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Intel Overclocked Bundle Recommendation?

mrmimz

mrmimz

mrmimz

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Joined
22 Mar 2010
Posts
42
Location
Falkirk
I am looking to upgrade my current setup over the summer, starting with my motherboard processor and ram, and an SSD for the clean install of windows 7.

Looking through all of the pre-overclocked bundles its hard for me to justify the difference in performance I would really get between an i5 and an i7 bundle. I am a photography student and also do some architectural drawing work so use the pc for photoshop cs5, lightroom, adobe bridge, photomatix and autocad (and rarely sketchup or the like). I'm also a pretty affluent gamer with the likes of bf:bc2, l4d2 and portal 2 atm.

My Current Setup:

Cpu - Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 "Yorkfield" 2.83GHz

Motherboard - MSI P7N Diamond

Memory - 6GB Corsair CM2X PC2 6400 (2x2GB and 2x1GB)

Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 260

PSU - Antec 750W

My budget is looking to be at around the lower end of £400-£500 for the bundle and the SSD with looking to get a new DX11 graphic card at the end of summer in time for Skyrim and BF3.

Any thoughts and recommendations would be much appreciated as I just want best bang for my buck really, and don't wanna over-do it if I don't need to. This is really for future proofing my pc for the next couple years so as my photography equipment can take priority.

Cheers.
 
Overclocking SB is shockingly easy so I think you would be better off buying the parts separately, customising as you see fit and then OCing yourself.

I am struggling to get a £500 budget satisfied with a current gen SSD. £613 with a Vertex 3 120GB, could lower that with 4GB of RAM instead of 8GB and a lower end SSD, an Agility 3 for example for £544.

That's with a new cooler, which you may not need/want depending on your current one and it's compatibility on socket 1155. That's another £38 saved if you don't need one. Add £10 for decent TIM though!
 
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Considering your uses, you may want to wait for the arrival of the new 8 core AMD Bulldozer chips which is expected in June.

That said, if you are buying right now then the Intel Sandy Bridge Quad cores are excellent and may well maintain their performance lead over AMD in less highly threaded tasks after Bulldozer arrives.

As for the issue of i7 vs i5, for your uses (as you probably know) hyperthreading will give you a performance boost, so going for i7 would be ideal. However, considering your budget, and the ~£70 price gap between i5 2500K and i7 2600K then I would suggest going for the i5- which is still a very quick CPU and overclocks like mad.

To save yourself some money I would strongly suggest overclocking the system yourself - as it is made rather simple with the unlocked multiplier.

Here is my spec including an i5 2500K, a motherboard which allows for overclocking and SLI/CF, a nice SSD and 8GB of RAM - as the applications you mention should make good use of this:

497.png
 
Sin_Chase said:
Overclocking SB is shockingly easy so I think you would be better off buying the parts separately, customising as you see fit and then OCing yourself.

I am struggling to get a £500 budget satisfied with a current gen SSD. £613 with a Vertex 3 120GB, could lower that with 4GB of RAM instead of 8GB and a lower end SSD, an Agility 3 for example for £544.

That's with a new cooler, which you may not need/want depending on your current one and it's compatibility on socket 1155. That's another £38 saved if you don't need one. Add £10 for decent TIM though!
Click to expand...

I was given this advice 3 or so weeks ago. I was looking at OC'ed bundles but ended up doing it all seperately and now i'm running an i5 2500k at 4.5ghz stable and it was easy as pie!

I was glad I asked and got the advice on here before I ordered as I saved a bit which I used on other things :)

David
 
Mine is sitting at 4.4Ghz and I changed all of...oh I don't know, 3 OC related settings? Even when you want to start getting into the full manual side of things for higher clocks there is not much to mess with :D
 
thanks for the advice guys ordered myself this stuff...

PROCESSOR - Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor with FREE Operation Flashpoint Red River Game

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-360-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1275

MOTHERBOARD - MSI P67A-GD65 Intel P67 (socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - (Sandybridge) ** B3 REVISION ** [129.15]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-165-MS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1906

RAM - G.Skill RipJawsX 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-060-GS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1517

SSD - OCZ Vertex 60GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (OCZSSD2-1VTX60G)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-014-OC&tool=3

coming tomorrow...excited.
 
i have Coolermaster Hyper 212 plus already, so will transfer that over to the new processor when it comes.

I don't plan on OC'n right away, its gonna be much faster than my current setup as is, so dont wanna do too much too soon. :-)
 
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