Possibly upgrading...

cats_five

cats_five

cats_five

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Joined
29 Dec 2004
Posts
420
Location
Fife, Scotland
My PC is fine for most of the things I do - surfing, work processing, low level stuff, but some more poke for Photoshop would be nice. This is CS4, not the latest one - at least not at present. It load programs fast enough for me so I'm not planning getting an SDD as part of the possible upgrade.

It's got a 4-core Phenom processor and 8GB of RAM and when it struggles is with blending several images into a panorama, which is something I'm quite keen on doing. I'm using the on-board graphics which seem fine.

I was thinking about an A8 trinity processor as an upgrade but have never been sure if that will give enough of a lift where it's needed - in CS4. It is however quite a bit cheaper than the i5 route.

If I go with the upgrade it will be with a Gigabyte mobo. The case is a Fractal Design, the power supply a good modular one and the disks all SATA so I only need mobo, cpu & RAM.
 
Hmmm... Found a site with CPU comparisongs using CS4, and there is very little difference btween the A8 & A10. There is a lot between those and the i5 so maybe that's what I should upgrade to...
 
YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £179.99
1 x Plextor M5 Pro 128GB Extreme Series Solid State Drive - (PX-128M5P) £99.95
1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £82.99
1 x Adata XPG Gaming v1.0 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AX3U1600GC4G9-2G) £35.99
Total : £410.32 (includes shipping : £9.50).



You can of course take out the SSD which will bring cost down to around £310. Or a CPU cooler instead of SSD if you intend to overclock
 
cats_five said:
Hmmm... Found a site with CPU comparisongs using CS4, and there is very little difference btween the A8 & A10. There is a lot between those and the i5 so maybe that's what I should upgrade to...
Click to expand...

The only downside to the i5 is the integrated graphics are not as good as Trinity. However, if you don't need a graphics card or your not playing games, you could get away without one.

dacads said:
YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £179.99
1 x Plextor M5 Pro 128GB Extreme Series Solid State Drive - (PX-128M5P) £99.95
1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £82.99
1 x Adata XPG Gaming v1.0 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AX3U1600GC4G9-2G) £35.99
Total : £410.32 (includes shipping : £9.50).



You can of course take out the SSD which will bring cost down to around £310. Or a CPU cooler instead of SSD if you intend to overclock
Click to expand...

I wouldn't rate that RAM and would change it to Avexir. You could also change the i5 for the i3 to bring the price down. The i3 has hyperthreading, which CS4 would benifit from.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Plextor M5 Pro 128GB Extreme Series Solid State Drive - (PX-128M5P) £99.95
1 x Intel Core i3-3220 3.30GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £92.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £82.99
1 x Avexir Core Blue Series 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (AVD3U16000904G-2CW) - Blue Light £37.99
1 x Cooler Master Hyper 612S CPU Cooler (Socket 775 / 1155 / 1156 / 1366 / 2011 / AM2 / AM2+ / AM3 / FM1 / FM2) £32.99
Total : £346.91 (includes shipping : FREE).



Dont forget, you're eligible for free shipping :)
 
Last edited:
Well apart from one bad review I've heard good things about Adata too, haven't really heard much about Avexir but I like the blue light feature :p
 
dacads said:
Well apart from one bad review I've heard good things about Adata too, haven't really heard much about Avexir but I like the blue light feature :p
Click to expand...

HA! - If I had the money, I'd get some. My theme is blue and would look great with my side window :D
 
Did some more thinking and Googling. Day-to-day performance is fine, and the few benchmarks I could find for CS4 suggest that the AMD Bulldozer are the rivals to the Intel processors. However they use a lot more power, so it's Intel.

I also found that CS4 can make use of the GPU power in the processors with HD4000 graphics, so have come around to thinking that a Core i3-3225 might be the best value processor for me.

I want to have a USB3 port available even though currently I don't have anything that would make use of it so as far as I know I need a Z77 mobo. Is there any reason to get anything much beyond the bottom end of the Gigabyte range of mobos? It has enough USB ports and so on, I want to get one with HDMI as well as DVI so I'm OK if I get another monitor.

Cooler - I believe the CPU comes with one, I'm happy to see how it is and if it's too noisy replace it. The current Phenom is running with a stock cooler quite happily. The Fractal Define case helps I guess. Or is the stock cooler SO bad I'll be driven to replace it PDQ?
 
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