3 500Gb hard drive
24 inch monitor

I used to buy a full new pc whenever there was something twice as fast available at not silly money. I'm totally out of it with current hardware!

Just thought I'd mention I'm not keen on SSD as I've had a few of these which have all failed.

Cheers!
 
Hi,

SSD, you might not be keen on them (no reason why as their price per GB isnt that bad) but they do add a sharpness and quickness to a PC that a HDD doesnt.

If not one of those what case+PSU do you have to support a better gfx card? thats if you are a gamer, 8GB of RAM (if yours is a single 4GB stick then add a 2nd assuming your OS is suitable).
 
Hi Stulid,

Thanks for the reply. Yes I'm a gamer not as hardcore as I used to be though. Ive got a fractal design define R3 case and 650Watt Antex True power PSU.

I agree the SSD's are great but I've owned a few and they all seem to fail so I'm keen on reliability to be honest. Have they improved recently?
 
Were the ones you owned early OCZ (pre Toshiba buyout days?) as they certainly did suck.

Look at some of them now such as Samsung 850Evos and Crucial BX100, they have long warranties and long MTBF (mean time before failure) lengths.

Other things you can do is try overclocking the CPU (if you have a fat heatsink fitted) as all 2500K CPUs did at least 4.5Ghz even on the cheapest P67/Z67 etc board.

Your case+PSU are fine, that PSU is a Seasonic made item.
 
Grab yourself another 4GB of RAM (for a total of 8), a new graphics card (perhaps amd 380 or 390, depends on your budget) and a decent CPU cooler. Then overclock your 2500k up to 4.2-4.5GHz. After these upgrades your PC will eat through modern games. The 2500k, especially when overclocked, is still really competitive with modern processors.

I'd also add my voice to the recommendation for an SSD. When was the last time you tried one? Modern SSDs are more reliable than mechanical drives, and the prices have plummeted too. I picked up a crucial bx100 250gb drive for £62 shipped last week.
 
Thanks for the replies, yes they were OCZ! I will relook into an SSD then and look at overclocking the CPU and upgrading the GFX.

Gracias!
 
What do you primarily use the computer for? If it's mainly gaming you could stick with the 2500K but replace the GPU and increase your memory to 8Gb. If you do lots of encoding, rendering or compression then it would be worth considering a second hand 2600K/2700K.

By steadfastly ruling out an SSD you will be crippling the performance of your system for general usage. SSDs have come a long way and problems with them are now the exception. Are you sure the issues don't relate to the known bugs with the P67 chipset's SATA controller?

If you want to buy new in order to have all the latest connectivity standards (CIe 3.0, M.2, nvme, USB 3.0+ etc) then a Skylake i5 on the Z170 platform is fine. A little money can be saved by going for a Haswell on Z97, but Z170 is likely to remain relevant for longer.

However if you want to go brand new and require an i7 CPU, the X99 platform is much better value currently than the Skylake i7.

Edit: sorry, drafted some of this earlier and based on replies since it's not all relevant now.
 
I'll just echo the comments above: quality SSD, good CPU cooler + overclocking, new GPU, more RAM.

Don't bother with the SSD if you leave your PC on 24/7.

If you're running 32 bit Windows, you'll need to install the 64 bit version to take advantage of the extra RAM.
 
your i5 does have some life left in it if you're not doing much except gaming, just overclock the hell out of it and put on a good cpu cooler (i have the 2600k).

I have the crucial mx100 256gb and it is amazing! I use it strictly for the O.S and programs and my pc boots windows 10 within 20 seconds.

If you are running an old version of windows, i'd suggest getting the free Windows 10 upgrade and make sure its the 64 version so you can upgrade your ram.


If you are dead set on a cpu upgrade, go for x99 or the skylake i5.
 
Hi guys,

I've decided to buy a crucial 500GB SSD and then overclock the system.

My CPU is a i5 2500K, I have 8 gig Corsair 4GB DDR3 1600MHz XMS3 Memory, Asus P8P67 P67 MoBo and an Asaka Venom HS/F:

http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/cpu.product.tpl&model=AK-CCX-4002HP

I've not overclocked in years but I think it should be fairly straight forward as there seems to plenty of guides. What do you think would be a fairly safe overclock? I'm just wary the system is 5 years old already and I'm not sure how good the cooling unit it.

Cheers,
 
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