Upgrade Time!

joshtunn · 10 Nov 2013 at 17:03

Hello everyone!

A couple of years ago I decided to take it upon myself to build my first custom PC and what a success it was however now it would seem that it is time to upgrade!

This is what I have at the moment:

Case: Corsair 750D

Processor: Intel 2500K 3.3Ghz overclocked to around 4.0Ghz

Motherboard: ASRock Extreme4 Gen3

RAM: 8Gb Corsair Vengeance 1600 Mhz

GPU: MSI 1280MB GeForce GTX 570 Twin Frozr III Power Edition, slightly overclocked

64Gb SSD for OS and Microsoft Office and 1Tb for games and storage,

I'm not with my PC as I'm on holiday at the moment (living the good life) so I wanted to ask firstly if anyone has played the more recent games (BF4 for example) with a similar spec'd system as mine, if so what kind of frame rates are you getting and would it blow up my machine?

I've read a bit that BF4 requires lots of VRam and my GPU doesn't have much by todays standards and if I go SLI I can only use another 1280Mb card.....

I think the CPU and RAM would be okay so I guess mainly looking at GPU upgrade?

Budget could be anywhere upto £300-350 depending on what people suggest!

Thanks for reading and any help/comments much appreciated!

ExRayTed · 10 Nov 2013 at 22:36

I'd be tempted to just upgrade to a decent GPU. It's the one area where your pc is the weakest for games really. Something like this at the upper end of your budget:

YOUR BASKET
1 x HIS Radeon R9 290 Boost 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £309.95
Total : £320.75 (includes shipping : £9.00).

And if that's a bit rich for you then drop down to the 280X. Still got 3gb of Vram.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte Radeon R9 280X WindForce 3X OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £245.99
Total : £256.79 (includes shipping : £9.00).

Doomedspeed · 10 Nov 2013 at 22:45

The 290 suffers from the heat and noise problem that the 290x does.. So until the aftermarket 290's appear id steer clear of them.

Blindeagle · 10 Nov 2013 at 22:46

if u get the 290 u could wiat like 2 more weeks and wait for other company's to release better cards as they are a bit loud

joshtunn · 12 Nov 2013 at 16:24

I'm not in a hurry to upgrade I just wanted a sense of what people suggest, no love for any Nvidia cards?

Also what kinda of performance difference is there between the 290(x) and the 280??

I've currently got an Akasa Venom cooler for my CPU, would it be worth going down the route of a self contained water cooler such as the H100 unless I'm really going to crank up my CPU? they look a lot better than the big ass thing I'm using atm...