upgrade current spec for €250 or so.

RoyalMarine

Hi guys,

I hate making these threads

So the parents gave me a nice Amazon.co.uk voucher for Christmas, £100, and the brother gave me €60 in cash.

I'd like to spend it on my PC.

Current specs

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1

Core i7 860 LGA 1156 95w @ 2.8 GHz

ASUSTeK Computer INC. P7H55D-M EVO (LGA1156)

8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 660MHz (9-9-9-24)
2 x 2 GB
1 x 4GB

HD 7770 2gb edition

465GB Seagate ST3500413AS ATA Device (SATA)
111GB Crucial_CT120M500SSD1 ATA Device (SSD)

My main thoughts are towards some better ram. I know the ones I have currently are slow and mismatched.

I'd love to upgrade my mobo too, to allow my SSD to utilize sata 3 as the current board I have is sata 2 only. But that would obviously require a new cpu too..

As my current build is an M-atx, I've decided I can throw a few extra euro towards the upgrade if it's reasonable. Perhaps an extra €70 to cover a new case bringing my total to 250.

2 things to note:

1. I can get 10% off electronics via Amazon through a friend of mine.
2. I run dual monitor's. It's a gaming PC.

marco_polo

Really if it is a gaming PC you should be looking squarely at the graphics card as your first port of call.

Your CPU is still quite decent and is roughly on a par with an FX6300 which is still going into plenty of new budget gaming builds here, I definitely think it is worth holding onto for another year or two. Also the real world benefits of changing an SSD from SATA2 to SATA 3 are fairly minimal tbh, and to get there will cost your entire €250 budget, as you would have to change motherboard and CPU.

Its a pretty similar story with RAM TBH, DDR3-1333 is still more than fast enough for gaming and faster RAM will again have a very small impact on performance. It is true that as you sticks are operating in a hybrid rather than full dual channel mode, this may have a slight negative impact on performance but again it will be a relatively tiny percentage in real terms.

On the other hand upgrading the 7770 to something like a GTX760, which can be got for about €220 or thereabouts will more than double you performance the vast majority of games. If you wanted an new case as well the R9 270x would be bit cheaper, still be a very good improvement over the 7770 and leave cash spare for a new case.

RoyalMarine

damn.. I'm only after replacing my GPU recently and all

that's an impressive performance boost according to the benchmarks.

Thanks Marco, I'm going to hold off on making a decision for a while. Might look into a whole new system through out this year at some point.

Luck100

marco_polo is dead on. Also, a new gpu like the 760 will slot straight into any new build you might do later in the year.

Slksht

Go big or go home! Sell your entire current system and put that towards the 250 you have and build a whole new machine