Upgrade Advice needed!

Joshy

Joshy

Joshy

Soldato
Joined
15 Jun 2009
Posts
5,016
Location
London
Hi there.

I don't usually venture outside of Motors but I'd like some input regarding some upgrades I want to perform to my PC. The build is about 3 years old now, and even back then it was a budget build and although its working nicely, I'm looking to get back into PC gaming a little bit more than I do now so I feel an upgrade is in order.

Specs
ATI (now AMD, when did that happen!? :D) 4870 1GB
E5200 Overclocked @ 3.2Ghz
4GB PC6400
DFI P45 motherboard
1TB Harddrive X2
430W PSU

When I built that system I wasn't clued up too much on hardware back then, now I'm well behind and not really sure what sort of upgrades I should make.

I'd like to able to get playable frame rates on high/ultra settings at 1900x1080 on most games. Truth be told I can already manage this on most games with my CPU seemingly being what holds me back (I.E the reason I run my E5200 overclocked is because there is a noticeable frame rate difference between 2.5GHz and 3.2Ghz).

What sort of upgrades would you guys recommend?

Is it worth me staying on old tech and buying second hand, or should I just nuke this build and start again? There is not set budget, I'm just after cost effectiveness (But let's say I don't want to spend more than £400. I'm willing to buy s/h).

Any input is appreciated

Thanks

Josh
 
Hi, and welcome to GH ;)

I'm afriad I don't know much about your current platform to know what to suggest. However I can show you what you could get new for around £400 :)

Is the 430W PSU a decent one, standard ATX case, 64bit OS [for the 8GB of RAM below], SATA hard drives?

If your PSU is decent, then this would offer a nice improvement, without spending too much [gone for cost effectiveness over maxing out the budget]:

YOUR BASKET
1 x OcUK HD 6850 OC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £99.95
1 x Intel Core i3-2120 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £99.95
1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £84.98
1 x Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CML8GX3M2A1600C9) £39.95
Total : £336.23 (includes shipping : £9.50).

Click to expand...

Comparison of your GPU with this 6850 here.
Comparison of your CPU with the i3 here.

The Z77 is a good platform as it'll allow you to put an i5 2500K or similar quad core in there later as a good upgrade, and allow you to overclock it. Unforunately the i3 in the spec cannot be overclocked, but its a good CPU all the same!
 
I would reccomend keeping your psu and hard drives.

Though you never meantioned a budget I would reccomend an i3 3.3ghz dual core cpu for low budget, i5 3.1GHz quad core for medium budget and if you really want to splash out, the i7 3.5GHz quad core

I would reccomemd the high budget for the ULTIMATE experience, well not quite but you get what I mean. For the i7 get the P9X79 motherboard if the i7 is too expensive for you then take a look at the EVGA intel p67 motherboard as it's a bot more in budget for most people.

8gb of Corsair Vengeance RAM

GTX 550ti graphics card as well

I'm not sure if you want a sound card, if you do then get the Asus Xonar d1 7.1 but it isn't necessary

Sorry if this post isn't great, I'm kind of new so I'm still making a lot of mistakes but I hope this helps! :D :D :p :D

P.s I'd definitely recommend using beejjacobs' idea's because he really knows what he's talking about!
 
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Wow! I didn't realize that an upgrade to a i3/5 processor, even a modest speced one would yield such an increase in performance!

Originally I was thinking about just upgrading to a Q6600 and going for a better graphics card, but even with the 4870 it seems like the CPU is causing a bottle neck, the only reason I run at 3.2GHz is because it makes the difference between unplayable and playable in some games compared to stock speed, and now I'm thinking that even with 2 more cores a Q6600 is going to make much difference considering it'll run at the same clock speed and is the same vintage of tech.

Regarding the PSU, its a Coolermaster unit and I am a little concerned that it won't have enough juice to power the new generation of tech, in fact to be honest I was surprised that it worked on my current build! Is it worth the £50 or so for a new PSU or is today's hardware more energy efficient than I'm giving it credit for?
 
Well, the 6850 will use around 120W under load, see here.
and the i3 will not be using 300W :p - so you should be okay on the power front.

Do you know the model? I'll see if I can find some more about it!
 
Joshy said:
Regarding the PSU, its a Coolermaster unit and I am a little concerned that it won't have enough juice to power the new generation of tech, in fact to be honest I was surprised that it worked on my current build! Is it worth the £50 or so for a new PSU or is today's hardware more energy efficient than I'm giving it credit for?
Click to expand...

You really omly need 500, maybe up to 650watts and that should power your tech just fine!
Apparently even less, I'm going to buy the XFX 450w core edition '80 plus bronze' because beejjacobs recommended it to me
 
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Thanks so far chaps.

I'm trying to keep costs down so I'm considering buying second hand. Do you think a I3 processor like a 550 will net me a decent performance gain. From a bit of reading I gather that one should be able to overclock easily past the 4GHz mark?

Will older 1155 chips work okay in a recent motherboard?

I'm thinking a I3 550 for £40, new motherboard for around £80 and 8GB of RAM. Then I just need to add a £100 or so graphics card and I'm set with a fair bit of scope to upgrade when the time (and money!) comes?
 
Not a bad idea for something a bit cheaper :)

Here you've got to be a little careful though, as the last gen i3s (such as the 550) use socket 1156 - yes 1 pin different to the latest sandybridge stuff!

So you'll want to pick up a P55 motherboard for that.

EDIT: so bare in mind if you go down that route, you limit your future options some what. If you want to spend less, you'll get similar performance and the ability to overclock :)
However, with an i3 2100 and Z77 motherboard you've then got the option of other sandy bridge [and later ivy bridge] CPUs, just something to consider.
 
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Hi there,

You need to be careful there, there are older i3, i5 and i7 CPUs that work on the LGA 1156 platform. This is totally incompatible with the newer LGA 1155 platform. Therefore, an i3 550 won't work on a modern LGA1155 board like a H61/P67/H67/Z68/Z77 and are much slower than the Sandy Bridge CPUs in general.

As for what to go for, based on what you have said you have a budget of ~£160 for the new motherboard/CPU/RAM,would that be accurate?

With that budget your best bet is to go for an i3 2120 CPU, H61 motherboard and a good kit of 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 1.5V RAM (the RAM suggested by the guys above is perfect).

That said, looking for a second-hand sandy bridge (2000 series) i5 would be worthwhile - as you would be jumping from a dual core to a quad core. The new ivy bridge CPUs will be out on the 29th - so you should see quite a few people selling their sandy bridge i5 CPUs in the next couple of weeks - so there are likely to be good deals to be had.

For the graphics card, the best you will get for ~£100 today is the HD 6850 recommended by beejjacobs. Unfortunately Nvidia's GTX 550Ti is significantly slower for a similar price - so not worth going for.
 
So far you haven't mentioned your cooling set up, you'll probably have to upgrade your cpu cooler if you're thinking of overclocking a cpu that's already much better then what you've got now.
 
cmndr_andi said:
As for what to go for, based on what you have said you have a budget of ~£160 for the new motherboard/CPU/RAM,would that be accurate?
Click to expand...

Sort of.

I'm a 'bang for buck' sort of guy. I (like 99% of us I imagine!) want the most performance I can get for a reasonable amount of money. I am willing to spend upto £400 on an upgrade if, and only if it has a noticeable performance increase on say an upgrade that I could do for £250. If the difference is negligible then I'll go for the cheaper system.

An extra 10% in benchmarks isn't something that floats my boat. Real world performance is all that matters, and if it isn't noticeable, I'm not really that bothered :).
 
That makes sense, absolutely.

Therefore, if you want absolute best bang-for-buck then I would buy a second-hand i5 2500K CPU over the next few weeks (as so many are likely to be available as many people will upgrade to ivy bridge). I would expect prices ~£130, which is fantastic value for such a powerful quad core CPU that can be overclocked to ~4.5GHz without much trouble.

For the motherboard I would go with a low-end Z77 board like this one. This allows proper overclocking and supports useful features like SATA3, USB3 and SSD caching. Though it doesn't do SLI and the second PCIE port only runs at x4 speed - but you need to pay more for these features which are only worthwhile if you think you will go for a dual graphics card setup.

For the RAM, this 8GB 1600MHz corsair kit is great for £40. Though for £30 you could get this 1333MHz kit, which tbh performs almost as fast in games and is cheaper.

Also, you would do well to get an aftermarket CPU cooler (like this one) - which will allow you to overclock your CPU to the ~4.5GHz range while keeping temperatures safe.

This all would total up to ~£269 without the graphics card.

For the graphics card the HD 6850 is a good option for playing modern games at 1080p and generally great value. If you want more performance (which means increased framerates) then the HD 6870 is a good option if you can find one for around £120-130. Past that the next bang/buck card is this GTX 560Ti 448 core which is £168 (this price is a short term deal until they run out of stock). This chart shows how the GTX 560Ti 448 compares to the HD 6850 in a range of games.
 
Thanks for that, sounds like just the sort of upgrade I'm looking for.

Still not sure how far to go on the Graphics card front. I've heard great things about the 560TI, but is it really worth the extra compared to something like the 6850?
 
thats a hard one mate,

u have a battle in ur head, one says get the 6850 its only £120. the other side says to get the 560ti at £168 then u think well if im spending that much more then why not go a bit more and get something even better.

like a 560ti is £170, for £170 u can get a 6950 2 gig

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/510?vs=547

u obviously have to draw the line somewhare.
 
Aye, but the GTX 560TI you can get for £168 at the moment is the 448 core version (as opposed to the standard 384 core version) which performs more like a GTX 570 than a GTX 560Ti (here is a comparison against a HD 6950), so for £168 this version is a pretty nice deal (especially with the excellent gigabyte cooler).

But you make a good point, with a bit more money you can go with a next-level card - for example the HD 7850 is a card which is slightly faster than the HD 6950, but it is cool, quiet and overclocks extremely well.
 
would another 1 gig of vram for the same price not push u towards that card.

anandtech is gettin abit mental atm. u cant bench the likes of a 2 gig 6950 against the 448 560ti, which at the same price range is a bit silly
 
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opstrat said:
would another 1 gig of vram for the same price not push u towards that card.
Click to expand...

It's a tough one. First the GTX 560Ti 448 is more like a 570 than a 560TI - so it has 1280MB of VRAM - which helps a bit on that front. Also, one of the main VRAM hungy games of the moment - BF3 - performs a bit better on the GTX 560Ti 448 than the 6950 (see here). Though in future games the extra VRAM may make the 2GB HD 6950 a better option. Though tbh with the current pricing you may as well go for the 7850 over the 6950 if you are going down that road.

opstrat said:
anandtech is gettin abit mental atm. u cant bench the likes of a 2 gig 6950 against the 448 560ti, which at the same price range is a bit silly
Click to expand...

Yea, it is a bit weird they haven't updated their 2012 gpu bench with the 448 card, though teh 2011 gpu bench does have both cards (as I have linked to above).
 
Looking at Benchmarks over on Hexus it doesn't really look like the 7850 which from what I can gather is the best buy for the circa £200 market is really all that much more powerful than the 6850 at my res for nearly half the price?

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/36269-amd-radeon-hd-7850-vs-6850-vs-5850-clocks/?page=2

The only game where the 7850 pulls ahead is in Crysis, where in everything else it barely has a few frames on the older, cheaper card which is disappointing.

Do you guys think a 6850 now and then another £100 upgrade in a year would make more sense than the £200 on a 7850 now?
 
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