Upgrade or Scrap?

MyNameIsEoghan

Howaya lads,
a friend of mine recently built a beast of a rig and I'm after inheriting his old one. Now it's not going to be winning any awards by any means but I was wondering if it would be worth my while using it as a base to upgrade from or to sell off what I can and start from scratch.

Right, down to business:
CPU: i3 540
Mobo: some socket 1156 board (now that could be a problem upgrade wise)
GFX: GTX460 1GB
RAM: 4GB
Then there's a 500w PSU and a 1TB HDD

What I was thinking was to just salvage the RAM, PSU and HDD and abandon the rest. I was thinking if I did that I might go down the AMD route, FX 6300 maybe. (Trying to keep the budget low, below 400 ideally.)
Would it be worth my while SLI'ing the 460 or just going for a new card altogether?

Cheers in advance.

nesf

Well it depends on what you want. That machine, as is, would be perfectly fine for some game genres and would be dated for others but it's far from not being able to play games acceptably with medium or lower graphics settings. If you want high end performance the GTX 460 lags two generations behind at best but to just play games and not worry too much about having all the details maxed it's not something you need to immediately replace. The CPU again depends on the kinds of games, ideally you want a quad core when gaming but if you want to keep things cheap it's not awful to have a "free" dual core instead so long as you aren't hoping to play very CPU intensive games.

Lu Tze

Yeah, try using it first, if it meets your needs, great! If it doesnt, ask the question again then, hopefully knowing where limitations are, and what budget you have for upgrades/new build.

Monotype

That CPU could be overclocked a bit, moreso if it has a reasonable cooler on it.

Is the PSU decent?

If you threw in an SSD, it could breathe a lot of life into a system like that.

What monitor are you pairing with it?

TerrorFirmer

Would sell it and start fresh, or at least sell most of it. A €50 euro CPU (g3220) is faster than that i3, for example, and the GPU is fairly dated, though would still get through most games at moderate resolution/settings.

I think your idea of holding onto the ram, hard drive, and psu is solid enough. You could even hang onto the GTX460 for now and just build the core of the machine (Fx6300, board, another 4gb ram, ssd, as an example) - GTX460 can be sold later on.

MyNameIsEoghan

I realise I've forgotten something quite important/relevant. Until about Christmas I'll be playing on an old low res monitor, so for the time being I should manage well enough. It's somewhere deep in the depths of my attic so I don't have it to hand, I want to say it's 1600x900 but it might even be 1366x768.

Might lash an SSD into it too depending on how the funds are, could anyone recommend something for good value? I was thinking maybe a 64GB, just to put the OS on and a game or two.

And cheers for all the help lads, it's been a while and I've kind of just blundered in blindly.

TerrorFirmer

No harm in buying an SSD now, can be carried over later.

This or this are good buys. It's worth a 120GB in my opinion for your OS and few games you play a lot of in particular.

At that resolution the GTX460 will actually be fine for another while at decent settings, so overall you're not set too badly really. Might need a bit of an OC on that i3 540 though depending on what's being played.