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ganesh

ganesh

ganesh

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Joined
23 Sep 2006
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Wiltshire
Hello chaps, could use a bit of help please.

I'm after a new cpu, mobo, ram and ssd as my computer is dog slow and i'm still running windows xp!

After having a look around i have thrown a rough spec together -

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz
Corsair Force Series 3 120GB SSD
Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Intel Z68
Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB

Can this be improved upon without spending lots more? I intend on doing a little bit of overclocking, but nothing major, gaming is my main priority.

Also can someone reccomend a quiet cpu cooler?

Thanks.
 
jpod said:
Hi I like the look of these two coolers, they are quiet

YOUR BASKET
1 x BeQuiet Dark Rock Advanced CPU Cooler (Socket LGA 775 / 1155 / 1156 / 1366, AM2 / AM2+ / AM3 / 754 / 939 / 940) £41.99
1 x Gelid Tranquillo CPU Cooler (Socket 754/939/940/AM2/AM2+/AM3/LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366) £25.99
Total : £77.88 (includes shipping : £8.25).



Do you plan to use a discrete gfx card?
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply, I have a 5770 that I still want to use for a little while so I will stick with that for the time being, funds won't stretch to a new one alongside the other parts. My case is sound insulated and I have a couple of quiet case fans, I like things to be as quiet as reasonably possible.
 
Your spec looks good, though I would go with the geild £26 CPU cooling if you can, as it is a good deal cooler and quieter than the stock Intel CPU cooler. It also means you can go for the (often) cheaper OEM version of the CPU which doesn't come with a CPU cooler (though admittedly the warranty on the OEM one is only 1 year vs 3 years on the retailed boxed one with the fan).

However, one thing I would change is the SSD to the Crucial M4. It's only £3 more expensive than the corsair and IMHO uses a better and more reliable controller.
 
cmndr_andi said:
Your spec looks good, though I would go with the geild £26 CPU cooling if you can, as it is a good deal cooler and quieter than the stock Intel CPU cooler. It also means you can go for the (often) cheaper OEM version of the CPU which doesn't come with a CPU cooler (though admittedly the warranty on the OEM one is only 1 year vs 3 years on the retailed boxed one with the fan).

However, one thing I would change is the SSD to the Crucial M4. It's only £3 more expensive than the corsair and IMHO uses a better and more reliable controller.
Click to expand...

Will definitely be buying the gelid cooler, retail ones are horribly noisy and will be buying the oem CPU also.

The crucial m4 SSd is £152 vs the corsair at £130, also the sequential read speeds on the corsair seem significantly higher, 200mb for the crucial vs 500+ for the corsair. Surely this means the corsair is superior? Though from doing some research the corsair gets some bad reviews.
 
OP it is up to you but there are a lot of recommendations For the M4. I also have one and it is faultless.

Get the gelid tranquilo.
 
To be frank, with just a 5770, that will be the bottleneck in almost all games at 1920 res, and having a 2500K on stock or overclock wouldn't make the game deliver more frame rate than what the 5770 is capable of.

If this is your fix budget range and won't be upgrading in a long time, I seriously think it would be better for you to just get a i3 2100 and use the stock cooler instead of a 3rd party's, so you will have around £100 budget to put toward something like a GTX460 1GB/6850/6870, which will deliver MUCH better gaming performance than the 2500K with a 5770.
 
Reading though here the Tranqillo, the Crucial. Saving for a better gfx card to drop into this rig is a great strategy.

That motherboard gets great reviews btw. Best of luck pod
 
Marine-RX179 said:
To be frank, with just a 5770, that will be the bottleneck in almost all games at 1920 res, and having a 2500K on stock or overclock wouldn't make the game deliver more frame rate than what the 5770 is capable of.

If this is your fix budget range and won't be upgrading in a long time, I seriously think it would be better for you to just get a i3 2100 and use the stock cooler instead of a 3rd party's, so you will have around £100 budget to put toward something like a GTX460 1GB/6850/6870, which will deliver MUCH better gaming performance than the 2500K with a 5770.
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I'm not going to be keeping the 5770 for a long time, I just can't afford to upgrade that at the same time. Will hopefully buy a new graphics card in the new year, my standard resolution is 1680 so shouldn't struggle too badly I hope.

After looking on the net it seems like the crucial m4 is a good bit of kit, thanks for the recommendation!

Also, my current psu is a seasonic 600w, will this be man enough to power the upgrades? I did tun it all through an online calculator which said that it would.
 
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ganesh said:
I'm not going to be keeping the 5770 for a long time, I just can't afford to upgrade that at the same time. Will hopefully buy a new graphics card in the new year, my standard resolution is 1680 so shouldn't struggle too badly I hope.

After looking on the net it seems like the crucial m4 is a good bit of kit, thanks for the recommendation!

Also, my current psu is a seasonic 600w, will this be man enough to power the upgrades? I did tun it all through an online calculator which said that it would.
Click to expand...
If you are only on 1680 res, then the 5770 would do you ok for now, as long as you have realistic expectation of no higher than high settings in demanding games, such as BF3.

While I do not know the exact model of your PSU, but Seasonic is one of the best PSU manufacturer, so I would imagine you PSU will have sufficient output on the 12v rail, which would be fine for any single GPU graphic card, no matter what CPU/platform you using (except may be overclocked Bulldozer :D).
 
Ok that's good news, I'm glad I bought a decent psu all those years ago.

Thanks for your advice everyone, much appreciated. Can't wait to get it all ordered now.
 
Would be good if you can find out the exact model of your Seasonic 600W PSU, so I would be able to look it up for you to double check the 12v rail output.

As I said, I would imagine it would be fine, but it's always better to get some solid confirmation by looking up the spec.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Would be good if you can find out the exact model of your Seasonic 600W PSU, so I would be able to look it up for you to double check the 12v rail output.

As I said, I would imagine it would be fine, but it's always better to get some solid confirmation by looking up the spec.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure it's the seasonic m12 600w.
 
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