Upgrade shopping list; a few questions...

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Hi all,

Have an old Core 2 box at home on an Asus board which is getting a bit flaky, with intermittent USB and SATA issues so thoughts are turning to an upgrade before it dies. Will re-use the case, 400W Enermax PSUs and one of the SATA-II HDDs already in there (1TB) but plan to replace the rest with one of the OCUK bundles, plus a couple of other bits. Looking for best performance/cost trade-off and the original budget was £550 (which I've already gone a bit over, at £610 so far). This get me:

i5 2500K 3.3GHz clocked to 4.4GHz
Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB
OCZ Vertex 3 60GB SSD
Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB HDD
Samsung SH-S222AB SATA DVD-RW (Have a beige case still, so wanting one with a beige bezel)

The box will be on 64-bit Win7, used for usual stuff (web, office, kid's homework) and dealing with photos on Lightroom 3. No hard-core gaming or intense graphics are likely to be going on. Given expected usage, I have a few unresolved questions in mind, if anyone would care to comment?

- Is the Gigabyte Z86X-UD3P board really worth the extra £45?
-Pondering stretching to the larger 120GB SSD: Is there much difference between the Agility 3 and the Corsair Force 3?
-Present graphics card is an ATI HD3450. Any suggestions on a cheap card more matched to the setup above, or am I not going to see much difference given what I'm using the box for?

Thoughts welcome

 

[scoop]

Thanks, guys,for advice so far. But I'm curious why~:-

Corsair Force and Crucial M4 over a OCZ all day long.

Understood the OCZ drives were pretty good? And do the Crucual drives now come ready flashed to 550MB/s?

Also; to answer a couple queries above:

-Was planning on getting the bundled deal for ease. However, if cheaper I'll go for the seperates. Compared to the existing CPU, the web suggests the non-overclocked CPU is already 17-fold (Edit-slight calculation error-should be 6-fold) faster so overclocking isn't a major priority. Might build with just the 1TB I have and expand later if prices continue to rise.

- Have several smaller SATA (1st generation) drives in there, plus an old IDE Lite-On DVD-RW drive. Was planning on consolidating the storage and replacing the old IDE drive as I understood the board had no IDE/FDD interfaces. As for the Graphics, I'm running twin monitirs and planned using the old card to drive both (Dell 22" Ultrasharp and an older Iiyama 1024x768 panel). Presume not easy to do this via the integrated HDMI?

 

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I was looking at the Krypton Z68 590i, which is £10 more than the individual components on their own.

 

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Thanks all, very helpful and informative. Will save the money on the mobo and possibly chuck the savings at the GT430 card and/or a larger SSD.

Seen mixed data on the M4 and Force Series 3 drives in terms of overall performance. Some reviews suggest one is better, others suggest t'other. Is there really much of a difference, or just go for the one with the best deal? Erring toward the Corsair as the write speeds are allegedly 5x faster, though whether this will actually be noticable in real use is, presumably, debatable?

 

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Parhaps somewhat heretical given the name of the forum, but am now strongly pondering forgoing the overclock, buying the component bits at native clock speed and getting both a larger SSD and the graphics card.....