Eek! My first upgrade

md99

md99

md99

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Joined
13 Aug 2007
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478
Location
Oirland
Hello folks,

I've set myself a budget of £400 (give or take a few of the Queens finest) for which I'd like a new mainboard, cpu and graphic card.

Feel free to correct me or make alternative suggestions but I was thinking of maybe getting a core 2 quad cpu, an ati 512mb 4850 graphic card and as for the mainboard, I haven't a clue. Something which is as future-proof as is possible in the brutal world of PC upgrades :D

Also, would new ram be recommended? I'll probably go over budget as what I have in there at the moment is ancient old Geil DDR PC2-5300 (2x 1gb). I have a pretty decent PSU (650w Hiper power supply), an Akasa Evo 120 cpu heatsink, vga coolers and two additional fans in my case.

The PC will be used mainly for gaming, editing hi-def movies and probably, in time, watching Blu Ray movies.

Thanks in advance.
 
Sounds like a fair choice. Those components should give you pretty reasonable performance in DX10. What OS are you planning on?
 
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shaffaaf27 said:
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That mainboard is certainly impressive. Thanks for the suggestion. If you wouldn't mind however, exactly how good is that cpu? I'm still stuck in the days of single core Pentium processors and don't know much about these newer ones. How does it compare to, say, a £150 cpu or even an entry level quad core model?
 
welcome to the forums mate

to be honest - if you have been content with single core up til now
you really would be wasting money on a quad

any games /apps you use will probably not make use of 75% of a quad cpus capabilities

the wolfdale suggested above would be ideal
or any of the wolfdale core 2 duo chips for that matter
you would certainly see a massive increase in speed

and 4gb of ram is ideal at the moment
i suggest going vista 64 to make use of it and get the most out of your new gear


edit* that mainboard will be brilliant for you - and will run the rest of the spec fine

i seriously urge you to go with what shaffaaf27 suggested
 
I'm certainly tempted to. When I mentioned gaming in the original post I meant gaming as in playing stuff like Crysis at high (perhaps not full) settings and slightly less demanding games like Bioshock and Project Origin, certainly at maximum.

Will that rig be up to it?

As for Vista, I have it on my laptop and just don't like it.
 
That E8600 will probably overclock to 4.2ghz, if you're lucky, 4ghz at least anyway. Your system will be very fast!

As for gaming, what screen resolution do you run?
 
rjkoneill said:
and 4gb of ram is ideal at the moment
i suggest going vista 64 to make use of it and get the most out of your new gear
Click to expand...

Just after realizing that I'll be needing it anyway, won't I?

32bit XP (which I have) won't recognize 4gb of RAM. And I'll might even get more ram over the next 12 or so months.
 
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md99 said:
Just after realizing that I'll be needing it anyway, won't I?

32bit XP (which I have) won't recognize 4gb of RAM. And I'll might even get more ram over the next 12 or so months.
Click to expand...

XP 32 will see 3 to 3.5 G of your 4gb. If you have to buy an OS anyway, then go for Vista 64, if you have a licensed copy of XP now, then you can use that.
 
Personlaly, I would go witha quad, but if you need the extra clock for whatever other uses you will be using the system for, go dual. I think that two extra cores is better than a bit more clock though, and a quad isn't going to lose you much frame rate, if any, in games...
 
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