- This topic has 10 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 17 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Hey guys
I am going to be doing and upgrade of my pc next month once i move house.
The main thing is to get a PCI-E graphics card in as my current system only supports AGP.
As result pretty much all of the pc has to be changed to have a PCI-E gfx card.
So my question is should I spend more money on getting the base plateform (cpu/motherboard) better with a good pci-e gfx card or keep that as cheap as possible and put in the best pci-e gfx card i can afford?
Basically need:
cpu
motherboard
ram
sata hdd
graphics cardBudget is around £400 – £450.
what do you recommend?
dont expect any hugely noticable differences with a sata hd SO I would grab the rest 1st. would recommend also good MB and CPU 1st because you can always invest in a better G card in the future without having to reinstall everything
Yeah I was sort of wondering about spending alot less on the gfx card and getting say a GF8600GT to start with. If I buy it from EVGA they are doing a 90 (3 month) program where within that time I can send them this card to get a newer one (say a GF8800) and I will only pay the difference between the rrp of the new one and the rrp of the one I get now.
I was looking at the m/b/cpu thing and there is a new series of P35 express m/b’s just come out supporting the newer higher bus speed and the new core2duo 1333 cpus seem to be very well priced, (e.g the E6550)
Another way to look at it is that I only have a Radeon 9800 just now, so pretty much any gfx card I buy should knock the pants off it lol.
With the HDD’s, main reason for that is the new m/b’s only have 1 IDE socket, so cant have IDE HDD’s and ROM drives.
I currently have ATA133 7200rpm IDE drives and was looking at get a 320GB 7200rpm SATA II drive. These are supposed to have maxium theorical tranfer rate of 300mb/sec compared to the 133mb/sec of my current IDE drives. so surely there should be an improvement?
Yes the are some improvments with SATA Drives but only really noticable if you get one with 10,00rpm which tend to be smaller in capacity. If you are looking at more than 1 HDD get a 10,000 rpm for your primary OS/Apps and another 7,200 larger disk for games and data.
With regards to the P35/1333Mhz FSB to really gain the performance benefit of the Duel/Quad Core Core 2 Duo’s you probably need to use DDR 3 Memory which at the moment is quite pricey. You can get M/Boards that support both DD2/DD3 but you’ll be limited to the speed your memory runs unless you clock the nuts out of it.
If you want a rocl solid M/Board get an Asus there a bit more expensive but are really good boards and worth the extra investment. Depending what you want to use tohe machine for other than playing games Quad Cores are a bit over kill as most games don’t yet make use of 2 core let alone 4.
Invest in a decent PSU – scriming on a cheap PSU can cause stabilty issues and in the event they fail could also take out your investment.
With regards to the P35/1333Mhz FSB to really gain the performance benefit of the Duel/Quad Core Core 2 Duo’s you probably need to use DDR 3 Memory which at the moment is quite pricey. You can get M/Boards that support both DD2/DD3 but you’ll be limited to the speed your memory runs unless you clock the nuts out of it.
I reckon Lammie’s on the money here. Get the best Mobo you can with loads of room for upgrade. Get a cheap CPU since if it’s a decent mobo you’ll be able to easily upgrade it in a year or so when you’ve got more money.
Get a solid PSU, since they’re not really upgradeable, and then you can pick and choose other components as and when you need to upgrade them. I’m of the opinion that when you buy components for a PC, you should in fact be thinking about the NEXT PC you’re going to build. i.e. How upgradeable is the kit your buying?
Thanks guys for your advice.
Yeah the reason i am thinking about this as I went and got a socket 478 m/b you see and they didnt last long before the socket 775 took over and thus no pci-e 478 m/b and so on, so yeah really it was the m/b choice that is costing me the money lol.
I currently have an Asus motherboard in both my games pc and my media pc and both are excellent, better than any of the other boards I have had and never gone wrong. So I agree with that.
I was looking at getting the Asus P5B m/b to start with which is the P965 one.
But then also saw the Asus P5K which uses the new P35 chipset.
I think I will stick with DDR2 ram for now since its cheaper, but I think you can buy a P35 m/b which will take both DDR2 and DDR3 so the upgrade option is there?
I am not interested in the quad core’s just now and they are expensive. I have read alot of good stuff about the E4400 chips in being able to overclock them rediculusly (2.0ghz up to 3.5ghz in some cases), but lack 2mb of cache.
My friend is building as in experiment as he loves messing around with electronics and electrical stuff (teaches it at college) a water cooling system for his pc to remove the heatsink and fans from his pc. BUT lol the radiator he has got for £15 off ebay is out of a car and will be mounted outside lol, so the cooling potiential will be crazy! lol. got a water pump also that can do 12 litres a min and bought 30mtrs of hose to connect it up with. Finally got a nice big bit of machined metal to drill the tunnel for the water to go through into and just need to attach a mounting mechanism to the bit of metal to fasten it to the motherboard. All in all will have cost about £50 to build this. looking forward to see the end result.
I already upgraded my PSU to a 600watt one with 36amps on the 12 volt rail as I was going to buy a AGP Radeon X1950Pro originally lol. It has the 6 pin pci-e pwr plug and SATA pwr plugs too which my old 300watt psu didnt have.
On the graphics side. I do fancy one of those nice Geforce 8800GTS’s but think it will be too expensive now unless I skimp on the other components.
Despite the 8800 being twice as fast as the 8600, the 8600 is alot faster than a 6800 I believe and the 6800 is twice as fast as my Radeon 9800. So I guess any of these new cards should be good to replace mine so I can play the likes of COD4, Crysis, ET: Quake Wars, Bioshock etc etc.Thanks a lot.
@Mugworth wrote:
I already upgraded my PSU to a 600watt one with 36amps on the 12 volt rail as I was going to buy a AGP Radeon X1950Pro originally lol. It has the 6 pin pci-e pwr plug and SATA pwr plugs too which my old 300watt psu didnt have.
On the graphics side. I do fancy one of those nice Geforce 8800GTS’s but think it will be too expensive now unless I skimp on the other components.
Despite the 8800 being twice as fast as the 8600, the 8600 is alot faster than a 6800 I believe and the 6800 is twice as fast as my Radeon 9800. So I guess any of these new cards should be good to replace mine so I can play the likes of COD4, Crysis, ET: Quake Wars, Bioshock etc etc.Thanks a lot.
If you are thinking of running a dual Core and 8800 you may be pushing your 600w PSU. I know that those 8800’s are quiet power intensive but still not as ATi which need a direct connection the national grind 😆 .
I would seriously think about upgrading the PSU to something with at least 750W even if it’s overkill it means your not loading the nuts out of the PSU and risk either blowing it or even worse your new investment.
Other than that I think you should be fine.
bloddy hell lol. 600watts is not enough lol. Well I am probably going to get a GF8600GT which can take all of its power from the PCI-E slot so my current psu should be ok. Also I only bought the new psu earlier this year lol so dont want to have to change it that quick
Ok how about this then:
ASUS P5KC AiLifestyle Series iP35 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard
Intel E4400 Socket 775 2×2.00GHz 800MHz FSB 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
Corsair 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered CL5(5-5-5-12) Heat Spreader Lifetime Warranty
EVGA 8600GT Superclocked 256MB GDDR3 DVI HDTV out PCI-E Graphics Card
Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II 7200RPM 16MB Cache – OEM
Cart Total: £321.78 (£378.12 Inv Vat)
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.