Best PC upgrade order

jimmyh

jimmyh

jimmyh

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Joined
1 Mar 2009
Posts
13
I'm looking to upgrade parts of my PC, but I'm not sure in what order I should upgrade them.

This is what I have at the moment.

Processor: Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz Socket 775 800FSB 2MB Cache
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L iG31 Socket 775
Gfx Card: Sapphire HD 5670 512MB GDDR5
HD: Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM
Memory: OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Titanium Memory Kit CL4(4-4-4-15)
PSU: Hiper 480W Type-R Black
OS: Win 7 ( Would like to dual boot with xp and win 7 )

I use my PC mostly for development using visual studio, so most of the time I will have visual studio open ( some times more than 1 copy ), a paint package(psp or ps), chrome with at least 10 tabs open all the time, streaming audio and I think that's probably about it. I may have a in the back ground running.

My gaming is limited to, World of tanks, WoW, Civ, Anno 1404, Lotro, Settlers. So I don't think I'm in need of a graphics upgrade.

With my current Mobo I can't add any more RAM, but I would like to move upto 8gb with the option of going to 16gb in the future. I'm also not really interested in overclocking, I think the most I would do is get an aftermarket heatsink/fan. Here's what I was thinking of doing.

Processor: i3 2120
Mobo:GA-Z68P-DS3
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CL9 1.5V Non-ECC Unbuffered

My current cpu is ranked 475 @ http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php and the i3 is ranked 147.

I'm also wondering if I would be better off going with some thing like a G850(ranked 299, oddly ranked higher than the G860) and getting some thing like a 60g SSD as my os/apps drive.

I would also like the option of maybe have a raid configuration at some point as well.

Thoughts?
 
Hi,

Would suggest that you do the following:

Sell all your old components (if no longer needed) excluding hard drive and possibly the graphics card.

buy new/used motherboard + ram + cpu in 1 go
buy a decent psu (cannot stress how important this is)
Use old graphics card + hdd till you can upgrade later on.

Rara
 
With £200 I would get an SSD and a 2nd hand quad core like Q6600. Mobo, ram and cpu is a bit much to cram into that price and an SSD will provide you with a noticeable speed increase.
 
hmm, I've been having a look at the AMD options available.

Would some thing like an AMD Athlon II X4 631 and a GA-A75-D3H along with the 8gb ram be worth a look?

The AMD is listed slightly better on the benchmark site and the AMD option is cheaper than the Intel setup.
 
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