System upgrade advice

fman

fman

fman

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Joined
5 Feb 2008
Posts
50
Hi guys, I'm looking for some advice on upgrading or replacing my twin sons pc's. I'll give the current spec first:
1. Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual core 5000+ 2.6ghz
6GB Ram
Graphics Card, Sapphire Radeon HD5770
Motherboard, MSI MS-7368
Hard drive 500GB sata
64 bit windows 7

2.Processor AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz
4GB ram
Graphics Card Nvidia Gforce GTX460
Motherboard Asus M4A78LT-M
Hard drive 500GB sata
64 bit windows 7

Main use is gaming, PC 1 is mainly world of warcraft
PC 2 is World of warcraft, Bioshock infinate, Nosgoth, The Witcher 2, Smite, Heroes of the storm, The Talos Principle, Fallout 3, and Sanctum 2.

Would I be best to replace both with something from overclockers, upgrade components in both or replace hdd's with solid state drives.
any advice appreciated.
 
Can anyone offer any advice on this, they're looking for this as their 18th birthday present which is at the end of this month, so I don't have a lot of time to sort it:) cheers.
 
You have a nice budget if you were looking at a complete build from scratch or even using components from both for one quite powerful machine. But would they be happy to share one machine?

Even in this scenario you could have one machine which is very powerful eg - new motherboard, RAM, CPU and an up to date card like a GTX970 perhaps re-using the 700w PSU and 500gb HD for storage and put an SSD in there for OS and a few load time demanding games. There would still be change leftover for an SSD in 955 CPU based machine to install the OS and games etc.

By the way you should take advantage of the free Windows 10 upgrade for both :)

Just throwing it out there as an idea - I'm not great at quoting specific setups (basically rubbish at linking to components!) but perhaps some other peeps would care to come up with some suitable combinations?
 
How about 2x Asus H81M-K Intel Core i5 DIY Micro ATX Motherboard, CPU & RAM Bundle (£221.93 each)

And 2x Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card

That takes you up to your £800 budget and you would be good to go and have two very capable machines for more current game titles.

Your PSU's should cover the powerload. You can also re-use the 500gb HD's but I would strongly urge you at some point to get a couple of 120gb SSD's in the near future for the OS install as the performance increase in load times and responsiveness is very noticeable. You'd be looking at £90-100 extra for two of these.

Perhaps get some cash for the old components on certain auction sites and should give you some cash for the SSD's?
 
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Thanks for your advice, I'm not really up on gaming specs but I'm sure your choices are good, I will add ssd drives as well as soon as I can. I'll check out your suggestions on overclockers site tomorrow. Cheers
 
+1000 Jinxter, an excellent suggestion.

Can't beat it at all but can offer a base for an overclocked Intel PC that is very upgradeable.


Pentium K £56 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-531-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567

Gigabyte Z97P-D3 Intel Z97 £62 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-498-GI&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2811

TeamGroup Xtreem LV 2666MHz £69 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-055-TG&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=2548

Total comes to £187 x2

Straight out of the Box, Jinxter's suggestion will be way faster. In the long run though, that motherboard will take an overclockable i5 or i7. If you want to give them an incentive to spend their own money, not your's, i'd get them these along with Jinxter's suggested GPU's :)

Looking at an overclocked AMD setup (FX-6350, Gigabyte 970A-DS3P and 1800 MHz Ram and aftermarket cooler), it's only £9 cheaper for pretty much the same sort of performance! That i5-4440 is Strong!
 
Doing some more thinking etc, you could get a quicker base setup for £249 each and then £150 per GPU. Not overclockable though. But i am spending your entire budget of £800 max.

Intel Core i5-4690 3.50GHz £170 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=cp-532-in&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567

asus h81m-k intel h81 £40 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=mb-596-as&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2698

teamgroup elite black 8gb 1600mhz £39 https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=my-033-tg&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1517

a slightly better cpu, that's all. http://www.cpu-world.com/compare/428/intel_core_i5_i5-4440_vs_intel_core_i5_i5-4690.html

I still think Jinxter's suggestion is better all round.
 
Thanks guys, I just had a look on the website, they only have 1 graphics card in stock, do they get more stock in quickly or should I get a different card.
Also could you recommend a couple of ssd's and i'll see if i can stretch to that.
cheers
 
OK these are in stock (and same price) - MSI is a nice brand too:

MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card

I'm purposely choosing the 4GB version over 2GB for a bit of future proofing.

Trying to keep your budget down by selecting these Kingston 120GB which include the mounting kit to secure it in the case. They're not the fastest compared to some others but by no means slow either (450mb/sec read/write)

Kingston 120GB SSDNow V300 Drive SATA 6Gb/s 3 2.5" (7mm height) Solid State Hard Drive - (SV300S3B7A/120G) **Upgrade Bundle Kit /w Adapter**

A tip if you're intending on upgrading to Win10 - wait until you've built both machines. Install Win7 again to the SSD then let it upgrade to Win10 as from what I've read (correct me if I'm wrong peeps) it becomes locked to the configuration you have installed (motherboard etc). I would also recommend you take advantage of the UEFI feature of the motherboard by installing Windows in this mode (force UEFI in the motherboard BIOS before installation to the SSD and also make sure AHCI is selected for your SATA controller regardless of if you go the UEFI route or not) It can further improve times in bootup/initialisation of devices. ;)
 
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Stuff hasn't arrived yet hence no update on how I got on, turned out the motherboard bundles were out of stock! But they're in now and I should have them this week:)
I have one more question in the mean time: what is the handiest way to install windows on the new machines? One was on windows 7 and the other one has upgraded from windows 8 to 10.
I have both discs and windows 7 product key, but can't find windows 8 product key.

Cheers
 
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Parts arrived yesterday, so got one machine built and running last night, got windows 7 activated with existing product key. First son is well pleased with the performance, no comparison to the old machine:)
I'm going to build the other machine tonight. I can't get the product key for this machine, he upgraded windows 8 to 10, I have windows 8 disc but I think it is an upgrade and not a full installation disc. I have tried extracting the key from the registry but it comes up with an error.
Any suggestions?
 
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