Partial upgrade, or new build? Advice appreciated.

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Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
139
Location
Liverpool, UK
Hi guys...

I currently have;

i7 930 stock
Corsair H50, dual fans in a push-pull
Gigabyte UD3R X58 board
6GB RAM
Sapphire Vapor-X 5870

I've been running into some issues with cooling and crashes lately. Cooling-wise, the H50 starts to get really hot after a few hours and can sound like a hovercraft in my front room.

Crash-wise, I think the graphics card is on it's way out - if I try playing anything even reasonably taxing, I will occasionally get a hung system where the screen goes completely grey, with just some vertical grey lines on the screen. Can't recover from this, have to do a hard reset, and after the most recent one resulting in all sorts of corrupt files on my HD, it's time for a change.

The system is 3 years old now. I primarily use it for games, and had plans for toying with video editing which have yet to arrive. 6GB seemed like plenty when I built this, but I'd much rather have more to play with if it comes to a new build. I've got an SSD in there, but it's not used to it's full potential due to the old X58 board.

Right now, I primarily want to quieten the thing down, and make it more stable. I'm quite happy to do a new build if you think that's best, as I'd already been toying with the idea of a Sandybridge-E 2011 based build until the Haswell appeared and complicated matters for me.

What would you guys suggest? Time for a new build, or just buy a few new bits and make do for a year or two? I haven't got a clue what to do, so figured I'd see what you guys think.
 
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considere this graphic card:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-063-HS
GX-063-HS_57723_350.jpg

Already had my eye on that card, be it for an upgrade or a new build. I tend to always opt for the custom cooled, quieter cards from the likes of Sapphire and HIS.

New build vs upgrade/replace potentially replace faulty parts depends somewhat on how much you have to spend and how serious you are about getting into video editing as you can get away with a lot lower spec machine if it's mainly still going to be for gaming.

Probably not THAT serious if I'm honest. As for how much I want to spend? For upgrades, I don't really have a limit, but I'm not about to sink cash into the highest spec replacement parts if the rest of my build is going to drag behind it.

If I was to opt for a new build, I'd probably be willing to sink £1200-£1500 into the entire thing.
 
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