Upgrading system. Few questions!

BogEyes

BogEyes

BogEyes

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Joined
7 Jan 2006
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South Wales
Right, my current spec is in my sig. Had it 2 years now and its served me well. It was fine for cod4, bf2, hl 2 and red orchestra which are the main games I play. But with games like bad company 2 coming out soon I think its time to upgrade.

It's going to be another relativley budget build, but heres what I've been thinking.

CPU wise the amd phenom II x2 550 seems like it would be a good choice? The price seems fair and as far as I'm aware it seems a good gaming chip?

That leads me onto what motherboard. I'm sort of stuck here. I've read a lot about the possibility to unlock all 4 cores on the 550, which would obviously be great. So i was wondering if there were any 'budget' boards which might possibly be able to do this?

Also, can you use ddr2 memory in a ddr3 motherboard? Probably a silly question but it seems they both have 240 pins so I'm not sure? If you can use ddr2 I will probably just get another 2GB of that.

Graphics card wise I'm not decided, probably just going to be a toss-up between a 4770 or a 5750.

Not sure if my Coolermaster 460W PSU would be up to job of powering this either?

I think thats about it, cheers for any help.

borgia :)
 
Oh, and I currently have a 17" TFT at 1280x1024. I think it would be awesome to upgrade to a 22" screen considering that you can get them for less than £150 now. Main thing that confuses me is that some are 1900x1080 and some are 1650x1050. Whats the difference?
 
Haha, that spec is almost identical to mine :p

Anywho, The 550 is probably the best chip for gaming on that budget, the Athlon II X4 620 isn't far behind but if you don't get one with unlockable L3 cache (which are becoming rarer nowadays) it's behind by quite a bit. Anything with SB 710/750 should do, so look at something like the cheap Gigabyte 770 board (around £70) that has ACC (Advanced Clock Callibration).

DDR2 and DDR3 are not interchangeable, you'd have to get some new memory (assuming you don't choose AM2+).

Out of those two i'd go for the 5750, especially with this new news that some might be able to be flashed to a 5770... it's got DX11 and decent overclocking, and the 4770 is just on an 'immature' 40nm process.

That's just their maximum resolution, shouldn't make much of a difference depending on what you want to run it at. I'm looking at a Fujitsu AMILO XL 3220T, although there are a lot of similar products on the market.
 
cheers mate. So I'm on the right track with the below spec?

26353233.jpg


Its not a deciding factor, but does anyone know what the chances are of actually being able to unlock the extra 2 cores? I'm not really bothered about it, but obviously it would be great if it is easily done.
 
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