Looking at upgrade or completely new build- advice appreciated

[ojgbrown]

My spec:

X2 550 BE @ stock clocks (3.10ghz)
HD Radeon 5770 1gb @ 900/1350
Asus M4A78-VM mobo
550w PSU (came with PC, may be stock but not sure)
Samsung HD502HI HDD (500gb)
4GB Ram (not sure of brand or speed, but I would imagine 1333)



I mainly want the PC for fast and efficient general use, high end gaming and some basic video editing as well.

- My mobo does not let me unlock the 550's additional 2 cores and does not respond well to overclocking. The cooler is stock in any case.



My inclination is that it would work out better value in the long run to do a new build, possibly built around an i5-2500k and a 6950. Could people please advise on whether simply upgrading the CPU (to say an X6 1090) would ultimately be wasting money and what a good spec may be for my budget which would be around £500+whatever you feel I could get for the components in my current rig.

I do not need an OS, monitor, mouse or keyboard. Thanks guys.

 

[sk82jack]

It would be better to just get a new build imo but the i5+6950 comes to ~£355 for those parts alone so £500 for everything isn't going to be enough without downgrading the graphics card a bit.

What case have you currently got? is it reusable?

If you can reuse your case, HDDs & optical drive (assuming they're both SATA) then you could get this for a little over budget

MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti Twin FrozR II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £175.99

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM £155.99

MSI P67A-C45 Intel P67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - (Sandybridge) ** B3 REVISION ** £89.98

Antec High Current Gamer 620W Power Supply £49.99

Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) £33.59

Total : £517.54 (includes shipping : £10.00)

 

[Reaper 392]

if the OP can reuse his RAM as well, then your build would be within budget jack.

with the money he gets from selling the motherboard and processor he could get the 6950 as well i would think, along with the G45 motherboard, allowing crossfire

 

[ojgbrown]

Thanks for the advice. As I said, my budget is £500 PLUS whatever I can get for current stuff. I think I could get £100 for the mobo, Graphics card and CPU so that would give me a budget of £600. I am happy with my case- it is extremely standard but that doesn't bother me, it would only be an issue if components do not fit in or are so cramped that cooling becomes an issue.

The PC was bought from Mesh originally and the spec has the following descriptions:

New Stylish Mini-Tower Micro ATX Chassis with 550W PSU - Piano Black
4GB 800MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM - (2x 2GB)


Out of interest is the 800mhz ram on my current rig a bottleneck at all? It is just that whilst I know a 550BE not overclocked and a 5770 isn't cutting edge, i still feel it should be performing better than it is.