To Buy, To Build or To Upgrade?

Associate
Joined
25 Oct 2009
Posts
1
Hello there. A friend I work with regularly browses this site at lunchtimes, and after some long discussions, he said I should ask you guys of the oC Forums for advice on a matter of mine.

And ultimately, the question comes down to, should I upgrade my current computer, or should I build from scratch or buy a pre-built machine with or without customisation options? And I hope you guys can shed some light on the situation.

During my last years of university, I had to purchase a new machine due to my older machine (bought as a present for me, which was a Philips Slimline M1000 series) had finally begun to buckle under the sheer amount of things I was asking from it at the time. It's poor design simply couldn't cope with heavy use, gaming, music composition and rendering atop of standard word processing, etc. So at that time, with limited resources and a quite-urgent necessity to replace the machine, I (foolishly) decided to purchase a Packard Bell iXtreme 2613 from the dreaded men in purple shirts. To briefly summarise its stats;

Intel Q6600 Quad Core @ 2.4Ghz
3GB RAM
nVidia 8400GS 256mb PCI-E Graphics
250W PSU
& Standard pretty-much-everything-else

At the time, it was a vast improvement over the previous machine, and it has served me well until recent times where I've been back at home, and the machine no longer can cope with recent purchases. For example, 8 months ago I bought a Samsung 22'' monitor which now causes the graphics card to cry under the strain of doing anything graphical, as well as games such as Crysis and even (to my horror) Left4Dead and Team Fortress 2 causing massive lag, and graphical horrors .

A couple of months back, fed up with the issues at hand, I decided I may try to upgrade my machine. Problem is, any new card I place in the machine requires more wattage, thus a new PSU will also be needed. And those two will also cause a large dramatic increase in heat, which means that the case will need better cooling. Then, considering its a horrid pre-moulded not-designed-for-enhancements case, I would need to rig up some sort of additional fan mounting, etc, etc...



So what should I do?

Upgrading the current machine will cost a fair bit, but simply ditching the machine for a new one seems a waste (although could always be pushed into service as a Media Centre I suppose). But spending that much to get it up-to-scratch would cost nearly as much as a new rig.

In case you are wondering, I have a budget up to a maximum of £900, but the machine needs to be able to support happily my hobbies (which are being an avid digital artist as well as music composition), and be quite future-proof/upgradable.


Any thoughtful responses would be greatly appreciated. :)
 
New case for enhanced cooling and to fit new GPU.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-101-AN&groupid=701&catid=7&subcat=160

Well regarded power supply that should power all modern high end GPU's Corsair are the best.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-014-CS&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=1084

A good graphics card, the ATI 4890 series. However you might want to consider a DX 11 card in the near future, so this one could be a placeholder till then. But it should play all modern games with your monitor res easily.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-124-XF&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1403
 
For £900 you could get an i7 rig with ease

Sell your current rig (keep the hard drive(s), they're worth sod all and it can't hurt to have a scratch disk) and you could probably get a couple of good monitors (audio and visual). Also I'd make a decision between that graphics card and a sound card

i7 rig:
29uxds7.jpg


Fair enough it's a few £ over, but if you don't need the cooler and fan (Which you probably will if overclocking) it quickly drops to within budget
 
I'd agree with VonScar, whilst yes you can get a very nice new system for your budget it wouldnt be that much better than spending a third of this on upgrading.
Buy a new gfx card, 5870 or lower
PSU to power it 550W for single card set up 750W if you want to allow for possibly adding a 2nd card in future
and nice new case to house it all
then in a year or two if you want/need to you can upgrade mobo/cpu/ran/hdd
Case is very much personal choice, given your relatively large budget Id look at something better than the 300 personally, the 902 from antec or for something subtler the new fractal designs look good
PSU wise yeah Corsair are one of best, Id try n go for a HX sries model which are not only modular (you dont have to attach all the cables, any you dont need can be left out which makes cable mangement better) but more efficient too
Re gfx card as I said 5870 is the best atm, and you can carry this over to new build when you make it, check the gfx card section for which make is about to come into stock, Sapphire atm I think or if you wanted you could just go for a 4890 which would still spank all over your old one, Id look at the Vapor X model personally if going this route
 
Back
Top Bottom