I'm massively out of touch with PC's at the moment but looking to upgrade my current setup, I normally go with whatever is the best bang for the buck. General use and gaming, happy to overclock for that extra speed boost. Vague budget sub £800, but whatever the best spec vs spend sweetspot is really. Case - Cooltek U3 Micro-ATX - £69.43 (liking the size and simplicity of this) Motherboard - mATX, overclockable CPU - ? Cooler - ? GPU - My 7970 up to scratch for a while longer? Ram - ? SSD - Samsung 840evo 500gb - £165 Storage - ?? 2tb PSU - Modular, not too noisy Cheers
Any ideas to get me started?, the "PC Hardware Buyer's Guide" was useful for this but seems to be defunct.
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus...ial-mx100-ssd-plus-8gb-ram-plus-i7-4790k-plus nice little bundle here or i5 http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus...ial-mx100-ssd-plus-8gb-ram-plus-i5-4690k-plus
I'll get you started. Case - Cooltek U3 Micro-ATX - £69.43 (liking the size and simplicity of this) Motherboard - For me, the ASUS Maximus VII GENE is the one I'd get, time and time again. CPU - Intel Core i5-4690K without doubt unless you fancy getting an i7-4790K for that HT goodness, albeit unnecessary for gaming. Cooler - Depends entirely on how far you wish to take it in terms of budget. A basic Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO will do the trick and should hold a 4.5GHz clock speed quite easily. You could get an AIO cooler, but I personally hate them. Too much to go wrong and the stock fans they supply with the Corsair units are loud mofo's. GPU - Your 7970 is more than capable for a while longer. Ram - G.SKILL TridentX 2x4GB DDR3-2400MHz, only a few bob more than most average 1600MHz kits, and it is great RAM! SSD - Samsung 840 EVO 500GB - £165 Storage - Will you really be needing this with a 500GB SSD? If so, take your pick really. PSU - My current favourite is the EVGA SuperNOVA G2. I have the 750W model and it is absolutely superb. Fully modular, extremely quiet and very well built too. Oh, and if that's not enough... perhaps a TEN year warranty will help. Hopefully that helps a little. EDIT: I just noticed that you already have 8GB of DDR3 and a nice SSD. Is there any reason you can't reuse these components? You should be able to sell off your current hardware like the board and CPU etc. for a fair whack of cash. Perhaps more than you're even aware of.
Thanks for the replies, good starting point . Can you still have a reasonably quiet setup with that cooler while oc'd?, I don't mind it ramping up in rpm if I'm gaming but idle\internet use I'd like to keep it quiet. I don't mind spending a bit more if I need to. The 256 SSD is nice but too small for OS and Games, BF4 is 56gb for example . I could get a smaller SSD for OS but that will likely only free up 50gb or so, I'll have a think about that. For storage I think I'll spring clean the current drives first as they're like a spare room\garage at the moment, both full of old crap that would probably go on a single 1TB. This is my current ram www.ebuyer.com/264750-g-skill-8gb-ddr3-1600mhz-ripjawsx-memory-f3-12800cl9d-8gbxl I'll be selling the current setup to my brother so anything I don't keep will go in that, plus my old AMD 5850.
Ahh, okay. You're selling it on which is a good thing, I suppose. In this sort of a build, it seems silly to blow 1/5th of the budget on an SSD. Rather opt for a smaller one, and then get a HDD for your games. The loading times aren't *that* much slower but it will allow you to spend more on hardware that'll give you more FPS rather than a few seconds faster load times with no FPS improvement.
In games youd get more milage from picking up a AMD 290 for £200 and a nice big ssd. The i7 still packs a punch for games. Keep your gpu while swapping CPU and your FPS wont really budge much id imagine.
I have similar build still, and don't really find it lacking on CPU performance. I agree that a gpu refresh would probably be enough and wait another generation before replacing cpu/motherboard/ram/etc. If you're running out of room on your ssd you could always get a second for additional games... or just uninstall stuff when you're done playing it. That said, I do want to upgrade too but only 2011v3 build is worthwhile currently in my eyes. Sure, it is much more expensive than 1150 build, but overkill specs are much more likely to age gracefully if you're like me and use a build for several years.
Hmm. I figured the other kit being 5 years old it would be time to upgrade, I only bought the graphics card in September (it had been out for some time by then obviously). I haven't really done any research or benchmarking to look for bottlenecks in the system, I just figured those bits were getting on a bit and I could offload them on to my brother I'm a bit of a tight wad so it's not bad news, I should probably just wait it out and replace the whole lot next year, is the AMD 290 a worthwhile stopgap or will that be outdated come upgrade time next year?.
I suppose it depends mostly on what games you're playing and what performance you expect out of them. If nothing feels lacking then no need to replace anything. GPUs move a lot faster I think. Pretty soon GPU with less than 4GB vram won't cut it.
