CPU or GPU, which to change?

McLeod

McLeod

McLeod

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11 Oct 2011
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My current system is as follows,

E8200 @ 3.0 ghz on MSI Neo platinum
4Gb Corsair Dominator
Gainward GTX260 Golden Sample OC'd
Antec True Power Trio 550w
Benq 1920 x 1080 Tn panel

This plays most games at high/highest settings fairly comfortably eg: Crisis 2, WoT, BFBC2, Shift 2.

Now I'm going to have a budget of around £400 to change bits in order to incvrease performance for upcoming games like BF3, SWTOR etc etc.

Would it be better to go for i5 2500k with board and memory or change GPU to a GTX570 or similar and get new psu too ?

What what be most effective in short term, long term I will be changing the rest anyway.
 
I would say make the i5 2500k upgrade -squeeze what you can out of the 260and wait for the next gen of gfx cards which is due end of year/early next year.

The SB upgrade will cost less then £400 probably +/-£300 I would then get AMD7000 or Nvidia 600 card and benefit from the the next gen which is supposed to be a real improvement.

My 2cents
 
2500k/Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 mobo/ 4gb ram, include a Gelid Tranquillo cooler and it will set you back about £330 ish.
 
cool seems reasonable, been looking at the Coirsair Vengeance Blue 1600Mhz 8gb set for about £50, suitable isn't it, or should I go for 1800's ?
 
McLeod said:
cool seems reasonable, been looking at the Coirsair Vengeance Blue 1600Mhz 8gb set for about £50, suitable isn't it, or should I go for 1800's ?
Click to expand...

1600 is fine, be careful with the vengeance type memory with the tall heat spreaders as it might cause issues if you try to fill all the memory slots when some coolers overhang them.
 
For the biggest gaming performance improvement with a budget of £400, it would probably be something like this:
i3 2100 (£85), 2x2GB ram (£50), 1155 H61 motherboard (£50), GTX560TI 2GB or 6950 2GB (£215), which will comes to around £400 in total and leave you with. However for future proof's sake, you should consider getting a better motherboard...something like a P67/Z68 board that support Crossfire/SLI.

Just a reminder that the despite the i3 2100 is only a dual-core, it is actually faster than a Core2Quad or Phenom II X4 at 3.6GHz on gaming, may it be games that use 4 cores or more, or less than 4 cores.

But you could also consider what others have suggested...you could upgrade to i5 2500K together with a decent motherboard and rams first, and leave the graphic upgrade until later when you have more money. The only problem with this is with the GTX260, you won't really get much better performance in game, despite having spent £300+.

Alternatively, if you got a decent P35/P45 motherboard and a good CPU cooler, you could try overclocking your E8200 to 4.0GHz and beyond, and just grab a GTX560Ti 2GB or 6950 2GB. Yes the CPU WILL still bottleneck the cards a bit in some CPU intensive moments in games, but it is still the biggest return on performance with the least money spent (£215). It will keep you going while you save up for a SandyBridge upgrade.
 
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