Considering an upgrade. Pointers?

tophee · 11 Apr 2011 at 17:24

Hello,

My current rig is somewhat outdated and I was considering an upgrade. Though I'm feeling a little poor atm, so this might have to be on a budget

I've been getting into photo editing, 3d modelling with some desktop publishing recently and suddenly 4GB doesn't seem really enough. I do a fair bit of video encoding too.

I was considering upgrading to 8GB, but the price of DDR2 is getting exorbitant. I thought perhaps a full system refresh would be more 'economical'. Looking at what's out there I'm somewhat confused by the benifits / features of i5 vs. i7 etc. Perhaps what people recommend might be the way forward?

I'm rather out of touch with current tech - my current cpu is a q6600 bought when they were the chip to own for that price/performance sweet spot. I've 4GB Corsair ram in an Abit IX38 GTturbo mobo.

My gpu is more recent and I'll be keeping it for the present - a 1GB Nvidia 460GTX.

Don't really game.

Suggestion greatfully recieved. Perhaps looking sub-£500. Or as cheap as possible.

Thanks in advance and all that.

Stoner81 · 11 Apr 2011 at 17:28

All i7's are quad core except for the 970 onwards which are hex core (6), some i5's are quad core and some are not, all i3 CPU's are dual core so hopefully that will answer one question. You say you are looking at sub £500 well what don't you need? Monitor, keyboard, mouse etc if you tell us the bits you are looking for then we can price up stuff accordingly since there is no point in buying what you already have

having said that though are you looking for a totally new system including case, PSU etc?

Stoner81.

stulid · 11 Apr 2011 at 17:37

Add more ram, add a SSD, add a big heatsink and overclock it.

Buy Windows7?

cmndr_andi · 11 Apr 2011 at 17:49

The option to keep the core system, upgrade the RAM, buy an SSD and overclock it is a good one. It won't cost you near £500 and will make your system feel a lot faster. May I ask what stepping your Q6600 is?

If you do want to go all-out and do a CPU upgrade, the I would suggest going for an i7 2600K, a P67 board, decent CPU cooler and 8GB DDR3 RAM. I suggest the i7 2600K because the applications you are using (photo editing, 3D modelling, video editing) do benefit from the hyperthreading. That said, the i5 2500K is still a very fast CPU and a fair bit cheaper (the main difference between the two is that the i7 has hyperthreading enabled and the i5 doesn't). This review shows how the 2500K and 2600K stack up to the Q6600 and many other popular CPUs in a range of tasks.

That said, if you dropped the CPU down to the i5 2500K then you could afford a 60GB SSD like this within your budget - and imho this is a better bet than spending all the money on the i7 CPU since SSDs really do make your system "feel" faster when you are using it on a day-to-day basis.

tophee · 11 Apr 2011 at 19:09

Wow, thanks for the quick responses (just the hour it took to get home).

Stoner81, have a reasonable monitor - Dell Ultrasharp U2311H 23" Widescreen LCD Monitor (didn't think the extra inch was worth the couple of hundred extra for the 24" version.) Case - still using my Akasa eclipse. In my opinion an absolute classic. And a logitech lazer mouse.

cmndr andi - It's the SLACR one. Did the SSD thing a while back, Vertex 60GB. And the link to the review is excellent.

stulid - oc already @ 3.4 or so and I'm a linux boy.

Though still virtualise the odd edition of windows when wine doesn't do the apps I need.

Thanks for your input so far.