Upgrade Help?

Soldato
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27 Sep 2004
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ok i am debating between an xbox one and upgrading my PC (for the same price as an xbox one)

My current set up is

Intel Code i5 750
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3, Intel P55
1GB XFX HD 5850, PCI-E 2.0(x16)
8GB (4x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC3-1
650W Antec True Power New 650

I also have a Samsung HD103SJ hard drive.

I was thinking about getting a Crucial M500 240GB SATA 6Gb for my OS and then putting my games etc on the Samsung drive.

Will the CPU, Mobo and RAM last a while longer, or is it time to upgrade them too?

I assume i need a new GFX card, what is the best mid level one these days??

My monitor is a Dell (i think it's a 2005fpw) running at 1680 x 1050. If i could get away with saving the money on CPU, Mobo and RAM, id be tempted to get a new monitor.

Any pointers would be much appreciated, thanks :)
 
Is the MSI R9 270 still one of the better graphics cards? Are ATI much better than nVidia these days??
 
The 270 is a mid-range card that would be my minimum if building a gaming pc. Better than Nvidia? Not better..'equivalent' would be a better word. They trade blows at various price points. Nvidia cards tend to be less power hungry though.
 
Theres not really a clear difference between the 2, just some nVidia drivers work better with some games and vice versa.

ATI are usually better value for money however the GTX 660 have come down in price a bit so may be worth going for one of those over the R9 270
 
Going for an SSD and a new graphics card is a good plan. The SSD will really speed up your overall windows experience and make games load faster (as well as improving data streaming performance within some games).

As for the graphics card, the R9 270 is a nice graphics card - pretty much the same as the HD 7850 2GB with a new name. Considering your resolution, I think this card would be a good pick as its good value and will allow you to play modern games very well at your resolution.

If you haven't already, I would strongly recommend you overclock your CPU (and invest in an aftermarket CPU cooler if you don't already have one). The i5 750 is 2.66GHz at stock, however most can be overclocked to 3.8-4.0GHz with a decent cooler and a bit of patience.
 
Is there much point in going for a 270x over a 270??

I'll have a look at an after market cooler for the 750, any recommendations?
 
It really depends on the price difference between the R9 270 and 270X.

If you look here, the 270 is basically the same chip as the 270X, but with slightly lower core clockspeed.
 
The £23 more for the 270X is basically buying a 200MHz clockspeed boost on the core. This means that in tasks limited by the performance of the GPU's stream processors there could be a 22% increase. However, in practice the performance gap will tend to be a bit less than this.

As for the 4GB, I would usually say that its a bit overbalanced on this card - as its unlikely the 270 GPU would be able to keep up with a game using so much VRAM. That said, recent games like titanfall have shown that a lot of video memory may be an advantage.

Instead you may want to consider a R9 280 (non-X) for just under £200, instead of going for a 4GB 270X. This gives you a card with a relatively beefy Tahiti core and 3GB RAM - it's basically a HD 7950 with a new sticker.

Also, since you have MM access you may want to look out for good deals on second-hand HD 7970 and HD 7950 cards. As a lot of these are going cheap now as people retire from litecoin mining and want to cash out their mining cards.
 
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