Hi, I'm upgrading a mate's old AthlonXP 3200+ machine to something a bit quicker. Budget is around £300 for CPU, Motherboard, RAM and GPU. For general use and gaming. There's a few options i've considered but I'm struggling to decide: CPU: Pentium E5200 £55 / Core2Duo E8200 £105 / Core2Quad 6700 £138 Motherboard: MSI P43 Neo-F £61 / Biostar TP45 HP £89 RAM: Whatever 4GB DDR2800 kit is best value (probably Corsair TwinX) £40 GPU: 512MB HD 4770 £80 / Geforce 260 £138 I've also looked at the Phenom II X3 720 BE which seems like a good proposition too. Any thoughts/suggestions on this would be appreciated. Thanks.
It'll be socket A (462). Have you factored in a new PSU? He'll need a new one probably, even it is only a 400W Enermax or Corsair unit. Personally I'd get the HD4770 and the MSI board with whichever CPU fits the budget.
Good luck to be honest. A gaming machine that will run modern games for £300 is a BIG ask. I did basically the same thing for a friend of mine lately at a friend price, and it cost about £550. That was a video editing rig though, for logging and editing DV.
Go on aria.co.uk and look for bargains in the superspecials section... Asus HD4850 - £100 4GB PC-6400 - £40 Freezer 7 Pro - £15 Gigabyte EP43-DS3L - £68 Intel 5200 - £54 delivery - £7 comes to about £270, leaving room to swap the 4850 for a 4870, or perhaps a better CPU, or a cheap PSU if he needs it...
Just very quickly specced up a system: Corsair PSU 400W CX400W Intel CPU Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz 800FSB LGA775 2MB cache Retail inc.Fan Gigabyte motherboard GA-EP43-S3L Corsair memory 4GB TwinX XMS2 6400 DDR2 Kit (2 x 2048MB) XFX ATI Radeon 4770 512MB DDR5 PCI-E DVI Total price including VAT £293.63 It's very do-able, could even throw in an Akasa 965 if you can find another £5
I would take a good look at his PSU to see if it would cope with a power hungry graphics card. What rating it is and what pci-e conections it has. From sounds of it you will likely need to work a PSU into the budget, you could do that by going for the E5200 CPU though.
He has a 480W XClio PSU (think its rebranded FSP) that i made him get a year or so ago. I reckon it should be able to cope
It's all depentant on what resolution the games are run at, £300 is possible to build what i would call a mid range gaming system. A 4830 from ATI is well under £100 aswell as there 4770. Nvidia's 9600GSO is in the same price range. So factor in £100 for a mid range motherboard, and £100 for CPU/memory combo, that still leaves spare change. So a system based around a E5200 and 4GB ram is more than possible, and will be pleanty powerful. Even has a decent headroom for an overclock!
I was a big fan of the P31-DS-3L but it really has reached the end of it's life with no support for PCI-E 2.0, limited over-clock on 333FSB CPU's and the lack of stability when using more than 2 memory modules. A good replacement is the Gigabyte GA-EP43-S3L that solves all the problems for another Tenner.
+1 i have the P31-DS3L and will probably run it till it dies, at the time it was amazing but there are better options for a little more money now having said that i would always go for gigabyte at the lower end of the market, you just get more features for your money
I would get a Biostar TP45 HP (new £88 frm scan) Intel e7400 (new £96 frm scan) Corsair TwinX XMS2 PC2-6400 (new £27 frm scan) 8800GT 1GB Alpha Dog (Graded £65 inc delivery videocardshop.co.uk) = just under £300, you will probably pay £8 to scan for delivery.
