My head is due to burst thinking about my upgrade. I Have £500 to spend on CPU, MOBO and RAM. the rest of the kit I have is fine. I have no preference from AMD or Intel. I simply want the best bang for buck that will last me a good number of years. I mainly use it for gaming, with the odd bit of video editing thrown in My current rig is basically: I5 3450 8GB DDR 3 GTX 980Ti I would prefer to order from Scan uk if that makes a difference Thanks in advance
https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?id=scpuinti73770 £80 (the K version is £140 ...) https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail?id=smem8qaa £25 (or buy a matched pair for £50 and sell your current RAM to offset) I'm assuming you will get secondhand pricing of £250 for your GTX 980Ti and that you're going to have £395 left over from your £500 budget so that's £750 to spend on ... https://www.scan.co.uk/products/pal...ti-gamerock-premium-11gb-gddr5x-graphics-card £749.99 I ardently believe this is going to give you much better performance than .4ghz upgrade in clock speed and two extra CPU cores (the 8600K is 3.6ghz and 6c 6t and £250 of your budget gone) DDR4 RAM - since when did RAM speed mean a significant increase in FPS keeping your 980Ti The power in games is from your graphics card... plus then in 12 months when you get another £500 you could go to the 9xxx intel chips which will surely be tweaked that little bit more, or Ryzen will be that bit cheaper, but either way you're going to have a killer gfx card for it. I know I'm not telling you the words you want to hear but I think this is the thinking man's approach!!
What Zoon suggested is a good bet. What's your current power supply by the way? You could also upgrade to 1600 ram speed instead of 1333 for better RAM if you happen to have a lot of things open or if you're going to be doing gaming.
What Zoon suggested would be a better system but you are banking on is old hard ware lasting you a few more years, its quite an old system, there will be a point where hardware can become unreliable, secondhand bits for it aren't going to turn it into a fresh system, just a faster old system. Ideally you'd be stumping up for 8700k or 2700x but they would go out of budget, not by loads, is that 500 hard limit? Its going to be either of the following in budget for new. AMD 2600x (6c/12t) + cheapest x470 board and 16Gb of B-die RAM, might be able to squeeze a 2700 (8c/16t) in, all Ryzen are unlocked so you can OC. Intel 8600k (6c/6t) + cheapest z370 board and 16gb of RAM, it's less fussy, the saving on RAM/board might get you an 8700 non K (6c/12t) if you don't give a stuff about OCing. On the encoding side the 2600 and 8700 should be preferred over 8600k due to more threads. Things to bear in mind AMD launch prices dropped quite quickly last release. Also none of my suggestions does anything for your GPU which tends to be needed for games more than CPU, 980Ti is still fairly strong if you have modest requirements though, are you happy staying on it, what res do you play at?
You can do CPU, mobo, RAM and stay within budget but I'd seriously consider Zoon's suggestion of a CPU and maybe RAM upgrade for your current rig and wait until DDR4 prices come down.
Thanks guys All good point taken on board. My current PSU is still quite solid and does not need changed. My native resolution is 1920 x 1080. My current MOBO / CPU / RAM will be put to one side, so that I can put something together for my son when I get the chance. Is there a need for 16 GB ram? and does it affect the CPU much if any? These are the simple thing I am unsure of. At this rate I will be dreaming about components
Is there a need for 16Gb, no you can get away with 8Gb right now, but I do note when gaming I am often seeing system memory usage much higher and the system is much slicker for it, no glitching/stutter etc, if you have more memory Windows will use it and cache more, you are doing an upgrade to last you a few years, if you did 8Gb you would do it in 2x4Gb for Dual Channel, the problem then comes when you want more you have to add another 2x4Gb and 4 sticks adds more load to the memory controller and can end up with lower memory clock speeds and instability. I guess if you were tight on budget you could run single channel 1x8Gb the impact of halving the memory bandwidth isn't as bad as it might sound, giving you the option of 2x8Gb DC at a later date as an upgrade when you are a bit more flush.
Cheers sandys, so does the speed of the ram make much of a difference, because that is also a cost factor. If 2133mhz gives no real world difference over say 3000mhz in gaming, I would obviously go the cheaper option.
Obviously each corner your cut the lower your systems potential will be, both the Core chips and Ryzen will benefit from faster RAM, by faster this would be Lower Latency more so than clockspeed but try and target for 3200 as a minimum, CL14 or less would be nice but CL 16 will be fine.
Thanks for all the info. I will see if I can stretch my budget and get decent quality kit. After all, I am wanting this to be a decent purchase that will last as long as possible. Cheers everyone
Unless you have an ultra premium sound card and some very expensive speakers there is zero reason to have one these days as onboard audio has reduced the gap to dedicated soundcards massively. And thats before we even get to all the driver related scandals from both Creative and Asus soundcards.
I currently have the Soundblaster Xfi fatal1ty pro, which is around 10 year old. My speakers are Logitech Z906
I have a fatal1ty something or other card. It's currently in a box on a shelf, even on my z77 board the onboard sound is decent enough. But then i'm not an audiophile.
I am by no means an audiophile, I simply want decent enough sound. My current MOBO is now 6 year old, and the sound quality on that is very poor. I have no experience of sound from newer MOBOs SO my options are: 1. Buy my CPU / MOBO / and RAM, and see how the sound quality goes. If need be, buy a soundcard when I can afford one 2. Save money by buying a less spec CPU / MOBO / RAM and also buy a soundcard. I am gearing towards number 1.
I've got a couple of decent sound devices, primarily used for 3d audio and to take load off of my CPU, but such wsx the shitstorm with each OS release and drivers Realtek on-board now handles all my duties pretty happy but perhaps I've just chilled out in my old age.
imho this is terrible advice. The 980Ti is a fantastic card. I find that GTA V with my 970 on my Haswell i5 build is more than good enough even though the rest of my rig hits its 5th birthday next month. Also, current GPU pricing is still extortionate and doing anything on the GPU front at the moment is, I think, pointless unless either the prices drop or your card dies. -- Since you use your rig for video editing, there are significant benefits in upgrading mobo/CPU as the benchmarks for the likes of Handbrake really benefit with more cores & threads than the 4 in your current CPU. where number of threads makes a bigger difference than core frequency. I've never gone with AMD myself but Handbrake performance seem to shine on Ryzen builds, Intel not so much so for mixed use Ryzen would be the way to go. RAM prices are also inflated compared to launch pricing which makes suggestions tricky as any upgrade to your system means new DDR4 RAM. Ryzen appears to do better with faster RAM whereas Intel chips don't really benefit, though the price difference can be practically nothing. Also, keep in mind that Intel builds are locked to a max of 2666MHz on any Coffee Lake chipset that's not a Z370 (which is required for overclocking, if that's of interest). There's 2 ways to go Ryzen and stick nicely within your £500 budget (prices from Scan). 8GB RAM/Ryzen 7 2700X 16GB RAM/Ryzen 5 2600X 8GB DDR4 is enough but video editing would likely benefit from 16GB. A single 8GB stick at 3,000MHz is £83. 2,400MHz RAM is only £4 less so it's worth the extra to get faster memory, especially as Ryzen CPUs seem to benefit nicely from faster RAM. That leaves £427 for motherboard and CPU. £283 would get you the top end Ryzen 7 2700X (8 cores, 16 threads vs the 4 cores/4threads of your existing CPU), leaving £137 for a motherboard - and Scan have options with the new X470 chipset that fall within the remainder of your budget with money to spare. If 8GB isn't enough you could drop the CPU down to the Ryzen 5 2600X (6 cores/12 threads) for £193 which allows you to double the RAM and have an extra £20 for a £150ish motherboard, or a round down the pub. I don't think you could do an Intel build without dropping down to an i5 which is "just" a 6 core CPU without hyperthreading and I don't think would be as significant an improvement on your existing CPU. Overclocking might help out but I've assumed that's not of interest based on the choice of your existing non-overclockable CPU.
Fantastic, thanks for this. This has released some pressure from my bursting head. I guess I am not going to benefit from an expensive MOBO, considering I have no desire to overclock. I simply want a system that once up and running, will see me through a number of years of gaming and the odd bit of video editing. I am gearing now towards the 2700x with 8GB RAM. and If I need to, I can add more sometime in the future. But for now, I strongly believe 8GB will last me a while. Most likely ordering near the end of the week. Thank you all
FWIW if i were looking at spending ~£500 i'd be looking at something along the lines of - this [which is not far from what welshbrummie suggested above] or this [which is a couple of quid over budget... because intel] EDIT: or you could cheap out a bit [kinda...] and go for a Generation 1 Ryzen setup... linky
I guess that is an option, considering the chip is only around the year old mark. But there is not much between them, so I think the newer option would be better
