Budget upgrade for old PC

hybrid572 · 1 Nov 2010 at 11:39

Personally, I'd go for the 6850 or the GTX 460 (whichever's cheaper), as both will rock at your current resolution, and consider a Q6600- as Fallout: New Vegas is a console port, it will use multiple cores, as the Xbox 360 has 3, so you'll get significant gains from the upgrade. Don't plan for CF- your PSU won't be able to cope with two powerful cards, although it should be fine with one

And remember- you might be able to sell off your E6300 to make some of your cash back.

pastymuncher · 1 Nov 2010 at 13:25

I would take the Q6600 over a E7500 any day. Get it clocked past 3Ghz (should be achieveble with your board) and it will really come into it's own with more and more games using quad cores. The Q6600 is practically indestructable just make sure it's a G0 stepping and not the hotter running, worse clocking B1 stepping. I have bought many second hand cpu's and other bit's off the bay over the years and have never had a problem with any of them.

Jam1 · 1 Nov 2010 at 15:07

Brilliant, I know what I’m doing now for CPU and graphics. Q6600 and GTX460 – sorry it took so much convincing!!

Trusty · 1 Nov 2010 at 16:24

Get another 2GB of ram aswell if possible! Sell the GPU and CPU and you should have a nice relatively cheap upgrade there.

Jony27 · 1 Nov 2010 at 16:26

im guessing that hell have to sell "some" rams as all the slots in the mobo are used(4x512mb)

Jam1 · 2 Nov 2010 at 12:54

Winging their way to me now are the following:

Second hand Q6600 SLACR G0 stepping

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 OC 1024MB GDDR5

I'm over my initial budget but not by all that much and thanks to everyone's help I think I've made good choices (although I might have overcooked the graphics card a little bit!)

The RAM will have to wait for now but I do have one more question for when the time comes: 800 or 1066?

If I stick to 800 and select new ram with the same timings I should be able to reuse 1gb of the ram I already have (I think). Or would I be better off selling it and moving up to 1066. So extra speed or extra gig?

pastymuncher · 2 Nov 2010 at 13:11

800mhz ram will get you to 3.6Ghz before going over it's rated speed. The thing is that there is only a £5 difference in price between 4Gb of 800mhz and 1066mhz so you may as well go for the faster of the two.