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ive been asked to build a PC within a budget, to get around the budget i was going to use my pc as the bases of the PC and upgrade to my needs.
at the mo i have a E6600- 4gb ddr2- 250gb hdd- ATI 3870 put it all in a new case & i was going to give them this and upgrade mine to either a i7 or quad?
any thoughts?
I just looked at the rest of your sytem. Solid but for extra performance right now a graphics card upgrade would make the most sense if you're a gamer. If you want to upgrade the CPU wait until core i5, as you might find it is exactly what you want. A graphics card upgrade would not break any budget and a decent one would still give you another year or two with that system.
I would agree with Emu here. The CPU in there at the moment is perfectly adequate, i've got an E2160 (yeah, not lightning fast by anyone's standards), but it's never been an issue with speed in games or applications.
If you upgraded the CPU, you could probably pop in a Q6600 which would be one of the best "budget" quads still on the market. Graphics you should seriously consider upgrading, prices for new cards are still tumbling and you could get an HD4870 for the same price as a low end quad core (£130 ish?).
What you need to bear in mind is that if you upgrade to an i7, you're likely looking at a motherboard upgrade as well - nay, you're definitely looking at a motherboard upgrade (i7 chips have more pins afaik). That will add a considerable increase of both cost and effort - if you need to upgrade the CPU, get a Core2Quad.
What i would say is consider your hard drive too. 250GB isn't all that much any more, what's more you can get a 640GB for well under £50 or even a TB for under £100 from most e-tailers.
But, most importantly - what is your budget?
Basically they would take my pc insides in a new case n i would put the upgrades in my case, i was thinkin about the i7/ quad update.
new build
new case with psu
new dvd
new floppy
unused new 250gb sata
used ATI 3870
used Asus P5B Deluxe
used 4x1gb Geil low latency ddr2
used E6600
my options
Q9550
2x2gb twinx xms2 ddr2
Asus P5Q pro turbo or Biostar TPower i45
or
i7 920
Gigabyte ex58-ud3r
OCZ 3gb pc3-12800 intel i7 triple kit