Ok this will be a bit long winded. I currently use my laptop to play hd movies and play a little Minecraft and Skyrim. It is a modified Acer Aspire 8942g. Upgraded cpu to core i7 820qm which runs at 1.73 ghz. Ram upgraded to 8gb. Graphics chip is an Ati hd5450. It works reasonably well but far from ideal. Basically I need a desktop PC to take its place but have no money to spend. I dug through my loft and found the following: 3 decent lga775 mobos, 2 e2160's and an e6600, about 10gbs of ddr2 ram, a Nvidia 7300 gs card, a Nvidia 6600gt card and an Ati hd 5770 card. Since I can only spend about £150 - £200 I can't decide whether to buy a new gfx card and over clock one of the cpu's until it leaks hell fire or buy the fastest cpu I can find for socket 775 and couple it with the hd5770. I don't expect either way to be able to better my laptop but matching it would be nice. Any thoughts would be appreciated, I kinda already know the best course of action but hearing you confirm it would make me feel a lot better Sent from Bittech Android app
A 5450 has 80 units and a 5770 800. I'm guessing the frequencies are higher too. It's a miracle the 5450 can handle skyrim.
For £150 you could pick up a decent second hand Sandy Bridge bundle on here. Sell all your bits off and you'd probably have enough left over plus the £50 to buy a very respectable GPU as well.
First generation i5/i7 bundles (i5 750 or i7 920/930/950 etc) are super cheap these days, can pick one up for £90-120 and still have £80 left to get a GTX 570 or something similar. Also try to sell your old parts to add a bit more to your budget.
Thanks for the input guys. I hadn't considered a second hand i5 or i7 as I figured it would be well outside my budget. I'll have a look. Yes my 5450 handles Skyrim but only ultra low detail and res and oy gives about 20 fps. Sent from Bittech Android app
The 5450 I put in my mum's rig can barely handle Sims 3 at 1280 x 1024 It's a media PC card in truth.
Your absolutely right. My laptop is a blu ray machine designed with hd movies in mind (it originally came with an i3 330m chip) but it handles most of the games I've thrown at it pretty well. Dawn of War, Supreme Commander, Oblivion, although to be fair the majority of the games I play are pretty dx11 and the 5450 is a dx11 chip so....... Sent from Bittech Android app
So I tool your advice and managed to get my hands on a core i3 550 machine. It's an HP built system so at the moment isn't worth a damp but the price was too good to turn down. My thinking is that it is better than anything else I have and as it's an 1156 spec I can upgrade one component at a time without losing use of the machine. As it's an HP custom motherboard that will have to be the first thing to go. Sent from Bittech Android app
