System Upgrade for ~£300

greyloki

greyloki

greyloki

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Joined
13 Sep 2011
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6
Hey folks,

First time poster here - registered purely because I'm amazed by the amount expertise on these boards!

I'm currently running a PowerColor HD 5770, Asus P5NE-32 SLI Plus, Intel C2D 3.2GHz (I think this is the Q6600), 4GB of value Corsair DDR2 RAM, and a 400W Corsair PSU.

I'm looking to upgrade the speed and graphics performance of my system - I was originally looking at upgrading the GPU and changing out the CPU for some variant of quad core Phenom 2, but the cost of then having to upgrade the mobo, PSU and RAM didn't appeal.

My thoughts are now to upgrade the GPU to an HD 6870, most likely the 1GB XFX variant. I did briefly look into running two 5770s in crossfire(?) mode, but it seems that that particular model has been discontinued... D'oh.

I was also looking at upgrading the CPU, but staying with the 775 socket - however, it seems that all the cheap 775 CPUs I was seeing a few months ago have evaporated, and a viable upgrade (i.e, to a lower-clocked quad core, perhaps?) is still coming in at around £160.

So really, I would like your thoughts on my plans - is it worth keeping the P5N and trying to work with it a little longer, or should I be looking at an almost entirely new system, with updated CPU, GPU, PSU, RAM and Mobo?

Unfortunately, I think my entire budget for this is likely to be around £300, going up to £400ish for a mega upgrade.

Oh, the system itself is used for general desktop use, and medium gaming use - COD4, Borderlands, Source games, a little SupCom.

Thanks in advance for any advice,




~Loki.

Edit: Just had a look at the OCUK store - there seem to be some fairly nice deals there, especially in terms of the component bundles, and the lower-end prebuilt gaming systems. Are these worth looking into further?
 
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Wow, that was quick!

I see that everybody is recommending Intel i-somethings, either i5 or i7; is this because they give the most bang for the buck?

Are AMD definitely not worth looking at? I've used Intel/nVidia for quite a while, got fed up with their bloated drivers on linux and switched over to ATi, i'm just wondering if a switch over from Intel to AMD is also worth it.
 
So i've looked around a little more, it seems that i5 is currently the way to go; the majority of the articles i've read seem to indicate that the i5 series are one of those gems which 'Just Work', for a fairly decent price.

I had a little play at putting together a 'build' of my own - what do you guys think?

Intel Core i5-2500 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - £163.99
Asrock Z68 PRO3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - £99.98
OcUK Battle 650W Dual Rail High Efficiency Modular '80 Plus' Power Supply - £49.99
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit - £39.98

Total (Inc VAT, Ex Delivery) - £353.94

Can the normal i5-2500 take a good overclock, or would it be better to pay the extra for the i5-2500k? I didn't add in an extra CPU cooler, as from a couple of reviews i've seen, it seems that the stock low-profile cooler seems to do the job pretty well. Does a top-down fan interfere much with case airflow? Is there even a need to OC an i5 for the kind of use i'd be getting from it?
I could always drop down the 8GB of DDR3 to 4GB, but for the sake of ~£17, I figured it would be better to buy the extra 4GB now, rather than paying for two separate 4GB kits.
I added in the PSU because it has the extra 4/6pin PCI-e connectors, which would be needed for just about any GPU upgrade I care to make in the future, from what I can see.
 
OK, new spec:

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - £169.99
Asrock Z68 PRO3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard - £99.98
Corsair Builder Series CX 600W V2 '80 Plus' Certified Power Supply - £59.99
Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit - £23.99

Total (Inc VAT, Ex Delivery) - £353.95 (An extra penny!)

This has the 2500K rather than the stock 2500, but with no additional cooler - I figure I can run it as a stock CPU for now, and OC if and when it's required.
Mobo stays the same.
Upgraded to a Corsair PSU, i've used them before and i've never had any issues at all.
I changed the RAM back to your recommendation - is it 'better' to have less RAM at a faster speed than more RAM at a slower one?
Speaking on the case of cooling, i'm still not sure if I should be aiming to have a positive case pressure (i.e, more intake than outlet), or negative pressure with more exhaust?
 
I'm not sure that I would ever run to an SLI setup - the past couple of builds i've had, i've always bought parts with the plan of using SLI as a cheap upgrade, then held out for so long that the parts became discontinued(!).

That's good news about the cooling - I doubt that i'll be OC'ing much, but it's great that there's so much headroom in the system, even with the stock cooling.
 
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