Looking to Upgrade £1300 budget

eiglos

eiglos

eiglos

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Joined
1 Jan 2008
Posts
40
My current PC spec is as follows:

Intel i7 920 (overclocked)
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard
6GB Patriot Viper DDR3
Asus Radeon HD 5870 1GB graphics card
Corsair HX 750W PSU

Monitor, keyboard and mouse not required.

The PC is now starting to struggle with reboots required etc..

I was waiting for Skylake but that does not appear as great an upgrade as many people hoped.

I would like to go to SSD for my boot drive.

Many thanks
 
Hi,

What case and drives do you have now?

What do you use the PC for and what resolution is your monitor?
 
eiglos said:
My current PC spec is as follows:

Intel i7 920 (overclocked)
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard
6GB Patriot Viper DDR3
Asus Radeon HD 5870 1GB graphics card
Corsair HX 750W PSU

Monitor, keyboard and mouse not required.

The PC is now starting to struggle with reboots required etc..

I was waiting for Skylake but that does not appear as great an upgrade as many people hoped.

I would like to go to SSD for my boot drive.

Many thanks
Click to expand...

You could keep your current PC spec and use it as a streaming PC. Then use your £1300 budget to build some i7 beast... probably would even have cash left over :D
 
stulid said:
Hi,

What case and drives do you have now?

What do you use the PC for and what resolution is your monitor?
Click to expand...

I have an Akasa Eclipse 62 case, rather battered now and the USBs are failing.

I have a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB boot disk and a Samsung SpinPoint F3 2TB data drive,

I use the PC for gaming, general use, internet use. Monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster T240, resolution 1920x1200.

Hope that helps.
 
 
stulid said:
YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus GeForce GTX 980 DirectCU II OC Strix 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £379.99
1 x Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI - Intel Core i5 6600K Bundle **£20 Saving** £303.97
1 x Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E250B/EU) £79.99
1 x Phanteks Enthoo Pro M Midi Tower Case with Window - Black £59.99
1 x Kingston Fury Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 PC4-21300C15 2666MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black (HX426C15FBK2/8) £50.99
1 x Alpenföhn Matterhorn Black CPU Cooler £39.95
Total : £914.88 (includes shipping : Ex.VAT).



Maybe you already have a heatsink that can be reused with new thermal paste applied and also reuse the PSU.
Click to expand...

Thanks stulid, my PSU seems to be okay even after 5 years or so! I'll be looking to upgrade soon, using my Windows 7 to upgrade to Windows 10.

Thanks
 
Looks like we've got the same rig. Differences are, I now have an SSD and swapped my HIS 5870 for a MSI Twin Frozr 680 a couple of years back. With the 920 at 4ghz, I can't say I'm struggling with anything. Still on max settings for most at 1080p.. Why don't you buy yourself a 970 or equivalent, make sure you're getting the most out of your OC and go travelling for a couple of months with the rest :D

Failing that, stulid seems to have the answer.
 
Larry365 said:
Looks like we've got the same rig. Differences are, I now have an SSD and swapped my HIS 5870 for a MSI Twin Frozr 680 a couple of years back. With the 920 at 4ghz, I can't say I'm struggling with anything. Still on max settings for most at 1080p.. Why don't you buy yourself a 970 or equivalent, make sure you're getting the most out of your OC and go travelling for a couple of months with the rest :D

Failing that, stulid seems to have the answer.
Click to expand...

Larry,

Thanks for the insights. The problem is, there's something wrong with my PC somewhere, on the internet it freezes for about a minute at a time (I'm on a fast connection) and the PC crashes regularly in a BSoD. Maybe a simple re-install of the OS would help but I'm thinking I might need that partial rebuild stulid suggests.

Thanks
 
Yeh, I was half kidding. The 920 is getting on a bit, as is the ud3r so you wanting to build new is completely justified. The internet and bsod screams unstable OC. You'll prob find boosting the voltage slightly solves these issues. I've had to boost mine a couple of times since day one to hold it at 4ghz, but of course this means higher temps. I'll be building new as soon as I have a good enough reason to. My board has a couple of issues, it can't handle SSD over 160mbs for example. The 920 is such a great cpu though. Mine has been at 4ghz 24/7 for over 4 years now, either playing games or encoding and folding at 80% in between.

What are you thoughts on stulid's build?
 
Sparx said:
If I were you, I would buy an SSD (involving a clean install) and new GPU.

It would save you a lot of money, while giving you a rig that lasts another few more years.
Click to expand...

I'm with you, as mentioned, running the same system with an SSD and a 680 and I want for nothing else.

It would be very rewarding to give a new lease of life to this oldish rig. SSD with clean install, OC from scratch, 970, oh and 12gb of RAM.

OCUK were doing bundles with this board, the 920 and Viper ram, I wonder if thats what his was. If so, the OCUK overclock settings were generic and a bit crap. I got the bundle for the price then applied my own overclock.
 
Larry365 said:
I'm with you, as mentioned, running the same system with an SSD and a 680 and I want for nothing else.

It would be very rewarding to give a new lease of life to this oldish rig. SSD with clean install, OC from scratch, 970, oh and 12gb of RAM.

OCUK were doing bundles with this board, the 920 and Viper ram, I wonder if thats what his was. If so, the OCUK overclock settings were generic and a bit crap. I got the bundle for the price then applied my own overclock.
Click to expand...

Larry,

That's how I purchased mine, the bundle from OCUK. My OC is the one supplied with the bundle. Do you have any info on how to give my old rig a better OC?

As for M.2, not even sure the motherboard will support it! There's no option in my BIOS for SSD even!

Thanks.
 
Ok so a sata SSD will be fine. However you need to get the user manual out and familerise yourself with the sata ports and drivers and make sure you plug the SSD into the best port. User manual and Google are your friends here.

In terms of the overclock, well every chip is different and age plays a roll too, at least after 4 years it does. The first thing I would do though is go into the BIOS and reduce the PCI frequency. OCUK boosted this for some reason and all it causes is problems. I think the default is 100hz.

The 920 is a very nice cpu to overclock and there are a lot of guides. Before you start playing though you need to get yourself 12gb of ram. Triple channel memory is rare and not the cheapest so shop around for some decent 1600 triple channel memory kits. Gskill ripjaws are good. They have xmp profiles to 1600. Once that's done we can start to get that cpu overclocked.

Note, before any of this, you need to make sure that your board is actually ok. First thing I would do is run everything at stock for at least a few days to check those internet drops and bsod are OC based. Let us know how you get on.
 
Well, I've run the PC with no OC and the PCI set back at its default setting and regrettably the crashes and freezes are still happening.

I guess I might well require more serious upgrading!
 
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