***** gaming upgrade - £300

Mr_White

Mr_White

Mr_White

Soldato
Joined
14 Oct 2006
Posts
5,335
Location
Cambridge
Hello there.

Long time since I've done this sort of thing, however, I'm bored, and I'm itching to delve back into the nerd side and unleash my deadly skills (At least when I was playing Quake/UT :p) upon the unsuspecting PC gaming community.

I haven't upgraded and have barely touched my PC since going over to Apple years ago and buying a 360 to satisfy gaming needs.

The mobo, cpu, graphics and ram will all need to be replaced (Athlon 2500+, X850XT, BH5 Hyper X), the chassis, drives etc, obviously will be reused, and I'm hoping that the PSU can be, power demands of the X3 and 5770 respectively point to it being possible.

The PSU is a 480w TrueBlue
+5V: 38A
-5V: 0.5A
+12V: 22A
-12V: 1.0A
+3.3V: 30A
+5V SB: 2A


I've come up with an X3 435, 1GB HD5770, 2GB DDR3 1600 XMS3, MSI 770-G45

Which seems to be about the best value system without going too low end, I'm not particularly interested in Crysis and all of those tech demos, I'm just interested in a rig that will sustain a minimum 60fps for competitive gaming, not too bothered about ultra settings and AA on everything.

I'm not looking to spend loads, as it's mostly just to see if I've still got it in the PC arena and to see how the gaming scene is now, so £300 is the maximum budget, as I might get bored of it in a month if it's not what I remember.

I'm not sure if my spec is the best pairing, as I haven't done this for a while ;)

So any suggestions on any better pairings and anything I could save money on, and whether or not the PSU will cope, otherwise I'll have to reduce the spec a bit and put the spare into a new PSU.

Cheers
 
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I figure 15-16A from the CPU and GPU both running at max load, it's also within spec of what AMD recommend for a 5770, it was a fairly revered PSU when it was new, with rock solid rails, and it still maintains that, so I'm not sure if I'd want to downgrade the rest of the spec for a new PSU without testing what I have first.
 
Drives will ge likely very slow too. Hard drives have moved on somewhat. I'd go with a 500gb Samsung F3... More than speed you het a new drive. I know nothing is certain but you'd hope a new drive would be mire reliable than one which has been laying about for years. Then again I usually get a new hard drive a year.

Big.Wayne could spec a monster system (compared to what you have) for not a lot more than 300 notes. Hopefully he chimes in, I don't know much of AMD these days.
 
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4gb of ram would be a wise upgrade if you can stretch to it since i guess you will be using a newish os and will be well utilised
 
Worried about your power supply. Modern computers draw the majority of their power from the 12V line, whereas older ones made heavy use of 5V. I'm certain your psu is still very good, but not convinced it's still appropriate.

22A at 12V is probably enough for your upgrade, my concern is that it wont like having heavy load on the 12V rail and light on the 5V one when it was engineered for a different balance.

I don't know the power demands of the amd system you're looking at. I can offer that an overclocked i7 with two 8800GTs uses 8.5A at 3.3V, 11A at 5V and 24A at 12V. So the 12V line uses twice the 5V current, and three times the 3.3V current.
 
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As usual the CAT's suggestion for motherboards looks good. :p The Athlon X3s are pretty nice and should be fine for gaming with low-mid settings. Also if you do get bored of it in a month you can always resell it. ;)
 
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