Hi guys, always get excited when it's time to upgrade; sure you do too. Upgrading is not as essential as its used to be for gamers as nelw games don't seem to test the system as much. Annnnnnyway. I currently have a pretty good, quiet system and i find myself in a position with around £400 to spend on an upgrade. Futureproofing is the idea, as my current rig just about manages to run BFBC2 on high settings on my 1680x1050 22" Samsung (which i plan to keep). So the question is, if you had £400 to spend on the upgrade, and you could sell some of the other kit to subsidise, what would you do! I have a few ideas and i'm not a fanboy so all suggestions are welcome. I'll list my current kit below. Antec 900 Case ATI 4870 512 - with Thermal Rad Passive + two Akasa silent fans Q6600 @ 3Ghz Gigabyte GA-P35-s3g motherboard 4GB PC6400 Ram 3 x 500GB std HDD Logitech g15 v1 Keyboard - Keep Logitech G500 mouse - Keep 600W Modular PSU Its pretty quiet already as the rig is in the lounge and I run Windows 7 x64 (keep) Thanks in advance fellow geeks
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB HDD? ATI 5850/5870? You could (just) get: motherboard, i5-750 CPU and DDR3 ram..... What about a new monitor?
Cheers for the early responses. Q6600 ok then? My thought was to sell the Q6600 and MB, get an i5 / i7 and 5850. Hadn't thought about the HDD tbh, out of the look on performance with them
i agree with above, the Q6600 will be plenty for gaming for a few years yet. 5850 or 5870 + a decent HDD. You'll be sweet for a few years yet.
What cooler are you using on the Q6600, as you may be able to squeeze a few more 10's of MHz out of it
What about keeping your current mobo and RAM and upgrading the CPU to one of the socket 775 Q9xxx 45nm CPUs? Would run cooler and potentially oc better.
hmm food for thought, bear in mind i can sell some of my kit at the mo, so Q6600 £70, HD 4870 £100 perhaps (without looking) . . . Anyone want to put a spec together for me?
I would say keep the Q6600, the difference between that and tha Q9xxx would be minimal I reckon. How about the Corsair H50? OC that CPU's nuts off. Chcuk in a 5870, and any money left over? Spend it on what ever you want.. Like beer.
Simply buy a 5870, a gelid tranquillo or the corsair H50 and overclock the CPU to get some more juice out of it. You could also buy a 1920X1200 native resolution monitor for the 5870.
/\ this is what i'd do with the money and i have slightly better graphics, the Q6600 isnt slowing you down too much at the mo. maybe an extra 2gb ram too?
Get the enthusiast overclocker - http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buyers-guide/2010/05/07/pc-hardware-buyers-guide-may-2010/3 With the parts you already have you should just be able to pick at the parts you need. At the end of the day all you need is a mobo, ram, cpu and gfx card. If you can make the sales stretch you should be able to scrape a cheap i5 system.... just.
can i just ask your reasoning there warren? this system isnt going to be much faster than what he has, if at all. improve the graphics and the cooling maybe the monitor, the Q66 will carry you through a coupla years.
+1. Supposedly the 4870 is just as good as the 5770, so I wouldn't consider that much of an upgrade. My Q6600 still running strong at 3.2GHz and doesn't seem to be limiting me in any way. IMO, a 5850 should give you a good boost in graphics performance. Apart from that, it looks a pretty solid rig, and should last well IMO
you get dx11 ofc but meh. the i5 750 is faster clock for clock than the q6600 but i dont think the advantages justify the upgrade, the performance increase is minimal especially in games spend the money on gfx, cooling and oc a little more
your q6600 will last you through 2years at least as quad cores wont be eliminated so fast.... you should be considering upgrading ur gfx,cooling to oc more on ur q6600 and maybe 2gb more ram for you...
Love the way everyone is repeating on post #5... Just OC teh nuts of that Q6600!! I doubt many real world apps are really putting it under that much stress. Chimeradog, another 2Gb? With current prices of RAM, and the fact I'm yet to see any consumer based program that I, or other people have used, really need more than 4Gb, it seems silly to just throw money at it if it's not going to benefit from it amazingly.
See here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/balanced-gaming-pc-overclock,review-31895-16.html The bottom line from this article, which I agree with, is that with your Q6600 overclocked, your gaming performance is going to be GPU bound, not CPU bound. Maybe better cooling and a 5850 is the best bet.
