£500 to spend on outdated PC

Northwind

Northwind

Northwind

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31 Mar 2006
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A few years ago, you guys told me what to think, and I ended up with a mightily overclocked Q6600 with a big Thermaltake cooler on top, with 4gb of sensibly fast ram, a GT8800, a Gigabite DS3, and a cheap-and-cheerful 22 inch Belinea monitor, and a big Corsair PSU, all running under the watchful eye of XP in an Antec 300 with a bazillion Yate Loons in it running at hardly any volts. Since then it's had next to no attention, just a 1TB spinpoint. Thus satisfied, I became a lurker forever.

So, it's all pretty nice, not cutting edge but not awful, and it's pretty well balanced to boot. Been an outstanding servant. But it's starting to get a bit flaky, and it doesn't destroy games and video encoding like it used to- especially with HD video footage from my Gopro. Needs a proper rebuild at the very least so it might be time to spend a little.

So... What would you do? Lets say £500 at most to spend. The monitor's probably the worst part of it, and I wouldn't mind going bigger, but then going up a size probably means the GT8800 will start to struggle. Switching to Win 7 seems overdue too (it took me til about 2006 to switch to XP ;) )

I'm just a bit lost, feels like almost every change will avalanche into another change... Any advice much appreciated!
 
Tough one as you want more CPU power (which means new CPU/mobo/RAM) and you also want a bigger screen (so probably better graphics card) and Windows 7.

You probably need to prioritise, in your situation I'd most likely go for Win 7 (retail so it can be shifted to a new motherboard) 24" LCD screen and a graphics card such as the GTX 560. However this will mean you're stuck with the same CPU for a bit longer for the encoding. :)
 
That's more or less the conclusion I'm coming to as well. The Q6600's still no slouch after all, it'll handle the video work, just slowly (while cooking my feet with its hot air!)
 
Have a similar system to yours, even had an 8800GT. Upgraded last year to a 460 GTX, overclocked it, which made a big difference in games. Also finally went to Windows 7. System still running great and don't feel any need to upgrade further yet.
 
I think what Redmint said is sensible, a Q6600 isn't all that bad still, you wouldn't see a massive improvement unless you spent almost all of your budget on a CPU.

a 560 or 460 will help a ton in games, I have a 460 (@860MHz); and it is starting to struggle in Crysis 2 (had to drop back to DX9 to get +60 FPS) but it depends what your playing, it runs cod fine.

if you want win 7 and a monitor too your not going to get much more for your money I'm afraid... :(

hopw this helps
 
If you have a couple of hundreds more, you could get something decent. There is no harm starting with a better screen, psu, graphics card, and win 7, all of which you can transfer into a new PC.

something like this.


YOUR BASKET
1 x Dell Ultrasharp U2311H 23" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Midnight Grey £229.99
1 x Asus GeForce GTX 560Ti DirectCU II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £173.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium - Retail (GFC-00025) £124.99
1 x Antec High Current Gamer 620W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply £62.99
Total : £606.96 (includes shipping : £12.50).



notes though.

I would pick up Win 7 retail, as you will most likely upgrade the rest later on. For that, shopping around.

You can get a 23'' LG IPS panel that will perform close to the Dell, you will loose display port (can't remember the model), but imo IPS would be the way to go. Shop around as OcUK dont have those in stock. About £150. EDIT : LG IPS231P-BN.

The PSU will be good for any single card (580 and whatnot). There are other candidates, especially if you think of going SLI later (SLI 560 / XFire 6950 would be mighty).

For the graphics card, a 560ti / 6950 2GB is mid-high performance. Between £150 to £200.

Would be a bit more than your budget, all considered.
 
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Thanks folks. PSU really doesn't need to be on the list I think, it's old but good.

Good to hear about the CPU too- I've been trying to find some benchmarks but couldn't really get a handle on how the new stuff compares.

So looks like screen, graphics card and Windows then. Cheers!
 
Yeah I think you're going to struggle to fully upgrade everything you want, especially as you want a monitor and an OS.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=288 - That'd be the sensible way to go for a CPU imo.

Ram is cheap now, 4gig for 26.99 - you really can't complain and it feels un-natural to go for anything less than 8gig which'd really help with the encoding and future proofing.

Your graphics card is probably the worst offender you have there now.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/178?vs=164


YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM £159.98
1 x Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 Extreme 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **OcUK Exclusive** £127.99
1 x MSI P67A-C45 Intel P67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - (Sandybridge) ** B3 REVISION ** £89.98
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-00599) £79.99
2 x Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) £26.99 (£53.98)
Total : £523.32 (includes shipping : £9.50).



I'm not too clued up on the OS's for video editing, I use ultimate 64 myself so apologies if I've made a mistake there, someone'll correct me for sure.

If you wanted to do it all in one go, that'd give you a pretty nice setup. Though the board doesn't support crossfire/sli and obviously its budget.. so far its not doing me any wrong. I know theres no monitor there but if you can live without an upgraded monitor for the time being then youd see a better improvement by going for the the bits that do the legwork seeing as a good monitor takes a huge chunk out of your budget.
 
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