Recommended Upgrade?

Sime

Sime

Sime

Soldato
Joined
8 Nov 2006
Posts
2,866
Hey all,

I think its time my PC had abit of an update. Newish games (Fable 3, CoD BO, Witcher 2) are getting a little sluggish at the settings I would like. Heres my current setup

E6550 @ 2.33Ghz (stock)
4GB RAM
Geforce 280GTX
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P Skt 775

I an absolute maximum of £300 to spend.

Thanks! :)
 
what PSU do you have?

also, what kind of ram do you have? (DDR2 or DDR3)

not knowing the answer to them, i have gone for a worst case scenario upgrade that is a lot better than i was expecting:


YOUR BASKET
1 x Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 Extreme 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **OcUK Exclusive** £114.95
1 x AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition "125W Edition" 3.20GHz (Socket AM3) - Retail £89.99
1 x Antec High Current Gamer 620W Power Supply £49.99
1 x ASRock N68C-S UCC GeForce 7025 (Socket AM3/AM2+) DDR2/DDR3 microATX Motherboard £33.98
Total : £288.91 (includes shipping : FREE).



the motherboard is n mATX size, so i would be surprised if it doesnt fit in your case.
it can also take DDR2 or DDR3 ram, depending on what you have currently

i assume your case, HDD and DVD drive are ok
 
Last edited:
Your basketProduct Name Qty Price Line Total
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM £155.99
(£129.99) £155.99
(£129.99)
MSI P67A-C45 Intel P67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - (Sandybridge) ** B3 REVISION ** £89.98
(£74.98) £89.98
(£74.98)
Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) £33.59
(£27.99) £33.59
(£27.99)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 High Performance CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/1155/1156/1366/939/AM2/AM2+) £19.98
(£16.65) £19.98
(£16.65)
Sub Total : £249.61
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50
VAT is being charged at 20.00% VAT : £51.82
Total : £310.93

£300 with your free delivery.


I dont consider a ATi5850 a upgrade from a GTX280 at all.
 
in that case, go for stulids advice and ignore my build

just out of interest, what kind of boost would the 5850 give to gaming over a GTX280 assuming the graphics card was the limiting factor
 
Was going to write that the GTX280 is still a good card but while I was searching for a review, the above posts occured. Still here it is if you want a look?
 
Yeah the GTX 280 isn't a bad card to be honest. More than likely it is your CPU holding you back here. If your looking for a significant upgrade then going for a Sandybridge build would be a good option and then you could upgrade graphics card (+/- PSU) at a later date.

Another cheaper option (if budget is tight would be to get a Core 2 Quad second hand (perhaps a Q6600 G0 stepping £60ish) and a reasonable skt 775 cooler and overclock it.
 
Okie dokie cheers all,

Well my PSU is pretty decent Thermaltake Toughpower 800W and my CPU Cooler is the Tuniq Tower 120.

Ill look into getting a new CPU...

Think I might give overclocking my CPU another shot aswell. Problem I have had is its never stable (even overclocking just slightly). Its annoying becuase I bought all these parts back in the day specifically to overclock.
 
If your not doing anything too intensive then I'd say something like the Q6600 Go would be a decent buy, especially if you can get one thank clocks well and hopefully hasn't been abused too much. Start scouring the members markets / ebay etc.

If you need a bit more power then the SB build would be a better long term investment tbh. All depends on budget I guess.
 
I'd go with the sandybridge build but maybe see if you can stretch to 8Gb RAM. If your CPU cooler is already decent you can lose £15 + vat from the build suggested by stulid.

The Q6600 go is a great CPU, and one I ran for nearly 3 years, but the difference between that and my current i7 920 is huge, so although you'd get a reasonable improvement by just upgrading your CPU to the Q6600, you'd have a massive performance increase by upgrading to sandybridge.

E-I
 
stulid said:
SandyBuild
£300 with your free delivery.
I dont consider a ATi5850 a upgrade from a GTX280 at all.
Click to expand...

If you got £300, that's the best way to spend it. Your GFX should be able to hang in there for a while, the rest will be good for a few years. If you have 4GB DDR3 already, that gives you room for a better motherboard, although this one do well anyway.
 
Last edited:
What size screen are you gaming on?
Personally, if it were me, i'd look for a knocked down Q8400 or similar and get a SSD drive. You'll get plenty of change from £300, that you can decide what to do with the rest once you've seen how much better your upgrade performs. Use your existing hdd as storage, just use the SSD for OS/apps etc.
SSD = single biggest performance upgrade you can do imo. Unless you go up to i7 etc, which your budget simply won't allow. Even then without an SSD, your mechanical hdd will bottleneck your cpu

Just my tuppence.

i upgraded a friends E7500 rig. All i did was put an SSD in, increased ram to 4gb and they were blew away by the increase in performance.
 
Banzai_Joe said:
What size screen are you gaming on?
Personally, if it were me, i'd look for a knocked down Q8400 or similar and get a SSD drive. You'll get plenty of change from £300, that you can decide what to do with the rest once you've seen how much better your upgrade performs. Use your existing hdd as storage, just use the SSD for OS/apps etc.
SSD = single biggest performance upgrade you can do imo. Unless you go up to i7 etc, which your budget simply won't allow. Even then without an SSD, your mechanical hdd will bottleneck your cpu

Just my tuppence.

i upgraded a friends E7500 rig. All i did was put an SSD in, increased ram to 4gb and they were blew away by the increase in performance.
Click to expand...

Difficult call, although SSD is great (I've recently taken the plunge and even RAID0'd a pair), it doesn't make a massive amount of difference in games. They may load quicker, but if the computers struggling due to lack of CPU grunt, the SSD won't help that and I don't think upgrading from a core 2 duo to a core 2 quad will make that much difference.

Just feels like upgrading to old technology....... (CPU wise that is).

I think the most balanced improvement for that investment is definately the sandybridge upgrade, and should easily last a couple of years. GFX and SSD can always follow later.

E-I
 
Yeah, horses for courses i guess.
A quad core 775 will certainly handle any game he has right now and in the foreseeable future, his 280GTX should do too (unless games move up DX generation), but that depends on his monitor size/gaming resolution (which is still unknown?)
SSD as you mentioned will increase map loading etc on games, but also speed up everything else, even the slowest SSD's (well 95%) will write faster than a mechanical device. But read speeds are more important and that why SSD's make such a huge difference, imo.

If he goes for a new i3/i5 setup, it will take up all his budget but will still be bottlenecked by the slow mechanical hdd. Then i guess it would depend on how soon he can scrape cash together to upgrade his hdd.

All that said, i'd probably be happy with either solution... :)
 
Last edited:
I generally game on high settings on 1680x1050 with 2x AA. It seems that my PC at the moment just cant hack these settings atm.

Anyone recommend a case aswell? Preferably something that has a carry handle ? ( I travel every couple of months for afew months )
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom