Upgrade advice please

[sillybilly1696]

At the moment I am running an E6600 on a Foxconn board and am looking to upgrade.

I have been looking at the Q9550, coupled with an ASUS P5Q deluxe m/b (would be looking to sensibly overclock).

I am mainly a gamer, but also do a fair amount of raytracing (poser 7).

Money wise I have got around £400.00 (including the taxmans share) to play with.

Any and all advice will be greatly appreciated

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I assume you have a good PSU??

I would say that for raytracing one of the Intel Core i7 processors with hyper-threading makes a lot of sense. Ray tracing programmes seem to benefit from more cores and hyper-threading it seems.

In POV Ray processors like a Core i7 860 would make sense. The Core i7 920 is a bit better in POV Ray but is worse for gaming,has higher motherboard costs,the need to run RAM in triple channel for optimal performance and higher power consumption too!

This is what I would look at getting:

Intel Core i7 860 ~ £232

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-298-IN

Asus P7P55D LE ~ £105

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-363-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1495

4GB 1600MHZ DDR3 ~ £83

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-026-PA&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1517

 

[pastymuncher]

Hi and welcome to the forums. First off, i know absolutely nothing about ray tracing, but to buy a new socket 775 cpu and mobo is not a good idea as the socket is getting killed off soon. AMD AM3 quad core or Intel i5/i7 rig would be more sensible.

 

[JeffyB]

What psu and gpu do you currently have?

 

[sillybilly1696]

Thanks for the advice so far. I have a 4870 GPU with 1024mb ram, and an Arctic Power 700W PSU. Everything is housed in an Antec 900 case.