Upgrading an old rig

Smithy

Smithy

Smithy

Associate
Joined
9 Mar 2006
Posts
1,536
Location
East London
Hi, my little brother wants to upgrade his 4/5 year old PC with a new graphics card. He currently owns an x1950 Pro - good in its day but I can see why he wants an upgrade. He's looking at the 460 (an affordable but significant upgrade for him).

The only problem is, his motherboard/ram/cpu set up is rather dated, and I'm afraid that it's going to bottleneck the performance of the new GPU. His motherboard is currently socket 775 and only 2GB RAM. I suggested that he's better off saving a bit more and upgrading his entire system to at least i3, which he's looking at costing about £150 without GPU, or less if he picks some things up 2nd hand. Would you agree with this?

As he's only a kid, he doesn't have much money to spend, so what would you recommend he does?
 
What cpu does he have in his 775?

There are some cracking little chips that fit there and if he (or you for him) oc's it then it shouldn't bottleneck even a high end single card like a 570 or a 6970
 
puts a few things on his XMAS list, lol
Yes I think youre right, if he can he'd be best upgrading the lot, maybe you should pay him to wash your car or somat???
 
lrlcr said:
What cpu does he have in his 775?

There are some cracking little chips that fit there and if he (or you for him) oc's it then it shouldn't bottleneck even a high end single card like a 570 or a 6970
Click to expand...

I think it's a C2D 4500 or something similar. A 2.2Ghz clock rings a bell...

What about RAM though? Currently his motherboard (some Foxconn heap that came with a bundle) only supports DDR2 up to 4GB. And I can't imagine the overclocking facilities being too supportive there either.
 
Last edited:
any particular reason for 2 mobo??????

Personally I'd go the whole hog and get an 2500k with that mobo and ram.
 
Smithy said:
Any particular setup you'd recommend? I imagine that even an i3 and relevant hardware is going to be a significant improvement over his current setup.

Gigabyte H61M-D2
Intel Core i3-2120 3.30GHz
Kingston HyperX Genesis 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit

Any problems there?
Click to expand...

You can get the h67 for £60ish and that includes USB3 support. You could pair it with the pentium G CPUs (£50ish and upwards)for a cheap cheap upgrade. What ram you buy will depend what's on offer 4GB is plenty for gaming and will be £20ish.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/65?vs=406

That said I do like to have a reasonable mobo. I'm with jpod with using a Z mobo but you need to spend £100ish to get the SLI/Xfire support done properly.

Flog the old kit and see what the budget is. An i3 would be ok but the i5K would be much much better. The 460 is indeed still a good budget card, you'll find superclocked examples for £110ish. With a SLI mobo you could add another later and get better than 570 performance.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/314?vs=306
(please note that's the STOCK not the overclocked 460 being used in the benchmark)

How you divide the budget is really down to you guys. Feel free to change the search criteria in the links i posted to give you an idea of price to performance. Any more questions or problems let us know
 
whats the current psu(make/model)? as you don't want to risk it blowing and taking any of the shiny new stuff with it.

also are the hard disk/s and optical drive sata? new mobo don't have ide.

I would say go with jpods spec but only 1 motherboard( ;) ) and the i2100(£96)

then in the future pop in a unlocked sandbridge/ivybridge and will be able to overclock it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom