Considering new components to upgrade pc

[DRuM]

Long post, sorry.

Since I discovered I really can't play certain new games on my pc anymore, (tomb raider underworld being one of them) because my processor is a serious bottleneck, athlon xp 2000+ 1.67GHz, and TR underworld needs 3GHz, it really is about time to upgrade. But it means I have to change my mobo to be able to upgrade the cpu. However, it's not like I play a lot of games like crysis, etc that need super fast processing, and all other things I do on my pc run acceptably for the most part. So on that basis, I really don't want to spend a lot of money, and don't require links to overly expensive top of the line stuff. Just enough to allow games to run well. I'm tryng to keep within a budget of around £300 max if possible. But it would be cheaper to build with components than buy a whole new pc, wouldn't it? Thinking of keeping my computer case, which is basic but should be ok, unless you think I need a better or bigger or more airflow designed one, depending on which processor I buy. I have a 550w psu in it which would be ok to use wouldn't it?

I'm thinking of buying:

1) CPU
2) MOTHERBOARD with sata, pci express and agp and maybe 2 ide slots if it exists,
3) 2GB of whatever type of DDR ram I need, DDR2 or DDR3, I've no idea.


As far as graphics card, tomb raider didn't fail on that, it passed by one notch over minimum pass mark. It's a 7600 GS agp, with 512mb onboard. If I have a pci express mobo, I'll be ready for a gpu upgrade, but for now, my card might be ok.

Not sure whether I can install my 2 IDE hard drives from my pc, one of which has XP installed, and save myself having to reinstall windows to a sata drive.. for now anyway? Would my old ide drives work as soon as installed into a new motherboard? Is there such a motherboard that does sata and 2 ide drives? Alternatively, I could buy a cheap usb enclosure to house the IDE drives and buy a sata internal drive and install windows?

Anyway, don't worry too much about the above questions yet, my MAIN question is.. which 3GHz processor, Intel or AMD? How important is L2 cache? I've selected a few here from overclockers, all AMD, all great prices and below £100, would any of these do me to take care of the latest demanding games and be somewhat future proof?

This first one looks like the best to go for, especially at the price I want to stay at compared to an intel equivalent which seems to be more expensive? Apparently it has 7.0MB L2+L3 Cache. Is it essential, or would lower amounts of cache also be sufficient, like 1 or 2MB? Many thanks for any advice!

AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 550 3.10GHz Black Edition (Socket AM3)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =6&subcat=


EDIT: apparently this one is highly recommended, supposed to be amazing chip for gaming:
AMD Phenom II X3 Tri Core 720 Black Edition 2.8GHz (Socket AM3)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =CP-238-AM

AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 245 2.9GHz (Socket AM3)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =CP-251-AM


AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 250 3.00GHz (Socket AM3)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =6&subcat=


AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 545 3.0GHz (Socket AM3)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =6&subcat=

[obsidian]

You will almost certainly need to replace your GPU with any new hardware (and better off for it) seeing as how all new mobos have PCI-e only.

PSU should be fine, but you may need adapters from 4-pin molex to the PCI-e 4-pin power connectors depending on the GPU.

Most mobos still have IDE slots for older hard drives, optical drives, etc. But since you are swapping a significant amount of hardware, you will definitely need to reinstall the OS, so back up your stuff beforehand. SATA drives would definitely be ideal and HDDs are very cheap these days and a bit faster. But if you need to save the money, it's certainly not a priority.

RAM is cheap. Getting 4GB is probably a good idea. It would likely be DDR2 that you are looking for.

Currency converter tells me you have about $600 CND to spend, not sure if that's an accurate approximation with street prices for hardware, etc.. but here goes...

Prices from Newegg.ca. I chose some middle priced hardware in each category, so if you wanted to save a bit, you can move down to the cheaper, slightly less clocked C2Q or the cheaper GPU, etc. You may be able to overclock to make up the difference anyway, I didn't do enough looking to think about that, but that should at least give you some flexibility.

[Fender]

I haven't been up on this for a while, but I think the current price/performance winner is Intel with their 2 & 4 core CPUs.

And the price difference between 2 GB and 4GB should be pretty small. Don't skimp there.

[DRuM]

Hey Obsidian, many thanks. The total converted price of those 4 things is £415, a little more than I wanted to spend, particularly as I've also got to spend some money getting someone to install the motherboard and cpu for me. I'm generally ok with messing around inside computers, but don't really fancy trying to install those, I'll muck it up.

Before I saw your post, I did a bit of searching around and found the only motherboard I could which is SATA 2 and takes PCI-E, AGP, and TWO IDE sockets. Currently, I have a dvd rom and dvd writer and 2 IDE hard drives all connected to my 2 IDE slots, so this motherboard would cater for those.

The motherboard is this one below, meaning I have to to stick with intel. This motherboard is cheap though. It takes less ram though, DDR2 up to 2GB but I believe it can go up to 4GB with a bios change. I can also stick with my AGP card for now. What do you think of this board? It would certainly save me money.

£52.59 Asrock motherboard

http://www.advancetec.co.uk/acatalog/As ... board.html

And this cpu?


£92 Intel core 2 duo

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... subcat=793

I know you suggested quad core, but wouldn't this 2.93GHz processor and 2GB ram be sufficient for my gaming needs?

You mentioned backing up. I don't have any backup hardware yet and I need to transfer about 170GB of files which are on 2 IDE drives. How about if I buy this WD sata 2 1TB drive and start afresh by installing XP to it. Then when I install my old IDE drives, I should be able to see all the files, is that right?

£59.98

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... 14&subcat=

Assuming I got these 3 things, plus a 2 GB stick of ram ( I'll try and get what you recommended DDR2 PC2 8500), we're looking at about £235 which would be perfect and allows me room to spend a bit more for fitting it and maybe buying a new graphics card later on. Please give me your opinion. At the very least, this upgrade has GOT to be a major improvement over my current system.

[obsidian]

Personally, I would stay away from Asrock... failure prone from what I've been told. Seriously, just give up on AGP, it's NOT worth it.

Core2Duo's are still good. Fine for gaming. Most games are barely dual core threaded let alone quad core. It's just that Quads are sitting at a nice price point at the moment.

Yes, plugging in your old IDE drives, all the files will still be there as long as you don't format them or drop it or something silly.

[DRuM]

Personally, I would stay away from Asrock... failure prone from what I've been told. Seriously, just give up on AGP, it's NOT worth it.

Core2Duo's are still good. Fine for gaming. Most games are barely dual core threaded let alone quad core. It's just that Quads are sitting at a nice price point at the moment.

Yes, plugging in your old IDE drives, all the files will still be there as long as you don't format them or drop it or something silly.

Ok, I'll stay away from Asrock and AGP then and have to buy a PCI Express card. I take it you approve of that cpu by the sounds of it, so that's good. It looks like my best bet is to buy an external USB enclosure to house and use the IDE hard drives, and use the one IDE slot on whatever motherboard I get to daisy chain my 2 IDE DVD drives. I'm happy to go with an asus motherboard but would like to buy cheaper than the one you linked, especially as you're now making me spend more money on a graphics card, lol. I'll do some more research. Thanks for your advice so far, mucho appreciated.

[DRuM]

This seems to be a good motherboard to go with that 2.93GHz intel cpu, if you think gigabyte is a decent brand? It's the only one I could find in my preferred price range, that takes 16GB of ram and has an IDE slot. This is Sata 2, right?

£56.99 MOTHERBOARD

Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G Intel P43 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =MB-217-GI

Full spec:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... A-P43-ES3G

Shall I buy a 9600 GT graphics card? They're not expensive. Good performers?

[Foo]

I recommend you ditch as much of your legacy connections and equipment as you realistically can, and take a bigger financial hit for the sake of getting yourself into a better position going forwards.

Since your Case, PSU, Keyboard, Mouse and Monitor are all presumed good, that leaves you needing the following:
- Hard Drive
- Motherboard
- CPU
- RAM
- Graphics Card

I recommend that you:
- Buy the cheapest, smallest capacity SATA drive on the market, and a £10 USB case for your largest IDE drive. This'll fulfill your storage needs on a tight budget.
- Definitely install your OS fresh. Back the data up to the USB drive before you swap out the guts
- Pop the Windows 7 Beta onto the new rig. I'll be good for nearly a year, may as well.
- Go for the cheapest Quad-Core CPU you can... they're fucking excellent performance for the cost. They start on OC at £110 which is 20 quid more than the processor you're looking at.
- Seriously, seriously 100x seriously, ditch the legacy slot requirements (AGP AND IDE) and get a non-legacy motherboard... one with just SATA ports and if you can find one with 2 x good PCIe slots, you'll be laughing.

[DRuM]

Thanks foo, really appreciate your advice and I know you're right. But seriously, all this does is put me off bothering. I'm looking to stay within budget, and so far, it's just getting more expensive. I'm being told to lose the agp card, so that means buy another graphics card. I'm being told to ditch the IDE, so that means I have no DVD drives. I have to buy 2 enclosures to house the IDE drives. I'm beng told to buy a more expensive cpu. And so it goes on. And the total price is starting to getting into several hundred quid. I've listed several components that I thought would be good enough for my purpose. I can't justify right now spending more than my budget for the sake of a few high specced games. If I can keep to my budget and do a basic upgrade, fine, otherwise, I'll stick with what I have for a bit longer.

[Foo]

Yeah it's a tricky call if you want to play games.

Given the options I'd opt to save some cash and make a 'full' leap to the newer tech when cashflow permits.

Stuff's moved on in so many areas now that it's worth severing all the legacy stuff, especially in terms of IDE, AGP and VGA ports, stuff like that.

[DRuM]

Yes. I mean I COULD certainly spend more and go for a system like you suggested, but I need to consider my priorities, nice as it would be to have a fast rig right now. I've spent a bit recently on blu ray and a new TV, and have been spending on other stuff too, so I need to keep a reign on the cash and do a proper quad core upgrade later. The only thing that got me thinking about this was when I found I couldn't run Tomb Raider underworld properly, so I thought I could try and scrape together a basic upgrade for the least amount of money. Anyway, for now, I have loads of other games on the pc to play that do run on this pc.

[DRuM]

Ok, I've had a good think and done some more research. The mobo and cpu I chose are not compatible. I've gone on your advice foo and chosen a smaller 500GB hard drive and have saved £20 on that which is something. I posted on OC's forum. Came up with this system :

AMD Phenom II X2 Dual Core 550 3.10GHz Black Edition
*XFX ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5
OCZ Gold Edition 4GB DDR2 PC2-8500C5
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA-II 16MB
*Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 AMD 770 (Socket AM3/AM2+) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

I'm very happy with that selection (which a guy at OC actually put together for me, though I had already selected the memory and hard drive) so now I've just got to choose a new psu. It turns out my EZ Cool 550w that I've had for 3 and a bit years is a piece of crap that has probably only ever put out less than 300w, which would probably account for my pc ocassionally shutting down. I certainly don't want a cheap psu damaging new components if it decides to blow up. Thinking of an antec basiq plus 550w or OCZ StealthXStream 500w Silent. I've found a shop that will fit all this for £20 which is better than I first expected. Gotta make sure the micro ATX board is ok in my ATX case, but I believe it's possible. So the grand total will come to around £370 which is fine. I did reconsider that Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 for £110, but nah, that would be £30 extra from the X2 550, and no doubt finding the right motherboard might be more expensive than the asus, or it might be DDR3 only which is pricier than DDR2, or.... whatever! For my needs, this rig will be perfect I think. Do I get a yay or a boo? You're booing right?

[obsidian]

It's alright if that's all you can afford.



Corsair makes some really rock solid PSUs, fyi.

[DRuM]

It's alright if that's all you can afford.



Corsair makes some really rock solid PSUs, fyi.

I know, this is the poor mans gaming rig lol

Yeah, I believe corsair do, some people reckon they're the best to get. I've read great things about OCZ as well. Funny you should mention them, someone at OC recommended this:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =CA-017-CS

He said to me : "400w is fine. I run a 4850, Q8200, 4GB RAM on a coolermaster extreme power 460w. That's 460 watt max and 401w continous. This corsair should do more than the coolermasters peak." But I'm thinking, maybe 500w would give me some headroom for future upgrades, and the psu wouldn't have to work as hard. What do you think? The 400w corsair, which is cheaper anyway, or the 500w OCZ? I always thought that 500w was the minimum needed these days, presumably not though. Oh btw, I've been very nearly persuaded to go £13 more and get the HD 4870 instead of the 4850
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... subcat=939

[DRuM]

It's ordered and I get it tuesday, can't wait I added a case, the Coolermaster CM 690 Dominator, highly recommended at overclockers, tool less, lots of fans, spacious, and great for the largest gpu cards. I also bought the HIS HD 4870 I024MB instead of the 512MB. Probably overkill for my needs, but a bit of futureproofing perhaps. I also went back to a 1TB harddrive instead of 500mb, and apparently WD black is better than WD blue.



To prove I'm not all talk, lol,




Only £170 over budget

Btw, I'm told that one bios setting may be able to unlock this dual core to triple or quad.

[obsidian]

Btw, I'm told that one bios setting may be able to unlock this dual core to triple or quad.

Uhhh, yeah... I can unlock the 4-cylinder shitbox engine of my car into a 12-cylinder Lambo as well.

[AmIdYfReAk]

its the X3 that you can unlock the 4rth core, but its only with specific bios's, and mobo's.

[obsidian]

The X3 is an X4 with one of the cores disabled because it was tested to be potentially unstable. But yeah, not happening on DRuM's computer.

[DRuM]

Dunno, can't say I'm bothered though, dual core at 3.1GHz and an HD 4870 1GB is more than plenty for my needs. Finally get delivery tomorrow then I can put it all together. And guess what? I just fried my old processor the other night, currently got no pc. I put heatsink on backwards, lol.

It gave me 5 years of good service and that's how I treat it

[DRuM]

By the way guys, whether my mobo and bios can unlock I'm not sure yet, however, the phenom 550 CAN be unlocked to x4. Read this and edumacate yourselves .

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... x2_15.html

[Scourge]

I'm pretty happy with my Phenom II quad. It's the 940 Black Edition. I think you'll be satisfied with yours as well.

[DRuM]

Nice one scourge. You're not kidding, I'm pleased as punch. It's amazing! Mine's a black edition too, 550 BE. I ran a couple of games for the first time tonight, my god, it's so quick and cuts through games on high resolutions and very high settings like butter. I'm so used to stuttering in games but this is a whole new level. First thing I tried was an older game, quake 4. I remember playing it on low settings and even then it was still choppy on the XP athlon, but with this processor and the HD 4870 not even a hint of stutter, and it automatically detected my system to use ultra quality as default. Then I tried a bit of tomb raider underworld which again was totally unplayable before but now it's faster than sonic the hedgehog on amphetamines. I'm going to do some benchmarks in a bit. You can tell I'm excited, lol. And what makes it more satisfying for me is that instead of paying someone as I had intended, I decided to build the whole pc myself from scratch. First time for me, installing motherboard and components. I'm quite proud of myself. Took me a couple of days but hey, so what, I took my time and did it carefully. Connectors are what slowed me down, I mean, I didn't even know which were the pci-e cables. And I wore an anti static wristband all the time So then when it was finished I went to boot up for the first time, and then,.. my monitor has the wrong size connector. Fortunately, I eventually realised I had a VGA to DVI adaptor in the box for my old nvidia card.
Case looks nice, black coolermaster with blue led front fan which glows through grill. Temperatures are very good as well and I haven't even installed the aftermarket gpu cooler yet, I'll prolly do that in the next couple of days.

Pics from my phone during build, bit crappy but you get the idea. Cable management leaves a lot to be desired but it's a bit tidier now since these pics.

http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/1525/2l8hhqu.jpg
http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/1070/2m466nn.jpg
http://img90.imageshack.us/i/14bnlsy.jpg/
http://img132.imageshack.us/i/246wdo4.jpg/

[Foo]

Sweet as fuck. pleased for you drummeh

[Captain]

Congrats on the build, always fun putting together a new PC Here's my current rig:

Case: CoolerMaster Centurion 5
PSU: Corsair TX650W
Mobo: BFG nForce 680i LT SLI
CPU: Core2Quad Q6600 @3.2Ghz + Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Memory: 4GB (2x2GB) OCZ Platinum XTC Rev-2 PC8500 1066MHz (5-5-5-15)
Vid card: EVGA GTX 275 (720/1585/1275)
Sound card: Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer 7.1
HDD1: Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-II
HDD2: Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM 16MB cache SATA-II
HDD3: Western Digital 500GB SATA-II external setup
Monitors: 22" LG 2242TQ-BF & 19" LG L1970HR
Speakers: Logitech X-530 5.1
Mouse: Logitech G5 2nd Revision

http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a382/ ... C05109.jpg
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a382/ ... C05118.jpg
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a382/ ... C05119.jpg

PS. Anti-static wristguards are for pussies Just touch the case or PSU and you're golden.
PPS. Get Street Fighter IV

[Scourge]

Nice. There's nothing wrong with taking your time to make sure you get it right. Good job.