Is this recycling or upgrading?

bezland

bezland

bezland

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21 Oct 2013
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Hello all,

So I currently have an old (3yrs?) Dell Inspiron 580 tower that has served me well, but now I'm starting to get into PC gaming more and more. It started with DayZ and is going to move towards Battlefield with things like League of Legends inbetween, so I want a machine that can play DayZ and Battlefield on what I call the "beautiful" graphics settings.

I'm on a bit of a budget with this, so I'm keen to try to keep my spend at no more than approx. £500 hence why I wan to try and recycle as much as I can from my old Dell PC.

You guys come in to the fray as I've never built a PC before, and I have no idea how to even spec one, so I definitely need some guidance on this.

Here's what I could find in terms of specs for my current PC:

Processor: Intel Core i5 760
Memory: Memory Type DDR3
Memory Size 6 GBytes
Channels Dual
Memory Frequency 665.0 MHz (2:10)
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5450 (1Gb)

It also has an optical drive, a 1Tb internal HDD which ideally I can just format and then use in the new PC.

Is there a way for me to build the system I want for £500?

Thanks for any help

Rich
 
Assuming you can reuse the case, optical drive, psu and HDD...

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - OEM £167.99
1 x MSI Radeon R9 270X Gaming Edition OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £149.99
1 x MSI Z87-G43 Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard - FREE Alpenfohn Civetta Cooler!! £86.99
1 x TeamGroup Vulcan ORANGE 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLAD38G2400HC11CDC01) £55.99
Total : £470.56 (includes shipping : £8.00).



This should do you... eventually you will want to upgrade the CPU cooler so that you can overclock the i5. I can also highly reccomend getting an SSD for your botting...

YOUR BASKET
1 x Samsung 120GB SSD 840 EVO SATA 6Gb/s Basic - (MZ-7TE120BW) £79.99
Total : £87.73 (includes shipping : £6.45).



Adding one of these will blow your budget, but would be well worth it!
 
Well, you may get stuck with a bit of an issue as some Dell's (im not familiar with that model) often have custom case layouts and CPU coolers, and tweaked motherboards so you can't overclock much / at all.

But if you're just wanting it for gaming, there's nothing wrong with an i5 760 and 6Gb RAM, but that 5450 is pretty puny.

Why not stick one of these in that system?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-118-GI&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1830

OK I'm an nvidia fan, but an equivalent ATi card would probably be:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-242-MS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1982

Unsure which is actually best "bang for buck" - but I doubt you'd be able to afford 1 of those cards, and to update your system fully with only £500 to spend.
 
The Only Beardy said:
I am pretty sure the 270X is a slightly better card than the 760... and £30 cheaper...

Either way, I am pretty sure my spec covers everything.
Click to expand...

Oh indeedy, it just may be a little daunting for a 1st timer stripping down this case:

http://zapp2.staticworld.net/reviews/graphics/products/uploaded/395307_g2.jpg

and being able to fit it up with everything listed.

Also, it's an awful lot cheaper to just add the graphics card in, and see what kind of improvement it makes. If OP wants to then spend the rest of the budget on the parts suggested, then he can at a later date, and still keep the same GFX card. :)
 
I also had a gander at the spec of the 580 and the PSU seems to be 300W... which may be a little low... someone else may be able to confirm. But for one of these GPU's ive never really heard of anyone using less than 500W.
 
it's a shame dell lock their mobos down as the 760 still has legs on it with a small overclock.

Even at stock it's not terrible though :) just upgrading the graphics is a decent option for now. My only worry there would be the power draw/connectors available on the PSU, I think it's just a 300W unit in the 580 and I've no idea how much of that is available on the 12V rail (nor do I know if it's standard size etc etc) maybe open the side and take a look?

Edit: Heh, too slow by a long way, Beardy in before me with the PSU concerns!
 
The i5 760 and 6gb of ram is still decent, you could in theory get years more decent use of the i5 760 even without an overclock.

Your graphics card is weak and your PSU may not be sufficient to run top end cards but I bet you can put something in it that will do a decent job for far less than the £500 you were thinking of spending.

Contact Dell support and they'll be able to tell you the best videocard that your system will safely support.

I use a slightly overclocked i5 760 with a GTX 680 - gaming performance is still superb at 1080p - and I see no reason to upgrade for plently of time to come.
 
So from the sound of this, it could be worth me fitting a new graphics card and seeing how that goes first of all?

Would it also be a good idea to also format my main HDD and do a clean windows install to remove the three years worth of clutter that has accumulated?
 
The 5450 is a low profile GPU that doesn't require it's own separate power connection. So you can't just swap it unless you get another low profile one which wouldn't be worth it. You'd need to make sure first that the PSU has the connections available to use for a GPU.

I'd be concerned that the PSU couldn't even handle a good GPU (if it even has enough connections for one). Unless you plan on getting a very cheap GPU I wouldn't risk it anyway with that PSU even if it could handle a better one (which it very well may not be able to)
 
Last edited:
bezland said:
So from the sound of this, it could be worth me fitting a new graphics card and seeing how that goes first of all?

Would it also be a good idea to also format my main HDD and do a clean windows install to remove the three years worth of clutter that has accumulated?
Click to expand...

My dad has a dell studio base unit which he bought about 4 1/2 years ago. Similar spec to what you have but with an i7 cpu instead. I swapped the PSU out for a corsair 520w one, which just fit into the case. This allowed me to upgrade the GPU along with it, which is now a GTX 760 OC edition by MSI.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-117-CS&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=2463 probably will fit, but measure up the current PSU just to be on the safe side. Looks the same size as the one I used a few years back. You'll probably need a CPU 4 pin extension cable as well if you intend to try and hide the cable or if the case is bigger than I think it is.
 
Alternatively, you may be able to pick up a decent case / PSU combination from OcUK for a bit over £100, and transfer the existing Dell components into it, and slap in a new gfx card.

I'd contact Dell to query that though, although you may not get a great deal of detail in the answer, but its worth a try.
 
Going off the pic, it does seem to be fairly conventional in layout, size, RAM location - although I can't be certain.

This is the Dell technical manual, but it doesn't state for certain:

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-prod...n_desktop/inspiron-580_user's guide_en-us.pdf

Dell forums seem to suggest it is micro-ATX though :)

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/p/19450188/20110499.aspx

Dell do seem to have woken up to the sense of not making every single item in their systems proprietary! I've some lovely old C2D quad core Dell's at work, still going strong after about 6 years.
 
I have a friend with what I am 99% sure was this system. He added a new Power supply, SSD and a 7970 last year which was an absolute revelation for him in terms of performance.

If it is the same as his, it uses a standard mATX board (which he later moved over to a new coolermaster case).

As others have suggested, your Motherboard, CPU & RAM should all still be pretty capable for gaming. If you can squeeze a new PSU, SSD and Graphics card into that case you will be surprised at how capable it is :)

It is a shame Dell are so bobbins when it comes to components. I acquired an old and dead Dell XPS machine which I tried to strip down for parts but everything was connected to proprietary slave boards. Nothing could be reused apart from the PSU, which was ready for the scrap heap anyway.
 
So if I was to open up the case, is there an easy way to tell if my motherboard will support a proper graphics card? If so I'm thinking about getting a new case, PSU, graphics card, and SSD if you all still think that would give me a noticeable improvement for gaming? It seems like a rather cost efficient way of sorting my machine out.
 
Another thought, with the upgrades I have mentioned in my above post, how capable would this system be for recording gameplay footage? I'm getting a youtube channel up and running at the minute (yes I know, like every other gamer out there, but this is more because I enjoy it as a hobby rather than I want to be known or anything like that), and I'm currently just using PS4 footage I've streamed to twitch and then downloaded. It'd be great to be able to start actually capturing DayZ without the large drop in frames I currently get.
 
For capturing game footage it might be worth looking at something like nVidia Shadowplay, since it lets you record footage without the large performance impact of something like Fraps.
 
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