Im gonna upgrade my old a64 s939 4000 second machine to something more modern, all i need is a new cpu, motherboard and ram, budget of £500.00 ono including an operating system software, dont need any hdd's, optical drives etc, the current rig is housed in an akasa eclipse 62, 8800gt for graphics, though later down the line i could add one of the 470's from my main rig when i upgrade my main rig, system is used mainly for file storage/torrents, though my nephew likes to game on it now and again, obviously it doesnt run modern games very well, if at all.
Build spec for a new rig
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Soldato
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Hi setter 
If its just CPU, mobo, RAM and OS then you could go for this:
However, i'm not sure you need this level of performance for what it will be used for. If you don't then you could lower the budget or perhaps add some big HDDs as spec requirement (everyone needs more storage, right?).
If its just CPU, mobo, RAM and OS then you could go for this:
However, i'm not sure you need this level of performance for what it will be used for. If you don't then you could lower the budget or perhaps add some big HDDs as spec requirement (everyone needs more storage, right?).
Spec looks pretty good mate, even 4gb of ram would be fine, the old rig already has 2 x 74gb raptors, a single 250gb western digital caviar and a samsung F3 1tb, the sandybridge setups do look very nice, but ill still stick with i7 for my main machine. Though i noticed in a few threads earlier, sb is a hell of a clocking setup, tbh 4ghz on the i7 was a breeze, sb sounds as though it could be a great setup for tweeking.
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Soldato
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Yea - it is pretty awesome.
TBH, if I was spending this kind of money on a second system I would seriously consider just swapping the X58 into the secondary and install SB into the primary (with an SLI motherboard like this).
The main downsides are dropping down to PCIE v2 x8x8 (instead of x16x16), however this is only a performance loss of a few %. The other downside is that the secondary machine (which is most likely going to be running 24/7 if its a torrent box) will be sporting a 130W CPU. However, perhaps you will make that back by running a max overclocked SB in your primary - which doesn't use nearly as much power as a 4GHz Bloomfield
Tbh mate, id prefer to keep the bloomfield as my main gaming rig, currently running overclocked sli 470's at x16, every little bit of performance helps, and tbh i wouldnt fancy a drop to dual x8 per pcie lane, even though the drop is small, but as i game competitively i like any edge i can get, particularly at my res of 1920x1200, power usage isnt a major concern tbh.