Upgrading PC

Unitedfandoc

1. What is your budget? [€750]

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? Gaming/Internet. Would really like to play games like GTA V at 1080p 60fps on the highest settings

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? [Yes]

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? I can use the case, RAM(have 4 sticks), HDD(I would like a SDD for the OS), PSU.

5. Do you need a monitor? [No]

5a. If yes, what size do you need. [N/A]

5b. If no, what resolution is your current monitor and do you plan to upgrade in the near future? [1920x1080 - No]

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? [Keyboard/Mouse/Wireless Card/Card Reader/Speakers/etc.] No

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? [Yes - as a last resort]

8. How can you pay? [Credit Card]

9. When are you purchasing? [~within the next week if I can get a decent deal on the parts]

10. If you need help building it, where are you based? [NA]

I currently have a GTX 660 and FX-6300. I get ~40fps in GTA V on low settings at 1080p.

Thanks for your help!

Digital Solitude

i5 6400 €170
H110 board €70
GTX 1060 €300
250gb SSD €90
8gb DDR4 €40
I think that's it?

You've more than enough to go to skylake, just sell the cpu board and ram as a bundle

minitrue

Given you aren't penny pinching don't get the i5-6400 (2.7-3.3 GHz) but bump up to the i5-6600 (3.3-3.9 GHz) which gives you pretty much top of the line single core performance (and a much saner quad core speed of 3.3 Vs 2.7 GHz). There's possibly some money to be shaved off the prices DS gave there for the board and GTX1060 also which you might put into an even bigger SSD (about €115 from mindfactory for a 480GB Toshbia Q300 last I looked) and/or ram (and I'd always go dual channel for the ram which I don't think you'll manage for his price).

As he said, sell the board, cpu and ram in a bundle, or maybe even sell it complete (either getting yourself a new case+psu or getting a cheap case+psu for it) as you might well find someone willing to pay a lot more to not have to do any building.

Digital Solitude

My prices are just estimates, it's pretty rare I check prices.

Agree re the 6600 and bigger SSD, no need not to I guess

minitrue

Yep, wasn't meant as a criticism in the slightest and better to guide people with slightly high prices then give too much false hope which I hope I haven't done I just wanted to point out there was probably enough wiggle room left that they could aim a little higher.

The i5-6400 in particular strikes me as generally a bad idea unless you know you don't care about single core performance and have a very tight budget, the 6500 is the best "bang per buck" and the 6600 gets you right up to the top end of the single core speed (3.9GHz Vs 4.2 for a i7-6700K which costs over 50% more) without a stupid premium.

The ~480GB SSDs also offer the best bang per buck right now and probably means most people can keep everything they want on the SSD while 240GB would probably have many soon resorting to putting installations on spinning rust (e.g. GTA V appears to want 65GB).

Unitedfandoc

Thanks for the suggestions folks.

Just one thing, I currently have 4x4GB of DDR3 RAM. Could I use that with the new build(Intel CPU) instead of buying new RAM?

minitrue

You can find boards that take DDR3 ram but you would probably be holding the system back (I think it would have at least 25% less memory bandwidth) and I'm not sure to be honest if you could find one which takes all 4 DDR3 DIMMs (looking for DDR3 compatibility automatically puts you at the super-budget end of the market). You are probably looking at 80 or 90 euro for 2*8GB of DDR4 and that should also make it easier to sell off the old board+cpu (or complete system).

Digital Solitude

As minitrue says, DDR3 is a bad idea with skylake.

You could go for an older cpu config like an i5 4460 with a h97 board but there's no point imo