If you had £350 for CPU MOBO & RAM upgrade which route would you go?

[Nobull]

Thinking of overhauling my current rig E6600, Asus P5B and 2 GB DDR2 in the near future but dunno what route to take.

I though initially I might be able to go down the i7 860 route but increased prices means this would be out my budget now. Would consider increasing it a bit if it meant lots more performance

Other options then seem to me to be either and Phenom II 955 n suitable mobo (any recommendations?)

OR

I core i5 750 and suitable mobo (any recommendations?)

PLUS

4GB DDR3...not sure which speed to go for but I'm thinking 1333 or 1600...again any suggestions would be good

Havn't been keeping as close an eye on hardware as I usually would these last 6 months or so as I've got a new job.

I mostly use it for gaming at 1900x1200 so I know I won't see much performance increase on that front. I do some light video encoding, plenty multi tasking, occassional ripping of DVDs etc.

Should I even be looking to upgrade at all or would the money be better spend on a 5870 seeing as my main use is gaming other than simple tasks? Reason I want to overhaul the ram/cpu/mobo is that they're 3 years old where as my 4870 is only about 16 months old...

Any input greatly appreciated

Cheers

[scaryjim]

Why not just do an incremental upgrade to your existing rig, which is still pretty well specced?

You should add another 2GB of RAM (or - assuming you have 2 x 1GB at the minute, swap that out for 2 x 2GB). While you might see some improvement from getting a quad core (Q6600s seem to go for about £100 on ebay) you could also just overclock your E6600 - this would probably make more difference in games, which still tend to be quite lightly threaded and gain more from clock speed than cores! Certainly @ 1920 x 1200 you're unlikely to be seeing CPU bottlenecks unless you play any very CPU intensive games (I believe the Total War series are the archetypal CPU-killing games ).

That should see you right for another 9 - 12 months then you could consider a full upgrade. Plus by then NVidia might have solved their Fermi manufacturing problems and released some competitive cards

[Nobull]

Interesting advice. Would be loathed to pay for old tech now tho, no way I'm getting a Q6600 at this stage plus I don't think my P5B would take it anyway?

Might think of oc'ing my E6600, I should be savvy enough 2 do it, i've built about 8 machines now!

Only thing that puts me off that is it might affect re-sale value, after all I was hoping to sell my current cpu/mobo/ram combo for ~£60-70 to fund this upgrade...

Cheers for the input Scaryjim

Any more for any more?

[scaryjim]

... no way I'm getting a Q6600 at this stage plus I don't think my P5B would take it anyway?

Fair enough - although according to the ASUS website your P5B will support all Q6x00 quad cores, and has beta support for all 45nm quad cores too, right up to the Q9650!

[Nobull]

Thats pretty surprising! Thanks for letting me know. Guess I just need a bios update or something. I would get a Q9XXX if i cud get one cheap somewhere, would really save my cost of upgrade!

Another thing to bear in mind!

Cheers

[scaryjim]

Full support list with relevant BIOS version required is here: http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID...specifications

p.s. a quick squiz at ebay suggests Q9300 / Q9400 can be had for around £120...

[Dayvo]

If I had £350 I would go for the i5, you can get a comparable AMD set up for a bit less but I think the extra performance is worth the price increase. The i5 is really good value.

4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Classic
Intel Core i5 750
Asus P7P55D LE

Total: £356.83

Also you can find the i5 for about £136 delivered on eBay if you look hard enough.

If you had your heart set on the i7 you can get the oem version for £200, but it's only worth it if you're not planning to overclock and/or you really think you're going to take advantage of hyperthreading.

[Nobull]

Cheers for the input...

~£90 seems so steep for 4GB of RAM though, not any better prices out there? Cheapest I've really seen is £80 for decent branded 4GB DDR3 set...

Hopefully the prices of RAM may settle down to more sensible levels again in the near future.

[Dayvo]

Yea, RAM prices are discouraging me from upgrading as well. I'm still kicking myself for not buying 4GB when it was £10 per 1GB for DDR2

If you're not desperate to upgrade you could always wait for the Sandy Bridge micro architecture coming Q1 2011, should be a big leap in performance also RAM prices should have settled down by then.

[Pob255]

I'd sort of go with scaryjim's advice.

To start with another2x1gb of ram, don't bother with 2x2gb as 1gb sticks are still better value you can also pice them up 2nd hand fairly cheaply.

Overclocking the e6600 would also be a good move, no need to go extream get it up to 3ghz and it shouldn't have a major impact of resale.
Getting a e6600 up to 3ghz is pretty easy and generally shouldn't involve any extra voltage increases.
The core2 cpu's are fairly hard to damage unless you're pushing it very hard or feed it stupidly high voltages.

Personally I'd not consider the Asus P7P55D LE it's a rather pants p55 board.
One of the major advantages of the p55 is the ability to have sli or crossfire, where as that board only supports crossfire and the 2nd slot is electrical x4 (ie it's a x16 pic-e in size but is actually only a pci-e x4 slot)

I'd look at the Asus P7P55D Pro instead http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...rboard-LGA1156 or Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4 http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...SATAIIRAID-ATX or MSI P55-GD65 http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/MSI-P...rboard-LGA1156

All of these motherboards aso include some for of automated overclocking. granted you'll get better results Overclocking manually, however for a simple hassle free and still reasonable overclock these automated systenms work well (generally will OC a i5 750 to around 3.2ghz)

[liquidmetal]

Definately try overclocking first. Put £20 into a decent cooler and see how far that takes you. If it clocks well it would proably put resell value up from my experience xD

[Nobull]

Thanks for all the input guys, lots to consider.

My current cooler is an arctic 7 pro...probably sufficient to get me a moderate overclock, no?