Upgrade - £1500 budget

TeflonJim

TeflonJim

TeflonJim

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Joined
20 Jul 2009
Posts
21
Hello there,

I last bought / built a tower in 2010 so I'm a bit out of date. I've been using a "gaming" laptop for the last 3 years, but I'm quite tired of the noise it makes and it's relatively low performance. I'd greatly appreciate any advice anyone might care to offer :)

From the old tower I still have the following that may reduce the cost of an upgrade:

Cooler Master ATCS 840 (if it's worth keeping it)
Cooler Master Silent Pro Modular 850W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (not recently tested, but assumed to be working)
BlueRay / DVD RW

Budget:

£1500

Goals:

Must be as quiet as possible, but the intent is to use it to play games and not really much else.

Thanks in advance for any comments!

Chris
 
 
X99 doesn't offer any discernible difference for gaming unless you're going SLI / Xfire - especially considering the difference in price. Also, 8gb RAM is more than enough for gaming.

I'd also replace the PSU, yours is a little old and made by FSP who are an average OEM anyway. Your case is (in my opinion) one of the nicest cases ever built back when Coolermaster were still awesome so it'd be a shame to replace it. The problem is unless you have all the original bracket accessories you'll struggle to mount a large radiator without modifying it. If you want to keep the case I'd recommend going for a decent air tower as it'll be more quiet than a small AIO. Noctua do some excellent coolers that are whisper quiet.

If it were my money I'd replace the case, get a decent and quiet AIO and stick with Haswell.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Inno3D GeForce GTX 980Ti "Reference Design" 6144MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (N98T-1DDN-N5HN) £499.99
1 x Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H-BK - Devil's Canyon Core i7 4790K CPU & Motherboard Bundle **£20 Saving + Gigabyte Free Upgrade ** £374.98
1 x Samsung 500GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E500B/EU) £155.99
1 x Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ATX Mid Tower Case - Gun Metal £139.99
1 x NZXT KRAKEN X61 280mm AIO Water Cooling Unit £119.99
1 x SuperFlower Leadex GOLD 650W Fully Modular "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - White £79.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Fury White 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C10 1866MHz Dual Channel Kit (HX318C10FWK2/8) £41.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD £39.95
Total : £1,470.56 (includes shipping : £14.75 Ex.VAT).

 
dacads said:
Just the tower, or peripherals, monitor & OS as well?
Click to expand...

Apologies, should have been clear. Tower only, I have a retail version of Win 7 with an upgrade pending. The monitor... I'll sort that out later and I have keyboard, mouse, speakers and headphones.

Thanks again!
 
If FSP do make your PSU (as Coolermaster use a variety of OEM including Seasonic) then they are a decent, reputable PSU maker, especially of higher end units of which yours is. They give good efficiency ratings and also reliability, normally with 5 years warranty. There are better makes of PSU like Seasonic and Superflower but there is no need to change yours. If you really want to know who makes yours have a read of this http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/how-to-discover-your-power-supplys-real-manufacturer/6/

If you are primarily gaming and have that much money to spend then go for the 980TI GPU but take a look at the Fury X, though my recommendation is with the former.

As for the CPU then I would be inclined to wait about a month or so for the imminent release of Skylake unless you want something today. In which case I'd get a 4790k with 8/16gb of RAM and at least a 512Mb SSD from Crucial or Samsung.

Oh and definitely keep the case. ;)
 
I'd better tidy up my office before I start taking apart power supplies to check that :) The reason(s) for the laptop are far too inclined to poke things and perform taste tests.

Skylake will be worth the wait, at the very least I expect it'll affect the prices of the Haswell.

Thank you for the advice everyone. I think I'll keep the case, it seems a shame to have to buy that one all over again.

Chris
 
TeflonJim said:
I'd better tidy up my office before I start taking apart power supplies to check that :) The reason(s) for the laptop are far too inclined to poke things and perform taste tests.

Skylake will be worth the wait, at the very least I expect it'll affect the prices of the Haswell.

Thank you for the advice everyone. I think I'll keep the case, it seems a shame to have to buy that one all over again.

Chris
Click to expand...

I don't think that the prices of Haswell will come down that much. When Haswell released it didn't have much effect on Ivybridge prices.
 
lee32uk said:
I don't think that the prices of Haswell will come down that much. When Haswell released it didn't have much effect on Ivybridge prices.
Click to expand...
Indeed, sometime I've seen the price go up of the EOL stuff to force your hand in getting the newer kit.
 
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