Cheap Upgrade

[melipone1]

Wondering what you guys think would be the best bang/buck, hopefully for around the £50 mark secondhand (if possible). Any particular CPU I should look out for that could overclock nicely? Would rather have raw cpu speed than quad core, but not sure if I should go for quad for newer games eventhough it will probably not clock as well.

Current system:

Core 2 Duo, e6300 (1.8 ghz @ 3.115), 65nm, 2meg cache (I think).
Asus P5B Deluxe @ 445mhz Bus (1780 fsb in cpuz)
2Gig DDR2
8800GTS

 

[cmndr_andi]

An upgrade to 4GB of RAM would give you the biggest performance boost for your money.

Upgrading the CPU or GPU would be nice, but you would need to spend £100 on each to see a big jump in performance.

If you can find one, a second-hand Q6600 or Q6700 would give you a nice boost in multithreaded games (like ARMA2 and GTA4) and multithreaded apps.

For a graphics card, you will be wanting at least a GTX 260 or a HD 4870 to get a decent performance boost. I'm not sure you can get these in your budget - even second-hand.

 

[PwnDirect]

as said ram & gfx would give you a much better boost thhan cpu

 

[Nocky24]

as said ram & gfx would give you a much better boost thhan cpu

I second this as well. A new gpu will be the best idea unless you use a lot of multi-threaded apps and play mutli-threaded games in which case as the above poster has been mentioned a q6600 second hand would be a nice performance boost. If its just general gaming definitely go for a better gpu.

 

[melipone1]

OK thx. Might upgrade the RAM sometime, but I was mostly after more FPS. Don't really fancy spending the cash on a new GPU yet

Its mostly a cpu intensive non-multithreaded game I play atm (CS:S) . Everything else I play is running fine. More RAM probably wouldn't hurt but won't boost FPS will it?