advice needed

PAULRYAN52

PAULRYAN52

PAULRYAN52

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Joined
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Liverpool
hi i'm buying a new pc in june/july so would like some advice, £1680 is my maximum budget, it will be used for games, web browsing and music playback, my current system is

Motherboard EVGA nForce 780i SLI
Processer Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
Memory Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-6400C4 TwinX
Memory OCZ 4GB Reaper X
Graphics Card Point Of View 8800GTX
Power Supply Zalman ZM600-HP Heatpipe Cooled 600W
Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit Edition DVD
Case Lian Li PC-A10B
Hard Drive 1 Western Digital WD2500KS
Hard Drive 2 Western Digital WD2500KS
CPU Heatsink Zalman CNPS9700
Fan Scythe S-FLEX 120mm
Fan Scythe S-FLEX 120mm
Fan Scythe S-FLEX 120mm
Fan Scythe S-FLEX 120mm

heres what i am thinking of changing

Krypton Extreme with Asus Rampage III Extreme
Asus Matrix ATI Radeon HD 5870 "Platinum Edition" 2048MB OCZ
Vertex 2 100GB
Corsair HX 750W ATX

can this be improved on for cheaper
 
TobyW said:
You have £1600 to blow but your only upgrading the cpu and other bits and bobs?

IMO, get a 5900, or a normal 5870.

new mobo will mean new processor and ram surely?
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its a bundle with the cpu, mobo, ram and heatsink included, so a normal 5870 would be ok, what about psu should i upgrade or will my current be ok
 
cmndr_andi said:
What monitor and speakers are you currently using?

You current system sounds great. To maximise your gaming performance I would only suggest a new GPU and perhaps a quad core CPU (a Q9550 would be ideal) and you will be flying. For the graphics card, I would suggest going with this - your current PSU will handle it fine.
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hi my monitor is a 24" benq and sound is my denon m37, i fancy a new cpu, mobo, ram and gpu while i have the money
 
cmndr_andi said:
In that case I would suggest the i7 920 CPU (be quick, there aren't many left at this price), the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R or ASUS P6X58D-E and this RAM.

As for the graphics card, I would suggest a 5850 or 5870 and keep the current PSU. If you want to push the boat out, the 5970 is a great card, but it will need a new PSU and you will need to check it will fit in your case.

With this kind of money to spend - you may want to consider getting a nice IPS or VA panel monitor and run it in dual-screen with your BenQ. I am assuming that your BenQ is a TN panel monitor - I would need to know the model name/number to check.
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hi its the fp241w but i dont have space for another 1, whats better 5850 or 5870 is the 5870 worth the extra, think i'll stick with 930 as i wont be ordering til end of the month
 
cmndr_andi said:
A very nice monitor you have there, shame you don't have room for a second.

The 5870 is the faster, this review compares the 5850, 5870, 5970 and Fermi cards. The £5870 is usually £70-100 more than the 5850 - it is up to you whether the extra performance is worth the cost.
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the monitor is good, i would love a 5970 or fermi but dont think i can get 1 in my budget unless i sacrifice somethings, i am a bit of an nvidia fan i've always had them so dont really know what ati are like, is an ssd worth getting
 
hi is the asus rampage 3 worth the price, i like the sound of bluetooth built-in, i will be overclocking the cpu, if its not worth it are there any alternatives with bluetooth
 
cmndr_andi said:
To be honest, unless you plan on doing some computationally intensive work other than gaming - moving to an i7 rig will not give you much of a performance boost at all. If you feel you do want a new start with a brand new i7 system - that is fair enough, but so long as you know that for gaming it is not required.

Right now you can pick up a Core 2 Quad Q9550 for around £160 second hand. Add this to your 780i motherboard and 6GB DDR2 RAM and for games you will be absolutely flying - do a bit of overclocking and get your framerate up a bit further in some games. Then the only thing holding you back in games is the 8800GTX graphics card - swap it for a 5850 and at 1920x1080 resolution there will be nothing modern you can't play perfectly. The other bonus of the 5850 is that it overclocks well, isn't a bad price and draws less power than the 8800GTX - so can be used with your current Zalman power supply.

All-in the cost of the upgrade suggested above will be around £400.

An SSD will not improve gaming performance (other than loading times) but it will make windows use feel much snappier as the primary disk has instantaneous response times and can do random reads and writes much faster than before. If you have the budget,then an excellent one like the Vertex 2 is worthwhile if you spend a lot of time in windows and loading things/moving files from the primary drive - also your boot time would be significantly faster.
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hi i fancy a new start and thought i would choose an i7 for future proofing, i like the sound of an ssd for windows use and speed
 
cmndr_andi said:
How does this look?

i71328.png



The case is only a suggestion, I suggest you hunt around and find something you like the look of, perhaps another Lian Li.

I included a 5850 as it will happily run with your existing PSU and is very fast, also it fives you the opportunity to buy a second one in the future and run them in CrossfireX when you feel the performance of one card is not enough. Though adding a second card would require a new PSU (as would buying a 5970 off the bat).

I included a megahalems cooler as it is an excellent air cooler for the i7 and you can use your existing scythe fans with it. The fan controller will allow you to tune the speed of the fans yourself.
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i dont mind the case, everything looks good, i wont be going crossfire, so should i go 5870, also i would like 2 sata cd drives
 
cmndr_andi said:
If you have the budget, go for the 5870. It is faster than the 5850 and overclocks well. I would suggest going for an ASUS one as they come with 3 year warranty (others seem to be 2 or less) and the BIOS is made for overclocking.

For the optical drives, I would suggest a pair of these. If you are interested in Blu-Ray, one of these drives is £47 more and gives you the ability to watch Blu Ray movies.
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yes i have the budget for 5870, are them drives quiet, i have 2 liteon drives but there noisy when reading/writing
 
cmndr_andi said:
I think all drives are noisy when reading and writing - I think the best way to control the noise is reduce the speed of the read/write operations.

Here is a review of the drive (this review the 7420, which is the same drive without the lightscribe functions of the 7421) and it performs very well.
Click to expand...

how would adjust the speed
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Just curious...any particular reason for against crossfire? While a 5850 would give you 'smooth' game play for most games...with crossfire 5850 or a single 5970 it would boost frame rate even more as well as allowing your to turn up more AA etc.
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no particular reason, i have never had crossfire/sli before
 
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