Upgrade Time

Maguined

The old girl just is cutting the mustard anymore so some recommendations on what to upgrade to.

I am happy with my antec P160W case, the 700TW-ATX psu should be fine and the Razer barracuda soundcard so will be keeping those. I want to upgrade mostly for better games performance as modern games i have to turn the settings too far down and it can still get clunky, i want to go back to the days of flying through games with most settings on high and still getting smooth performance.

Can anyone recommend a good combination of processor, motherboard, memory and graphics card for me? I am thinking of spending between 500 to 600 and actually i think i want to throw in at least 500GB hard drive as well, not a priority but would be a nice extra if it can be included in the budget without affecting performance choices too much.

Effluo

Well what else do you have in your old pc?
It seems that it might well be quite good looking at your other components.

Also what games are you wanting to play and what resolution screen do you want to play them on?

Solitaire

+1. Specs on the PSU would also be very, very useful; I doubt we're talking about a build that could bring a decent 700W to its knees, but some older PSUs are just so miserable it doesn't even matter how high they're (over-)rated, things could still end badly even with a fairly conservative build.

But if it's a decent PSU you could have a CrossFire rig sucking juice from it and it'd just shrug it off

Maguined

Xpower ATX-700
AMD Athlon 64 4000 2.41Ghz
Asus A8N SLI Premium
Sapphire Radeon X1900
3GB OCZ DDR 400-232 XTC Plat

Games wise i want it to perform well at FPS, My monitor is an LG 204WT though since i have moved back into my parents for the time being i have been using my Samsung 32 inch tv so i can watch movies in my room, its only 720P but its more the textures, HDR and anti-aliasing i want to be upping in my games more than the resolution.

Solitaire

720p = 1280*720. And that LG is "only" 1650*1080 anyway. A HD4850 should do fine, and they're dirt-cheap. If you really want insane performance you could go one higher and get a cheapie HD4870 512MB though!

Oh hell... that PSU is a favourite on BadCaps. That's very much not a good thing... extremely dodgy, overrated Yum Cha PSU. That budget has just been nominated to include your new PSU as well- don't argue, just breathe easy and thank the gods it hasn't blown up in your face thus far. Literally :eek:

EDIT: Off to make up the build and I've already been distracted by shiny things... looks like AMD has new low-end CPUs out. Oooh... sparkly...

kfish2oo2

My 4870 eats every game rather happily, go for one of those. A bit of careful searching should turn up one for around €130. Make sure that if you do go the ATI route that you get a card with an aftermarket cooler. MY card has a zerotherm as found on the Palit cards and its superb. A bit loud, but as long as my card is sitting at 47C idle, I'm a happy camper

Solitaire

So busy being distracted by shiny things and exploding PSUs that I forgot to list the HD4870. D'oh.



The HD4870s there aren't so great at the moment anyway, at least the 512MB ones. There were some floating about for something silly like €110, but now the cheapest is a shade over €120, and the 1GB versions start under €130. Note that they don't use that much more power than a HD4850, but they do require two PCIe power (PEG) connectors, not just one. That means that with that PSU listed (which is almost overkill for just one HD48*anything*0 on its own!) you'd need some 6pinPCIe>2*6pinPCIe cable splitters :rolleyes: You can CrossFire two HD4850s straight off the bat though

Maguined

Thanks Solitaire that is some very clear and much appreciated advice.

Out of interest if you went for the higher scale of the budget, including shipping keeping it just under 600 what would you spend the extra funds on, a better processor? crossfire the HD4850 or just getting a single better model?

Waiting to see how much money i have left over after the weekend so that will determine whether I go with your initial 500 budget build or if i have the extra cash to go for a slightly higher 600 budget build.

Solitaire

You might be in a pretty solid position already.

That CPU has an unlocked multiplier, which makes it much easier to adjust the speed upwards without too much fiddling. Thus you could get quite a lot of oomph out of it if neccessary anyway The price (and power requirement) gap between it and the next Black Edition CPU is fairly wide, so the X3-720BE is good value for money and can punch far beyond its weight when overclocked. Only proviso is to maybe get a better cooler for it if you intend anything more than light overclocking. But even at its 2.8GHz stock speed it packs a hefty punch. It's much cheaper than almost any quad-core CPU worth mentioning, and if it has to deal with a multithreaded application it doesn't suffer like even a fast dual-core CPU would. Of course, if you're allergic to overclocking then you can spend a bit more to get a CPU that's even more aggressive at stock speeds.

And while CrossFire beats a single bigger card in raw power, the latter is far more practical and versatile. What if a game doesn't support CF? Half your graphical horsepower goes straight out the window. And power consumption can be quite scary - compare one HD4890 gobbling up 120-130W compared to a pair of smaller HD4850s managing to devour 220W+ between them :eek: Plus two smaller cards tend to suffer from being virtual overkill in smaller resolutions, then struggling at the higher resolutions where the individual cards start to experience bottlenecks simultaneously.

Main change would be upping the GPU to a HD4870 and throwing in a CPU cooler to give you the option of taking that CPU up to 3.6GHz and beyond. But a 2.8-3.2GHz tri-core and an "old" HD4870 borders on overkill nicely as it is I'm not sure if getting lower-latency RAM would help your cause enough to be an option, mind.

Basically mix and match to get to €570:

Upgrade from X3-720BE to (new stepping) X4-945 - +€50 (no BE but very powerful at stock)
Upgrade from HD4850 to HD4870 512MB - +€35 (better 1650*1080)
Upgrade from HD4850 to HD4870 1GB - +€45 (much better 1080p)
Upgrade from HD4850 to HD4890 1GB - +€75 (much better everything, including OC)
Add a second HD4850 - +€85 (insane 1650*1080, not really recommended)
Upgrade from 1333MHz CL9 to 1600MHz CL7 DDR3 - +€10
Upgrade from stock cooler to Xigmatek HDT-S1283 - +€25 (for better cooling)

Maguined

Thanks again Solitaire your help is greatly appreciated, all the thoughts of shiny new bits and pieces made me impatient so i couldnt resist and have placed my order in with hardwareversand so now its time for the impatient waiting game.

Brian

What did your final setup look like?

Maguined

Pretty much followed Solitaires advice, only changes was to up the hard drive to 1TB to stop my brother moaning at me for getting anything less.

Changed the memory to OCZ purely for the fact that i absolutely detest sticking new memory in, my pudgey uncoordinated fingers make a mess of things and the external casing on the OCZ sticks lets me get a decent grip. I know it sounds daft but the last time i tried sticking in a normal corsair stick in i dropped it so many times i was amazed nothing broke.

Solitaire

Eh? I thought the GeIL came with heatspreads too? Oh well, the OCZ seems the better value-for-money anyway :P