Upgrade an FX-60 system, or not?

Justice · 23 Jul 2009 at 09:20

Hi,

I've been offered an FX-60 base unit from a friend (old I know), for about £350. I'll be using it mainly for web development and the occasional gaming, WoW and Fallout 3 if it will run. Was planning on putting in a GTX275 as a mild upgrade and another 2gb of RAM for I guess about £250 or so.

Is it worth it or would it be better to build something more future-proof from stratch? I only have a small budget of about £600 at the moment.

Here's the spec of the FX-60 system

AMD Athlon™ 64 Dual-Core FX-60 with HyperTransport Technology
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional Edition
Brushed Aluminium ATX Midi Tower +550W PSU- Silver
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe PCI-Express Mainboard - ATX
2048MB DDR400 Memory - PC3200
300GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
200GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB Buffer
SONY 16x Dual Layer DVD-Re-Writable +R/-R/RW
16x DVD-ROM Drive (40x CD-ROM)
256MB nVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
CreativeLabs Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS

Forgot to mention - I'll be using 1920x1200

Cheers

Lemin · 23 Jul 2009 at 09:33

Titan Slipstream" AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition 2.80GHz @ 3.30GHz DDR3 System
£610.98 inc VAT
£531.29 ex VAT

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-067-OE&groupid=43&catid=1445&subcat=

or

Titan Thor OC" Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q8400 2.66GHz @ 3.20GHz DDR2 System
£613.97 inc VAT
£533.89 ex VAT
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-042-OE&groupid=43&catid=1444&subcat=

both would slaughter above rig

shadowake · 23 Jul 2009 at 09:44

That does sound overpriced, for the £600 total you could buy a much better new machine TBH.

Justice · 23 Jul 2009 at 09:54

Cheers for the replies, yeah that's what I thought as well. I haven't built a new system for quite a while now, so a bit out of touch!

The core2 system looks perfect, thanks. I'll have a look and see how much more of a stretch it would be to get to a basic i7 rig, too much I expect.

Jonny Wright · 23 Jul 2009 at 10:21

For £600, a Phenom II 955 and a 4890 GFX card sound about the best option. Core 2 and socket 775 have no future and will be replaced by the end of the year so AM3 or i7 is the way to go, and i7 is more high end, big budget:

Minus shipping then its £605 all in.

reflux · 23 Jul 2009 at 10:23

Yup, that is majorly overpriced @ £350. OCUK sell a much faster, modern system at less than that.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-180-OK

Cru54d3r · 23 Jul 2009 at 11:01

I wouldnt bother with the fx60 system..

Also although i think Jonny Wright has spec'd a good system I'd argue that a socket 775 system is only a bad choice if you are realistically going to want to upgrade in the near future..