Upgrade time. Advice anyone?

Allattar · 12 Dec 2011 at 09:45

Its that time of year when I get to upgrade the pc.

I have a budget of £400 ish, reasonably flexible on this.

My current system is.
BFG Nforce 6 motherboard
Dual core E8500 processor
4GB Memory
Pallit 460 GTX 2GB ram
Corsair 550W HSX modular power supply
and various other bits. All wrapped up in a nice Dominator II case.

The graphics card can stay, its managing fine, and I will probably wait a while until going for a new graphics card.

Its really time for the motherboard and processor. That nforce 6 board is getting old now and lets face it, its ancient by component standards.

The plan is for an i5 2500, putting 8 GB of ram in there. Thing is though is its been years since researching motherboards. I have no idea where to start other than an 1155 socket.

I could go straight for one of the bundles here, but any suggestions on which boards to look out for.

Other useful information is that at present I have connected in the way of drives. One DVD drive, IDE, 1 Sata SSD 128GB Crucial Hard drive. 1TB Samsung spinpoint, a 36GB WD Raptor, and a 360GB WD something or other. (I just seem to hoard hard drives).
There is an X-FI soundcard in there as well, but I dont tend to use it as I run things through a logitech wireless headset.

So other good questions here.
Is it worth swapping the DVD drive up to Sata?
Will the 550W power supply cope? (Last time I did a quick check on power requirements it was pretty close)

HaggisUK · 12 Dec 2011 at 09:52

Motherboard http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-364-GI&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990

Processor http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-360-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=1275 or get the OEM version + an aftermarket cooler to overclock

Ram http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-094-KS&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=1517

You're probably going to need to buy a SATA DVD drive anyway as new motherboards don't usually come with IDE ports nowadays. PSU should be fine.

Marine-RX179 · 12 Dec 2011 at 09:58

For socket 1155 motherboard you should look at the Z68 chipset.

Most 1155 boards are decent, so it's really down to brand preference, features (i.e. does it support SLI/Crossfire at x8/x8, Gen3/PCI-E 3.0), RMA and warranty consideration and price point next.

Allattar · 12 Dec 2011 at 10:01

Excellent thanks for the advice. Always considered SLI or crossfire depending on the card I had at the time. My usual plan is fit wone graphics card, and maybe add the second at a later date. I never add a second by the end of it

.

Marine-RX179 · 12 Dec 2011 at 10:11

Just make sure you check the motherboard spec to make sure they support Crossfire/SLI at x8/x8 if that's what you are after...the last thing you'd want is get a motherboard which the 2nd PCI-E x16 would only run at x4 when Crossfire/SLI.

Also, your existing Corsair will handle an overclocked 2500K system with any single GPU graphic card perfectly fine, but if you are going to SLI or Crossfire in the future, you'd best be prepared to upgrade your PSU to a decent 750W as minimum (and higher would be better since more headroom will allow PSU to run more efficiently).