Need Recommendations

[Clarky]

Got £150 to £200 to spend on upgrading my old computer. Its runnning a P4 3.2ghz and 1gb of RAM. Could do with some pointers of some decent bits to buy.

[cougarslam]

ddr or ddr2?
graphics card?

[Clarky]

DDR2 2x512mb

Graphics Card is a Nvidia GeForce 7600GT.

P4 is a Prescott with a skt 775 LGA

[staffsMike]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=126737
Gets you to 2gb of ram.. you might want lower speed ram, I don't know..but it will only be cheaper.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/produ...oductID=669446
If you go to the today only part on scan you'll see this for £172

and you get free delivery from scan.

Should be a good imporvement for gaming as long as you have PCIe and not AGP

Alternatively you could get

2gb of PC5400 RAM, an Abit IP-35 (or IP-35E) and a core 2 duo E4400 for around £200

[cougarslam]

core 2 duo may be a good route to take your mobo may support it would have to check online but it probably does not.

is the 7600gt pci-e?

[Clarky]

yeah it's PCI-e

Yeah I'm thinking new motherboard and CPU maybe some more ram.

If i'm not overclocking whats the least amount i can spend on a mobo without it being 'dogger'.

[staffsMike]

get the IP-35E for about £65
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=605521

great board and very cheap

decent ram and still very cheap
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=291363

cpu with the change
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=632057

[Saracen]

It depends what you do with the machine, and where any bottlenecks lie. It also depends on whether you're after performance improvements, or feature enhancements.

For instance, depending on what you're doing, more memory might help. It does with RAM hungry apps like Photoshop.

If you're a gamer, then updating the video board might give the greatest enhancement.

Or, a new soundcard might be a good bet, especially is using onboard sound.

Or, how about hard drives? If you have just one, then adding a second one and splitting what you put where (in particular, keeping the swapfile on a fast drive, maybe a Raptor, can be significant).

Or .... a new mouse/KB. Or a TV tuner. Or .... well, it goes on and on, depending on exactly what you've currently got, what you want to do with the machine and where any current weaknesses lie.

[Agent]

Hiya
I know the .smartshoppers can be a bit scary for new users, so have a quick peek at this post for the best place to post
Not only does it help keep things in the right place, but more importantly, you'll get the best answers in the correct forum

Cheers buddy!

[roddines]

get the IP-35E for about £65
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=605521

great board and very cheap

decent ram and still very cheap
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=291363

cpu with the change
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=632057

That is a great recommendation but for a four pounds more I would probably go with this mobo:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=657885

It has an extra PCIe slot, RAID support, plus very nice onboard VGA for a second/third monitor (or primary VGA when you want to retire it to some other job later in its life) and can take faster 1066Mhz memory if you decide to upgrade to that.

Both can support Core 2 Quad, 45nm chips and 1333FSB which is good for a future processor upgrade when you can afford it. They also have slightly cheaper uATX with and without RAID versions of these if you want something smaller to fit in a new case.

And if maybe you'd like to eventually get a Core 2 Quad core processor (currently £175 ish for the Q6600) you could put a slightly slower dual core cpu (this is essentially a Core 2 Duo with a smaller half sized cache like the Celeron's did with the P4 range) in for the shorter term and save £34+ pounds toward a better processor later.

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...uct_uid=132064 (ebuyer have free 5 day delivery option on over £49.99 orders too)
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=632059 Scan are £3.50 more on this one!

or you could buy some nicer 800Mhz DDR2 RAM with the saved money:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=402849

[staffsMike]

It has nice features but so many people seem to have problems with them i'd personally stick with abit..but each to their own

[Pob255]

How many people use the standard (non-graphics card) pci-e slots?
And are you going to use 8 sata slots on a low cost set up?

[Clarky]

I won't be doing any heavy gaming on this PC so I'm geussing the the graphics card is sufficient for my needs. The only gaming that might occur is Football Manager if I get stuck at home for to long.

I like the colour on the gigabyte board but am I better buying a 'better' branded motherboard like abit?

Whats the performance boost like with the higher clocked RAM? Does it justify spending and extra £20?

CPU will have to a C2D i think to see any real benefit to the power?

[roddines]

The E2140 (2 x 1.6Ghz), E2160 (2 x 1.8Ghz) & E2180 (2 x 2.0Ghz) range are actually Core 2 Duo's (C2D as you abbreviated it) just with a half size cache and that is the ONLY difference technically. They have just been re-branded as Pentiums in an attempt to try not to undermine or erode the brand value proposition of the existing C2D range but to more effectively compete with AMD's lower price range (which up until these came out had a niche market).

However overclocking people like Custom PC mag have them as the best value for money as they will easily overclock to almost double the performance with a decent Heatsink Fan. In their Sept 2007 edition (page 51) they got an E2140-2 x 1.6Ghz native up to a stable 3.0Ghz with a perfromance spec to match. The performance was up from 1.12 to 1.99 times their standard Pentium D 820 (that is a 2 x 2.8Ghz netburst architecture dual core Pentium 4) base line of 1.

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/11901...-50/page2.html

If you extend your price versus performance thoughts from RAM on to the CPU then the significantly cheaper E2180 is much better £/performance than the E4500 at this time.

While the higher speed 800Mhz RAM will provide around 5-20% performance gain over 667Mhz (not exactly noticable) in a non-overclocked system (depending on task at hand). Overclocking is where the 800Mhz RAM is really useful. Apparently you can set the ram to 533 or 667 frequencies and then overclock the FSB to increase overall system performance. Not that I have done this myself with these components. Maybe someone else who has can comment?

My personal experience with Giga-Byte Motherboards (which is a long standing Taiwanese brand in business just as long as Abit if not longer, about 20 years each) has been brilliant. Many of their new 'D' range motherboards (the D=durable) have some really nice high quality components and a high quality 6 phase power supply, with great overclocking features too. I think your getting a nicer grade of product versus the economy version of an Abit motherboard for similar prices. I currenly have two Pentium Socket 478 Giga-Byte motherboards nearing the end of their useful life that having been running without issue for 3.5 and 5 years 24x7 in an un-airconditioned environment (plus many at client sites). I have used some of these new boards for clients and they are great. Here is the link to the motherboard web site I omitted from original post.

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/...ProductID=2535

While the 8 x SATA ports on this board may seem excessive all the new optical drives are coming out in SATA rather than IDE so they are starting to chew up these ports too. And more is almost always better than less wether you use them today or not.

All up this board is better all round than the ABit one recommended earlier but if you want to go back down to its specification level then consider theses options.

To compare apples with apples this motherboard from Gigabyte (still slightly better spec with 1066Mhz RAM support) is the most similar one to the Abit one and £6 cheaper

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=657886

And if you want a still cheaper one with similar specs (only limited to 4GB ram) that will do the same job this will save you £15 to £18

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=657881 <- They are same but this first one has "D" for more durable parts for only 50p more
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=657880


I am an IT consultant and system builder with 20 years experience and I use them all Giga-Byte, Asus, Abit, Intel, ECS and MSI for myself and clients depending on budgets, current pricing, features and availability. I have at least 8 or more pcs at any one time in house and 2 servers all running 24x7 (and a large power bill to suit). A lot of home/hobby/gamer users develop brand loyalty based on equivocal reasoning and you need to consult many people with a wider experience to get valid feeling for the market place for a particular product. It is very difficult to say a brands whole range is bad, maybe in the car market where some suppliers are highly supported by domestic markets, but not when it comes to motherboards in the PC industry.

Basically unless people can give you consistent repetitive negative experiences with a particular board model then you can pretty much bet it is OK. It is good practice to search the web for the model and the word "problem" and take a look for yourself before you buy. The biggest problem here is that the products change so fast it is hard NOT to be on the "bleeding edge" as they say. Sometimes to play it safe it pays to buy slightly older model motherboards where experience can be drawn upon to ensure your not going to bleed.

While ALL brands do have occasional troublesome products and they do tend over time to fit into or specialise in specific niches (like DFI the makers of the LANparty boards, ECS for budget concious buyers, Tyan and Supermicro for workstation and server) the main stream ones all mentioned above are all good but they have tendencies toward niches (like ASUS high quality, high end, high cost). FoxConn (high spec for a good price) and ASRock (special boards with dual AGP&PCIe Video) are newer rising stars too.

I am not attempting to undermine any other comments and recommendations here, but just open up options for people so they can make a more informed choice.

[staffsMike]

I must admit my poor gigabyte experiences were a good few years ago now and I havn't given them another chance since, though I have been tempted at times.

The reason I suggest abit at the moment is they are fantastically priced for their spec and quality but more than that they have fantastic customer service only made better by this

http://forums.hexus.net/forumdisplay.php?f=171

which makes small problems you may have so easy to get sorted..you don't have to wait for days for email responses that havn't considered what you wrote in the first place or pay out for premium rate phone calls and you get fantastic help there. I'm not suggesting gigabyte have that kind of CS but I dont think it matches Abit and certainly didn't used to.

[roddines]

Ahh I see a customer support forum that is useful! Nice!