Thinking of upgrading my full pc and upgrading to windows 7 for gaming

Chrisavz

Chrisavz

Chrisavz

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Joined
1 May 2008
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96
As above, i'm gonna start putting a few hundrew away a month and get a new rig together

current setup is

e8400
9800gx2
2gb ram
asus maximus motherboard
700watt corsair psu

This is on winxp but i would like to move to win7 and still play all the latest games.

i'm looking at the i7 bundle for around £580, is it worth the upgrade?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-017-OB

I was thinking for the gfx card either the nvidia 275 or the ati 5870 but need help deciding..dont want anymore dual core cards due to the problems and microstuttering my 9800gx2 has had..

Would this upgrade be worth it as its going to cost me quite a lot.. or should i wait for more hardware to come out and the current setup to go cheaper?
 
If i were you i would wait 1 month till 6 core thuban's will be released it might be that you'll get the same performance as i7 930 with additional 2 cores. and if they'll be able to compare to 920/930 maybe intel will drop prices for these cpus... just and idea :)
 
agree wait for 6 cores , seems a bit silly to upgrade now when their literally knocking at your door waiting to be brought! lol

but as for windows 7 - yes upgrade to that, i love it.
 
haha i do too, my mate has it on her laptop and its the only operating system i like other than xp, vista was a waste of time, and money imo.. win7 though im impressed with, also reviews on gaming is looking greater than i expected also! :D
 
If I had the choice of a 6 core CPU that could keep on with a 4 core CPU.. but only when all 6 (or 4) cores were fully loaded, I would still go for the Quad (or even the Dual core)... The more cores you have the harder it is for general purpose applications to fully load the cpu anyway.

Clock for clock, per core the i7 are still fastest.
 
If an application or game for that matter has been mutli-threaded then it will make use of the number of cores it's been programmed to use. Physical or logical. However, it's unlikely we'll see games using the 4+ cores for the time being which is why we are not seeing massive leaps in game performance.
 
Is the E8400 overclocked? if not, invest in a good cooler like this (+ a good fan) and take it to 4GHz. If you are mainly gaming, this should keep you going for a good long while (and the cooler can be transferred to a future build). A dual core CPU (especially a nice one like yours) can deal with 98% of games perfectly well, especially when overclocked. It won't cost you much to try upgrading your current platform - but a complete overhaul to i7/i5 will be very costly, for little extra performance in games.

Upgrading to 4GB RAM would also be a good plan. I would suggest selling the 2GB kit ( you will be surprised how much you will get for it) and buy a 4GB kit. This may seem like pouring money into dead tech, but DDR2 is plenty fast enough and should hold it value pretty well so you can sell it when you do upgrade later to a DDR3 system.

As for graphics, I would suggest a 5850 - but I suggest waiting until Friday to see how fast the new Nvidia GTX 470 is.

Also, if you do upgrade the RAM - make sure you get a 64 bit version of windows 7.
 
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Thanks for your replies, no the e8400 isnt overclocked but i am going to knock it up to 4gz i already have a Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler, and see how that does me :)

I'm not happy with my ram at the moment as it seems be taking ages for windows to start and simple things like opening firefox just after booting takes about 8 seconds..my work pc which isnt half as fast seems to load things faster than mine!

mem is Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C4 at 4-4-4-12..maybe i need to up my volts a bit..

I'm going to wait a bit as what you have said is true after reading a lot of reviews, i'm not going to see much of an improvement for the money i would be spending :/

I'm just getting into one of those moods were you just wanna upgrade for the sake of upgrading :cool:
 
my hd is

150GB Western Digital 10000RPM 16MB Cache Raptor X

i checked my ram and for some reason it was running at 270mhz instead of 400 for some unknown reason, only fixed this problem after overclocking my cpu from 3ghz to 3.6ghz..but im gonna start another thread in the overclocking sextion regarding that cus i'm gonna try and get my cpu to 4ghz..

PC seems to be running a lot quicker now with my e8400 at 3.6ghz and ram at 400mhz on 1 :1 ratio..was lately on 5:6 ratio at 3ghz :S..guessing thats because of the 333fsb

anyway im gonna make a thread now in the overclocking section, please feel free to help me in there cause im gonna ask the question of is my ram ran at 800mhz on a 1:1 ratio faster or 961mhz on a 5:6 ratio.. and how to get my cpu to 4ghz safely =]
 
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