Time for my 2 yearly upgrade!

Smitho3

Smitho3

Smitho3

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
2,837
Location
Cardiff
Hi guys,

It’s that time again for me, my current setup is a 5200+ AM2 with 2gb of ram and a 8800GTS oc 640Mb.

I’m not much of a hardcore gamer and only tend to play source engine games. I do however use Photoshop CS a fair bit for use with high res images and have noticed my current setup lagging a fair bit.

With the OcUK Core i7 920 overclocked bundle, am I going to notice a vast improvement? Also, will the main system upgrade boost gaming performance much without a graphics card upgrade?

Any advice welcome. My budget is £500 give or take.

Ta :)

PS i have a Hiper 580W Type-R Modular PSU SLI/CrossFire. Would this suffice for the i7 setup or would i need to upgrade this as well? If so can anyone suggest a good but cheap PSU with detatchable Molex connectors?
 
bundle is fine and so is psu however u might wana save up more to get the gfx aswell cos that gfx card will bottle neck ur system like crazy!
 
If I were you, I'd ignore the bundle and buy these:
Cheapi7.jpg


Exactly the same apart from the cooler and around £70 less!! That cooler I chose won custom PC's lab test for best cooler for low temps on an i7 :)

As for graphics card, £70 that you save isnt gonna get you much, but for less than £120 you could get a HD4870 512mb which should be a reasonable improvment :)
 
The 8800gts is only going to bottleneck it while playing games, in any other use it's hardly a limiting component.

Frame rates will probably go up, as it is unlikely that your 5200+ is so much faster than the 8800 as to be limited by it. I'd leave the graphics card be until you find a game which you don't like the performance of with the 8800gts.
Alternatively, a second hand 8800gts is probably about 40 quid these days, and your chosen board will happily run sli.

PSU is fine, you're not going to beat it without spending more than most people consider 'cheap'. Aside from that, yeah, the i7 set up will walk all over your current one. Enjoy :)
 
Yeah, if the the 5200X2 wasn't overclocked you will get some more performance from it. My old 5200X2 couldn't fully drive my old 8800GTS 320MB. Either way going i7 will be a huge upgrade! :)
 
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