Upgrade advice for an old system.

[Zaireekairl]

Hello all,
I've an old gaming rig that I'm looking to squeeze a little more life out of. I'm looking to keep her ticking over for a year and then build a new system from scratch once the Skylake cpus hit the market.

Specs include:

Q6600 Quad core Processor @ 2.4Ghz (need to OC)

8gb OCZ PC2 6400 Memory ddr2

XFX ATI Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition 1024MB

ASUS MAXIMUS FORMULA LGA 775 Intel X38 ATX mobo.

PSU: OCZ ModXStream Pro 500w

HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache

Ideally I'd like to only upgrade or add parts that I could use on the new build in 2016 (like an SSD) but if I can get a decent performance boost out of a cheap upgrade I'll give it a shot. I'm not expecting any miracles but if I could get any sort of improvement gaming wise it would be great.

 

[Jinxter]

I think to be honest at this point you're best to just get an SSD. You could upgrade the GFX but I reckon you'll see minimal gains based on the current CPU. As you have SATA2 you'll be capped at a bit below 300mb/s for maximum read/write speeds on the SSD but this is still a vast improvement over a mechanical drive and in real world performance you probably won't notice the difference eg. general windows use. Just enable AHCI in your bios before doing a clean install on the drive to ensure TRIM support.

 

[sastusbulbas]

I still run old 775 systems too, my old E6300, E8500, Q9550 are still ticking.

The biggest differences are as Jinxster said, an SSD. GPU can also be upgraded, most cards under £200 will still work well, even a 290, even if bottle necked. I currently have an MSI Twin Frozr HD-7950 GPU in the E8500 system, with Windows 10 on a 120gb Samsung Evo SSD.

Previously I had a Q9550 system, and I had upgraded that with some parts I knew I would use in a new system, that now resides in the kids room with a standard HDD again. But will be getting a new case/GPU/SSD at some point so I can change the motherboard/cpu/ram in a bundle.

You can easily upgrade a case for any USB3 240-280mm radiator support you may need in future, psu if you think you need a better model/more connectors, CPU cooler (some integrated all in one water coolers also have 775 hardware), graphics card and SSD. Then add a CPU/Motherboard/Ram bundle at some point in the future.

I would say an SSD, GPU, AIO cooler with 775 hardware if your case can mount it.

Edit, a quick benchmark of the SSD in my old 775 system, optimized for capacity.

This thing is booting to desktop with Windows 10 faster than Windows 7 on my main rig, and to be honest, I can easily forget it is just an Evo running at half its speed at times, it just feels so much snappier and quicker than the old Samsung F3 HHD Q9550 system the kids are using.