Isit work upgrading this rig

woofercooker

woofercooker

woofercooker

Associate
Joined
4 Nov 2011
Posts
512
Currently running this

Antec Black Fusion V2 MATX MediaCenter Case - 430W PSU

Intel Pentium Dual Core E2220 2.4GHz Overclocked @ 3ghz

Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L iG31 Socket 775 mATX

OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Platinum XTC Memory Kit CL4 2.1V


8800gt 512mb

With games like far cry 3 Hitman Absolution and a few others coming out soon i want to be able to play them on my pc,

I was thinking of just getting a xbox or ps3 but i don't enjoy playing FPS's with a control pad

I only had around £300 is could i upgrade this rig to play the latest games with decent settings?
 
That Gpu will definitely need upgrading. There are some great options from AMD at the moment (look at the 7800 series) that would give you a nice boost without breaking the bank.

If you have to keep to that tight budget then socket 775 also has many more powerful processors that can still do a pretty good job with the latest games and can be found reasonably cheap second hand online.

If I were you I would look at getting a q6600 SLACR (G0 Stepping). These can be picked up for about £60 in an auction. The one in my sig still plays most things without complaining. I would also look at getting a p35 / p45 / x38 motherboard as they overclock really well / much better than your current G31 chipset. (Something like an asus P5k / P5Q / P5E) Lastly you could swap out your 2 x 1gb sticks for 2 x 2gb sticks. All That should give you a pretty big performance boost.

A Sapphire 7850 can cost as little as £143 (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-306-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=411)

A Q6600 will set you back around £60

A P45 / P35 / X38 Motherboard Will cost anywhere between about £40 and £100 but it is only worth paying the lower end of this at this point (I picked up an asus P5E x38 recently for about £45).

2 x 2GB DDR2 800Mhz Ram can be had for around £40

143 + 60 + 50 (for arguments sake) + 40 = £293.

You could also do without the new motherboard if you wanted to save some money, you should still be able to overclock the q6600 to around 3Ghz which is enough for most tasks.

Edit: The above about overclocking is assuming you have a decent cpu cooler ( q6600 is a quad core and runs a lot hotter than what you have ). Otherwise you can pick one up for £20 to £30 that will do an adequate job. Also the Q6600 will draw more power than what you have so you need to make sure your psu is big enough. Could you list your full system spec please, including brand of PSU?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom