Staged upgrades - what to do and what first?

jaysus

jaysus

jaysus

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25 Dec 2009
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About 5 years ago the OCUK forums helped me spec and build the rig below.
It's getting a bit sluggish and my needs haves shifted slightly, so over the next 6 months or so I'm looking to introduce a series of upgrades if that's practical.

It's used for a mix of photo editing, browsing and gaming - the former being more important than the latter, but I'd like to be able to play modern games on decent quality settings. I'm looking for components at that mystical sweet spot of max performance for the money.

This is the setup:

AMD Phenom X4 955BE @ 3.6ghz
Gigabyte GA870A-UD3
4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 SOC 1280MB
Seagate Barracuda 7200 500GB 16MB HDD

And the most recent addition (waiting on delivery) is a BenQ GW2765HT.

I'm trying to do things on a budget and/or spread out the costs, what should I aim for as an eventual upgrade and what in what order?
 
GFX card 1st.

CPU+Board+RAM (unless you stick with ddr3 boards and can manage with 4GB for a bit) 2nd.

SSD 3rd
 
Sorry stulid I'd go different order considering his primary use is the photo editing :)

SSD first, you'd notice that instantly with photo editing especially if it's used with the scratch disk.
then it's a toss up over whether I'd go motherboard/cpu/ram then gpu or the gpu followed by motherboard/cpu/ram.

It all depends on time frames and budget for the latter because depending on how long the process is going to take could take you into new hardware release dates.
 
SSD first as it will improve performance for both the OP's photo editing and gaming.

GPU second, selection is very dependant on what resolution the OP wants to game at.

Not being an AMD CPU user, I'm not sure if putting in 8GB of faster DDR3 RAM would give a significant performance increase. If it does, this would be stage 2.5 until the OP can afford to replace CPU (and cooler), MB and RAM.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Not being an AMD CPU user, I'm not sure if putting in 8GB of faster DDR3 RAM would give a significant performance increase.
Click to expand...
it would at the very least help in photoshop etc when doing larger photos.

Should have really suggested that myself :o
 
The case and PSU are as per my sig - Corsair TX 650W and the case is a Coolermaster CM690 II Advanced Dominator, with a couple of extra fans and a Titan Fenrir cooling wise.

Budget is flexible but I'd rather not spend more than £200 on a GPU. No idea if 1440p gaming is within reach for that much, if not I'm happy to settle for 1080p.

Short term RAM upgrade sounds doable, any specific recommendations on the RAM and SSD? It could take me up to a year to do everything.
 
ssd - samsung 850 evo seems to be the go to choice these days, 250gb can be had for around £55 if you shop around (sorry ocuk but you're just to much overpriced again at £65)

Ram... I'd get the same as what you've got now unless they need to be completely replaced, not sure how it's set up if it's 2x2 or 4x1 or 1x4 but get whichever is the best option to take it to 8/16gb :)
 
I think it's 2x2 so looking at complete replacement, but happy with more of the same. Should help with Lightroom load times. And thanks for the recommendation on the SSD, will have a hunt around for the Samsung cheap.
 
I think most people would recommend getting at least a 390 for 1440p gaming but these are around 250 sheets.

For 1080p gaming you can look at the more modestly priced 380 cards including a few on special offer for £150 at the moment. I'd be avoiding Nvidia cards all across this price range as they lack the raw performance compared to the AMD cards.
 
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