A wild 2nd hand upgrade appears!

Sixense

Sixense

Sixense

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So, unexpectedly I might be able to upgrade my snail of a laptop to something a bit better for under £300, 2nd hand though, would love your advice on which would run better.

No.1
Intel i3-4160 with GT 740 1 GB (I know :eek:)

No.2 AMD Quad Core 4.3GHz (oc'd at the moment) with GTX 960, the guy doesn't remember what CPU it's exactly, will find out tho.

They both have Win 10 and 8 Gigs of DDR3 ram, I will be putting a small SSD in whatever I buy anyway. Which one would run recent games 1080p at least 50-60 fps, fully maxed is not a must have course.
 
The 960 is a better GPU. but the i3-4160 is possibly a better CPU. It's hard to say which is better.

The i3 is possibly more recent and gives you the option of dropping in a Haswell/Devil's Canyon i5/i7 in the future. However, the GT 740 is a dog of a GPU and the 960 beats it...
 
AMD Athlon X4 840 he said, I took it, decided I don't want to be stuck with a office gpu like a 740 :D Thanks for your input.
 
The x4 840 isn't that good but it might be better than you laptop. At least with a 960, you've got a decent enough graphics card and could eventually upgrade to say a Skylake i3 and get some decent performance.
 
No.2 AMD Quad Core 4.3GHz (oc'd at the moment) with GTX 960, the guy doesn't remember what CPU it's exactly, will find out tho.
Click to expand...

I would go with this. Even though the i3 will be a better CPU, the 960 GPU will be a lot better and will probably make the most difference to you if you want to game.
 
linktoinsanity said:
I would go with this. Even though the i3 will be a better CPU, the 960 GPU will be a lot better and will probably make the most difference to you if you want to game.
Click to expand...

Gaming is what I do with my laptop, I just wish I will be able to play something released AFTER 2012 and not end up in a slideshow :D
 
as an owner of the 4160 its a great processor and that pc wouldve been the better choice, but yeah you made the right choice in the sense of the 960.


just on another note. i have the r7 240 which is probably comparable with the gt 740 and the combination is not bad, can run the division in a playable state with setting adjustments, wouldnt replace my 270x for sure, but those low end cards arnt all that bad.
 
Think the second one was definitely the right choice for right now, and for the future the first wouldn't have been that much better and upgrading is always something you can work and save up for.
 
The cost of upgrading to a better CPU + motherboard would be equal or less than the cost of a 960, so you made the right choice I think.
 
Thanks, the rig should be here tomorrow, the only thing I'm afraid now is the PSU might be some no-brand. If I decide to keep cpu OC'd at 4.3 or higher, how high they usually go and what's the best card that will not make the cpu a bottleneck if I find some cheap 2nd hand? Gigabyte F2A68HM-HD2 is the motherboard, how bad is it?
 
With no VRM heatsink at all, it's not the best board for overclocking. However it's not like the CPU is an FX-8350 which really hammers the VRMs. I would be more concerned about finding a no-name PSU in the system.

The 960 will be fine in that system. It may get bottlenecked, but the only way to find out is to run a hardware monitor while gaming. If the CPU is at 100% load and the 960 isn't you've got a bottleneck.
 
It will depend on the game. Some games, like older MMOs really rely on the CPU, others scale well with CPU cores, BF4 is a good example.

As to the CPU overclock, 4.3 will be fine for that particular architecture even on budget boards. It's once you go past this that the voltage really needs to be ramped up and would require a better board.

It would be a good idea to inspect the PSU, paying particular attention to the power available on the 12V rails. I would not expect that system to draw more than 300W at load so even a budget PSU would suffice.
 
Yes, I totally agree with you that 4.3 is safe on this setup. Definitely inspect the PSU. A budget model is fine but if it's no-name/ultra-budget junk, then get a new one.
 
Thanks for your input guys again, just wondering, whereabout the Athlon stands against Intel CPUs? Am I right in thinking it's roughly 2500k-2600k perf?
 
It's closer to core i3 levels actually. In most cases it will perform very similarly to the i3 4160. To give you some idea of the performance difference:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1707?vs=1192

Bearing in mind your CPU is overclocked, and that is a faster i3. With the overclock you can expect about 5-15% more performance on top of a 860k depending on whether the how the turbo states work out.
 
Update. The guy lied, it's an X4 860k :D Got this weird one in the system, how bad is it?

qpvhcJF.jpg

Originally cpu was running at 4.3 @ 1.44v, managed stable 4.4 @ 1.392v, is it alright on that board and a cooler similar to 212Evo, temps maxed out at 56'C after 10 min Aida + 2 Firestrike runs. Could do 4.5 @ 1.44v but temps went up into 60's, plus I don't want to stress VRMs and PSU too much. Running 2GB GTX 960 from Zotac (single fan -.-) at 1389/3506, too bad 1400 crashes in the middle of Firestrike, no voltage control ftw.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/13020907?

No idea why it says 1226 MHz while on Afterburner max was 1389 :confused:
 
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