Good Upgrade for < £500?

ishy44

ishy44

ishy44

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2 Mar 2014
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7
Hi, I'm in the process of upgrading my PC so my middle son can play games on it. I've already got a case, a power supply (550W), OS and hard drives. I just need CPU, motherboard, graphics card and RAM.
Here is what I've come up with. I went with the i5 because I want to get the Occulus Rift when it comes out and I've read it needs a pretty beefy CPU. Also my son wants to play Star Wars Battlefield on it.

i5 4690 retail - £188.99
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/inte...ocket-lga1150-processor-retail-cp-540-in.html

MSI Geforce 770 - £149.99
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-...ddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-202-ms.html

RAM - £41.99
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...kit-black-tpkd48gm2400hc16dc01-my-065-tg.html

Motherboard - £79.99
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...cket-1150-ddr3-atx-motherboard-mb-497-gi.html

It comes to £472 which is probably £50 more than I would have wanted to spend. Is the spec ok, or are there any tweaks I can make to bring the price down a little?

thanks
 
How about this:-

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £429.02
(includes shipping: £11.10)
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Cheaper version of the GTX770 and I believe the warranty is with OCUK so shouldn't be any problems there. Saves you £43 over your original list. The motherboard will still get a decent overclock out of the 4690k should you go down that route.
 
Quartz said:
Does that not require a CPU cooler which will eat up much of the saving?
Click to expand...

Sorry, yes it does but as shown above you can get a half decent one for little money, have much better temps than the stock Intel cooler and save money as well. What make and model is your 550w psu?
 
Hi everyone, thanks for the advice. I've just checked, and my case came with a power supply, it's a 'Coolermaster Sileo Quiet Case With 500W Extreme Power Plus PSU'. I'm not planning on overclocking it, so bog standard coolers should be fine. Hopefully the PSU is ok. cheers
 
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That psu is garbage. It's built by AcBel Polytech who typically build poor budget psu's and it has a pathetically weak 12v rail of only 360w. HardOCP gave it a fail in their review. That needs replacing.
 
Ok, I've done some tweaking. I'm not going to overclock so I'm sticking with the stock cooler. To reduce the cost a bit more I've changed the CPU and the graphics card.

Core i5-4590 3.30GHz - £155.99
Gigabyte Z97P-D3 Intel Z97 - £61.99
Kingston HyperX Savage Red 8GB - £38.99
SuperFlower FX 550W '80 Plus Bronze' - £49.99
Asus GeForce GTX 750Ti OC 2048MB - £104.99

Think that looks ok. Thanks for all the help.
 
Not with the Oculus in mind :)

I would seriously also AMD cards for the Rift, although we won't know until it shows up, if AMD has got an edge over NVIDIA (which it might with more VRAM and better async support).

A 750ti will probably do OK in the meanwhile, but bear in mind you will have to consider replacing it (R9 390, or if you must a GTX770) for the Rift. You'll see, I suppose.

Get the SuperFLower HX Gold version as well. For a tenner, I think it's worth it. But the FX will be fine anyway.
 
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I think your cost cutting will come back to haunt you.

Stick with the overclockable CPU and you will be able to wring some extra life out of it in the future...taking this route enabled me to keep my dad's 5 year old PC strong enough to play arma 3 with me.

A 750ti is really going to struggle in the not too near future.

You can stick with the stock cooler until you decide you want to overclock
 
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