PC upgrade - £150/£200 maybe

Guy · 2 Jul 2010 at 20:47

Hi guys,

What sort of upgrade would you say would be worth while on the below rig? I have a NAS, so storage is not an issue. I do play games on the PC, so I would think graphics card but I don't know.

Looking to spend around £150/£200, below is my current spec.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz, oc'd to 2.65GHz (big heat sink on it)
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
Asus P5N-E SLi nForce 650 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Corsair XMS2 2GB (4x1GB) DDR2 6400C4 TwinX Dual Channel
Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB 10000RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache
Corsair HX 520W ATX Modular SLI Compliant Power Supply

Cheers!!!!

snaggster · 2 Jul 2010 at 20:54

q6600 and a good hsf. Then give it a good clock,

Redmint · 2 Jul 2010 at 20:56

Hd 5770.

cmndr_andi · 2 Jul 2010 at 21:01

I would suggest a good heatsink like this. You should be able to overclock your E6600 quite heavily with this board and you can re-use the heatsink on future systems.

Then spend the rest of your budget on a graphics card - a 5770 or 5830 should fit your budget. If you went for a 5770 you may be able to get another 2x1GB kit of RAM to give you 4GB (or alternatively sell you existing 2x1GB kit and buy a new 2x2GB kit for easier overclocking). Edit: please ignore the RAM upgrade option - I now see you already have 4GB.

I usually do suggest a Q6600, however that 650i chipset motherboard hates quad cores and you would have great difficulty overclocking it much past stock speeds. Anyway, a 3GHz + dual core is plenty for most modern games.

Guy · 2 Jul 2010 at 21:07

Updated it a bit, thought I had already. Got 4GB of RAM and a beastly heat sink, just never got round to oc'ing it properly.

cmndr_andi · 2 Jul 2010 at 21:11

Ah fair enough, what heatsink have you got?

If you are interested in giving heavy overclocking a try - I would suggest pushing the E6600 to as far as it will go and use you money to buy a 5770 (the ASUS one I linked to is a good option) then put the rest of the money you were planning to spend aside to help save up for a CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade in the future.

Dark_Angel · 2 Jul 2010 at 21:13

As a note, that board is the same I've got. The max OC you can get on a Q6600 is about 3GHZ, just in case you were thinking of changing to that CPU. It's still a good upgrade from an E6600.

Question is, what do you want the upgrade to do in performance terms - the biggest boost is games, then new GPU really is the only sensible option. But get your CPU clocked! You're on Overclockers.co.uk not stockclockisfine.co.uk.

Guy · 2 Jul 2010 at 23:13

Cheers for the advice guys, yeah I def need to oc the cpu more, cant remember why i stopped tbh. I'll have a gander at those graphics cards.