I thought I could get myself a Christmas present this year in the form of an upgrade. I'm currently using the rig in my sig and, despite it being pretty good, I'm thinking of relegating it to becoming an HTPC and getting something new as my main gaming machine. Things I will reuse will be my power supply which is a 520 watt modular unit. I can't remember the make but it is solid as a rock. My hard drives, case, fans and optical drive. I'm thinking AMD as they're cheap, solid and will do everything I'll be asking of it. Phenom II 965 Black Edition Gigabyte mainboard. My current board is awesome, really impressed with Gigabyte so will go with them again. GA 890FXA UD5 I've put down 8GB of RAM but this could probably drop to 4 for half the price. 8GB of Corsair Ram Finally, the graphics card. I'm thinking GTX 470, for a similar price there is the ATI 6870 but the nVidia option seems to be a better performer. Bit seem to recommend the 470 over the ATI equivalent in the buyers guide which makes me lean more over to the green side (for the first time in my life). Thoughts? I've got everything needed to watercool a CPU aswell so will probably go that way with it and may aswell get a custom air cooler for the graphics card. As well as this PC I've got 2 engines to build and a car... I need some cheaper hobbies. Ninja: Just thought I'd say, I currently game on a 1440*900 monitor but will be going 1920*1080 as soon as I can.
Well, the thing is AMD build now is not actually much cheaper than i5 760 build. And if you are paying that much for a AM3 board, you can easily get a decent 1156 Gigabyte board for around £100, and the overall build cost for i5 760 build would be pretty much be the same, but the i5 would be much faster than the Phenom II X4. For your reference: i5 760: £125~£140 Motherboard: £90~£140 For example this: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/giga...pci-e-20-ddr3-2200-sata-6gb-s-raid-usb-30-atx this: http://www.cclonline.com/product-in...gory_id=949&manufacturer_id=0&tid=ga-p55a-ud4 or this: http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=46688&category_id=949&manufacturer_id=0&tid= P.S. The UD4 and UD6 will support Crossfire/SLI at x8/x8.
Oooh, shows how out of touch I am, I didn't really think to look at Intel's offerings as they've always been on the serious side of expensive. Cheers, I'll have a ganders.
Also, Sandybridge (1155) will be out in early January. It is a new gen platform that is supposed to be 1156 replacement and may be it would be what interest you...but the chances are it would be more expensive than getting a 1156 build now. If Sandybridge is not what interest you (being too expensive), may be if you can wait till January, you might be able to pick up 2nd hand i5 750/i5 760 for £100 or less, and a 1156 motherboard for £50~£70 off people that are upgrading from 1156 to 1155 (for the sake of new toy)
I'm not too fussed about waiting for a new platform, I usually go for the previous generation, anyway, as it's cheap (like the budgie). 1156 Motherboards seem to be less equipped than the AM3 socket counterparts but on the flipside, do I really need twelvety PCI-E ports and a rear panel that would make the space shuttle jealous?
id still wait as prices are gunna change when intel thrust sandybridge on to the market which is supposed to be more mid-range rather than high-end (although rumoured to have better performance than 1366)
