Spec: £200

gee3000 · 14 Oct 2009 at 17:14

Hi, can someone please spec me a budget UPGRADE for £150 or £200.

Already have case, regular PSU, hard drive. Need:

CPU
Mobo
Ram
GPU? (or on board may be fine? no gaming, just the odd video clip, youtube, etc.)

For basic office use. Will be buying and installing Windows 7 on it.

Thanks!
Gee.

1pudding1 · 14 Oct 2009 at 17:25

I'd be v interested in this too as Ive been thinking about it for the last day or two and havent upgraded for a looong time.

Need an upgrade from my AMD Barton XP2500 and 1GB RAM for win 7 i think!

cmndr_andi · 14 Oct 2009 at 17:31

This would do the job happily, just make sure the case is OK for fitting a Micro-ATX motherboard.

The motherboard uses an onboard HD 4200 GPU and will be absolutely fine for videos and even some light gaming. Will also run HD/Blu ray with no trouble.

95thrifles · 14 Oct 2009 at 17:33

Hi guys well Id say
Mobo: Asus M4A785D-M Pro £58
RAM: Kingston 4gig PC6400 £50
That leaves £42 and £92 for CPUS
1st CPU slightly over at £46 is Athlon Dual Core 240
and 2nd one would be Phenom TriCore 710 @£92
And yeah the integrated gfx on this mobo will be more than enough
Edit: damnit beaten to it, lol

1pudding1 · 14 Oct 2009 at 19:17

That looks great thanks. Got an Antect Sonata II case which I think does micro-ATX.

What about an X4 processor like this :-

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-258-AM&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=803at

at £80? Is an X4 quad core, or even that Phenom Tricore worth the extra?

PermaBanned · 14 Oct 2009 at 19:51

The thing with that is that you'd want it to actually have Phenom architecture, so you can unlock the L3 cache. That's purely chance though. I'd get this to be honest:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-249-AM&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1328

Since unlocks of the extra cores have a fairly high success rate.

gee3000 · 16 Oct 2009 at 14:35

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not too familiar with AMD, is there an Intel alternative or will I be okay?

95thrifles · 16 Oct 2009 at 14:37

You'll be fine, there is an alternative but at this budget AMD is your better bet tbh, similar performance but AMD offers better upgrade possibilities as Intels offering at this level is socket 775 which is being phased out