It's time for an upgrade, and to finally throw off the shackles of my outdated mobo

I've been putting this off for a long time now, but i don't think i can any longer. It's time for some PC upgrades. Sorry for yet another pc build thread.
PSU, HDDs and DVD drive are probably going to be fine to transfer over to the rebuild with the new parts, with this knowledge the wall'o'text between the red lines can be happily skipped.

v-------Not really essential to read, mainly background waffle-------v
My Current specs are (well the bits that need attention):

Poorly ventilated nasty no name case - Has to be upgraded no matter what, even if it was the only thing replaced it could probably be a big performace upgrade due to the lower temps.
Intel P4 3ghz (socket 478) - Still handles day to day operations fine
2ghz of assorted ram (DDR1) - Again, ok for most of the time
XFX 6600gt 128mb (AGP) - I don't play many gfx intense games so it's not had too many problems with the likes of Football Manager (obviously), CS:S and DoD:S, but it's really showing it's age (as well as the rest of the system's) when it struggles with details and fps for WoW.
Abit IC7 MoBo - Has a really annoying NB fan that sounds like it's on it's last legs, Terrible sound interference from mic when using programs like Ventrilo etc.. (googling showed a few reports of the same issue from other people with the same or similar boards, but never found a resolution) Have been wanting to ditch this noise maker for a while.

As you can see if i want to upgrade 1 component it general means i have to upgrade 1 or more other parts. I did consider replacing the mobo with something like this with a PCI-E slot so that i can get out of the AGP market, and maybe avoid having to spend out on a full upgrade for a little longer. I then noticed it was DDR2 anyway so would need to upgrade ram too. All this in mind if i'm upgrading mobo, ram and gfx card, i may aswell go the whole hog and upgrade the lot to a new cpu socket too.
^-------Not really essential to read, mainly background waffle-------^


An I7 system is just too expensive at the moment, so i'd rather aim for a cheaper, good bang for buck build around a 775 socket, with a budget of around £300 -£350. This will hopefully last me a few years, until eventually having to upgrade again to the next socket.

Operating system is currently 32bit WinXP.

Having read around here, so far i was thinking along these lines for the parts i need:
CPU: Intel E5200 £55-£60 - Nice and cheap, chance to try out a little overclocking, should last nicely and maybe upgrade to a quad core when I7 becomes more main stream and prices come down.
CPU Cooler: Xigmatek s1283 red scorpion £31 - Have heard nothing but good things for this, although the price seems to keep going up a little :( but i guess it's worth it.
RAM: Corsair 2x2gb 800mhz £40-£45 - Although i'm on 32bit XP at the moment and wont get full use of the 4gb, i'll most likely try out the Windows7 beta and hopefully stay with it once it gets released. Also not really looked around much at ram yet, as just grabbed this off scan as i was already on the site, feel free to point out there is better elsewhere or i should be looking at paying a little more for tighter timings etc...

Case: This is proving a really tricky choice as it's more about personal preference, rather than best performance, which all of the other parts are. So far i'm considering all the usual contenders, Antec 300, CM 590, CM 690, Lancool K7/K1, etc... aswell as the option of pushing the boat out and going for an Antec P182 or something full aluminium from Lian Li, maybe the new PC-60F or PC-7F. I do really like the mini P180 but not sure if i really want to force myself to have to look for mATX boards in the future. To be honest, which case to choose could be a whole thread of it's own.

GFX Card: I'm not quite sure here tbh, anything will be an improvement on what i already have tbh, be it the ati 2600 on play lately for £18 or something nicer like all the 9800gtx or 4850s that keep popping up on the bargain forums, i think this one may come down to the amount of money left in the budget after case and mobo are decided and then fnd the best bang for buck deal with the left over cash.

Motherboard: What's the current best performance per pound motherboard? (getting bored of this $ business) I did use to know this, when i last looked the P35 chipset was still relatively new, and the Abit IP35 dark raider was pretty much the budget £60-£70 range mobo to go for. Now that we're several chipsets on is there a new stand out budget board to go for? or is the best value board now one of the more expensive boards? if so, which would you go for?



Thanks for reading, sorry if it was a bit long. I'd love to hear your thoughts or suggestions. I'd say the place i probably need the most help would be picking the motherboard, as once i know which board to go for and how much it is going to set me back, it leaves me in a better position to easily decide which gfx card or case i can afford to go for.

Again thanks in advance for any replies.


Bres

Well if it was me I would make a few changes, heres what I would go for at £350

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Coole...Scan-Exclusive - Coolermaster Elite 330 (cheap case but good for the money on this budget I wouldnt be throwing money at a case like a P182 myself)
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Akasa...Intel-push-pin - Akasa 965 cooler (again cheap but very good for the price, prob not as good as the Xigmatec but less than £10 and will get that chip OCd a good way)
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-(...d-CAS-5-5-5-18 - Same RAM
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Intel...B-Cache-Retail - Same CPU
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...-SATA-RAID-ATX - Gigabyte P45 motherboard, has all the features you need and is the successor to the P35
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512MB...-DL-DVI-I-HDTV - ATI 4850 good graphics card which should see you for a while, plus you can Xfire it up on that mobo no problem if you feel the need in the future.

Total: £349.30

Hope thats of some help.

Hawker

I would get this motherboard for £55:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...-SATA-RAID-ATX

It is a good budget overclocking motherboard. Here is a review:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/575

It does work with the E5200 BTW.

Use the £30 saved towards an HD4870 512mb for £155:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s....html?ASU-4870

Here is what I would get:

Intel E5200 -£56 from Scan(Today Only)

http://www.scan.co.uk/TodayOnly/Index.aspx

Akasa AK965 - £10 from Scan

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Akasa...Intel-push-pin

4gb Corsair RAM - £42 from Scan(Today Only)

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...-SATA-RAID-ATX

Gigabyte EP31 motherboard -£55 from Scan

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Gigab...-SATA-RAID-ATX

Coolermaster Elite 330:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Coole...Scan-Exclusive

HD4870 512mb - £155 from Novatech(free postage)

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s....html?ASU-4870

The total comes to just under £350. You should be able to get your E5200 upto 3ghz+ and the HD4870 is also quite powerful too!! :)

Remember as a Hexus member you are eligible for free postage from Scan. Also check Today Only on the Scan website for special deals too!! :

I prefer the antec Zen case to the elite. Plus if i was to get the elite i wouldnt get the 330, i would get the 335 its much nicer looking.

If your not going to be big into games then the 4850 will be wasted energy and money. Get a 4670 or a cheaper 9600GT and thensomething like that then put the money saved into a better CPU, that wil benefit you more IMO.

Unless im being blind... arnt you guys missing power supply?

We are indeed missing a PSU, but he didnt say he needed one so I presume hes using his old one. Im not a fan of the Zen, used it once and it feels plasticy and cheap compared to the 330, just depends what your preferences are I guess.

Hawker

See i am using an elite for my server box, and i think that feels quite cheap and tacky + vibration transfer is aawwweeeeeful!

The other option is the NSK4000 but its a bit more expensive.

In his signature he has a Corsair HX520W. At £155 a HD4870 is a better bet than a HD4850 at £120 to £130.

He has mentioned WoW, CS:S and DoD:S which arnt particularly intensive so hes not a big gamer. If he was im sure he would have upgraded much much sooner :p
Unless he states that he wishes to try out new games at insane settings then it seems wrong to spend 3 x the budget of the CPU on a GPU. A 4830 @ £~100 and a C2D E7*** @ £~100 would be better imo

http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...Picture2-1.png

Without looking at today only...
With free postage thats £345 but i would maybe even go so far as to get the 4670 which is still a pretty capable card and get an E8*** series CPU maybe even a Q6600.

Yep PSU fine :)

However keep looking at his specs CAT, 19" + 17" screen
Games played = Football Manager (obviously), CS:S, DoD:S and wow

Anything more than a 4830 or 9800gt is going to be overkill on the current set up. On 1280x1024 my 9800gtx could hardly be described as underload when playing many games.
a 9600gt or 4670 should be ok with out all the graphic whissles and bells shoved up to max.

Other options are look for 2nd hand 8800gt (same card as the 9800gt) or 3870, even a 8800gts 512mb or 8800gtx if you can find it cheap. (ie less than the £90 approx that a 4830 or 9800gt would cost)

Other option is go AMD, esp good for mATX
AMD x2 7750black edition
780G motherboard
should come to around £120-130
RAM + GPU the same £45 + £90
Case p10 mini £85 :( nice but pricey, for the same price a Silverstone SUGO may be better (or check the for sale section ;) )

I've got an E5200 myself with 2GB of Corsair memory, so I suppose I could share my experience. What I'd say is that neither has been able to bother me in the things I do, which include video and image editing. Maybe they could be faster, but I could care less. Going to 4GB isn't a bad idea either, given how dirt cheap memory is these days.

I'd also add my voice to the people advising a HD 4830/50 card. Those are by far the best value cards available right now. One of them will probably take care of your moderate needs until the next time for a systemic upgrade, and you can ask for little more than that.

Cheers guys, great food for thought, especially after having just seen the hexus review of the akasa cooler, and at just £10, it's well worth it to start out with and then just replace later on down the line if the need arises. I think we've found the definite cooler choice

Glad to see a general approval of the ram and cpu choice so far.

So going on todays Scan prices CPU, RAM and Cooler come to £108.87 with Case, Motherboard and Gfx card left to decide on.

Looking at Hawker and Cats list and total prices it does leave me with a question though, have you both managed to come to nearly exactly £350 but pure coincidence or you let the budget influence your choice of components to make it come in under the £350?

Having read back what i typed about the budget i suspect it's the latter, in which case i should apologise. What i meant was that £300-£350 is my ideal budget area to aim for. However if it's a choice between a good £75 item that brings me in on budget, or a well known market leading part with highly sought after features that the £75 item doesn't have, yet happens to sit in the £110 price bracket. As long as these extra features are worth the extra £35 i'd be more than happy to spend over my ideal budget.

It was with this in mind, that i had always seen myself spending around £50-£60+ on a new case anyway. As nice the 330 is and great value for the money, having lived/struggled with my current dog of a case for so long, i can see the benefit in spending an extra £30 for a few extra bells and whistles like, removable front bezels, washable air filters, easier cable management, improved ventilation, removable/easier access HDD cages, and noise and vibration reducing measures.

I can see you're points about the 330, they are extremely nice and feature rich for their price, which is exactly what i've asked you guys to suggest for the other parts but it doesn't quite fit when it comes to cases (no pun intended). Although it can probably be said that some of the features on the £60 cases aren't really worth the extra £30, from my stand point they are more than worth it as they are mostly the features i wish my current case had had over the years. i.e. the rotated HDD cage on the CM 690, Lancools and newer Lian Li's, with the amount of times over the years that i've had to swap in and out HDDs while avoiding cables and my gfx card etc.. things would have been so much easier had i had the rotated HDD cage.

The other thing aswell is that when i come to having to upgrade again i'm much more likely to be able to re-use the case and keep all the benefits i like from it for the next build, so i'm happy to splurge a little more on the case. I should have explained a little better initially about why i had been looking at the slightly more expensive cases, and as choosing a case is a much more personal preference thing, it might make it easier to ignore the case from now and just think of it as a £60 item that needs to come out of the budget and i'll worry about deciding on it later.



So with that in mind the CPU, RAM, Cooler and Case can be looked at as coming to £168.87

Leaving around £200 left to sort out the motherboard and gfx card

Thanks for the mobo suggestions so far and review links, really helps to give me an idea of where to look and also gives a point of reference to compare any other options to.


@ Biscuit, I'll be keeping my current HX520 for the new build

You also bring up a very good point about with the gfx card. The games i play atm really have no need for any overly powerful gfx card, but that's not to say my gaming habits wont change in the future (if i ever get the WoW noose off my neck that is). The ati 48xx series cards the other guys suggested, although are massively overpowered for my current needs, they are also some of the best bang for buck/value for money cards around atm, and would definitely leave me in better stead for future games if i did decide to give them a try.

All that said though, if i had say £180 left to spend, i'd personally much rather go the route of concentrating on the mobo first. spending for example £90 on a very nice mobo and only £90 on a slightly older still prefectly adequate gfx card, instead of going £130 on a much nicer gfx card and then only £50 on an OK mobo. Obviously the choice there comes down to whether the mobo is worth paying the extra for, and if it is the gfx card loses out.

Also as we all know gfx cards prices tend to drop alot more often with new gpu's coming out all the time, so making sure the mobo gets more thought would probably work out better value for money.





Sorry for the rather late reply, have had my nephew and nieces around all day so it's taken me ages to finish writing this reply.

Again thanks for all the comments and suggestions so far, very much appreciated.

Bres


:Edit:

Oh dear, i really was writing that a long time, had a lot of replies between the time i started writing it and hitting submit, i'll get reading them :)
Again sorry for the long post, didnt realise i'd typed that much.

Just read through the rest of your replies, and it seems a lot of you are of the same mind as me, as nice as it would be to go for the nicer newer gfx cards, my money would go further if i looked to put it into other areas first. i'm glad a few of you guys see it in the same light as me.


I'll answer some of the replies you guys gave while i was writing my last post, i wont use quotes, my posts have been long enough already.


@ Biscuit (post #8)
You're quite right by the way, i'm not someone who really goes for constant upgrading to the latest tech, i'd rather buy something of relative good quality (not the latest and best) and keep using it, until it starts to under perform before replacing it.

I'd not really thought much about going for a better chip than the e5200, it just seemed to fit into the price range well and is well know as being a very nice budget chip, there is almost £50 difference between the price of the e5200 and the e7400, is it really worth it? i assume toms hardware still do their cpu benchmark tables, i'll have a look in a minute.

With the price of the e7400 it does leave me looking at the mobo just wondering if maybe it's been picked to help fit the budget (having actually gone to the scan site yet to look at it's specs), if so then you may also have posted like Hawker and Cat thinking that the £300-£350 was a fixed upper limit and maybe and extra £10-£15 could mean a much nice mobo.

As for going q6600 thinking, i was thinking of this build as being made so that when the quads come down in price over time to a point when one can be picked up cheaply, i was going to pick 1 up to replace the e5200 i had planned to help any video editing perfomance, but i wasn't overly fussed about not having the quad from the start as the e5200 would have still been a big improvement over what i'm used to from a single core P4 northwood already anyway. But it is an idea to consider.

@ Pob255 (post #9)
Spot on, pretty much any PCI-E card from recent time will be fine for me for the time being. Better off deciding on the best suited options for the other 5 parts and then seeing how much is left over to spend on the best gfx card i can get for the money.

@ Pob225 (post #10)
I'll be honest i've never really considered an AMD cpu, not sure why, wouldn't say i'm a specific Intel fanboy, just always had intel cpus and when i first did some reading into current good budget chips the e5200 was the one that kept popping up. It may also be subconscious in that any friends AMD systems have always been slow dogs of systems.
As for mATX, as nice as a mATX or SFF cases are, if i'm looking at getting this new case to use in future builds i think i ought to not limit myself to mATX mobos.

@ Transylvanic (post #11)
Thanks, that's nice to know, and yes that's exactly what i was thinking when i was looking at the current RAM prices, couldn't see any reason not to be looking at 4gb, especially when i think back to when i built my current system and RAM prices were silly and i had to pay about £140 for the 2x512mb sticks i currently have.


thanks again.

For under £100 an E5200 is more than enough as it can be overclocked quite easily to 3ghz with the motherboard I specced. Unless you need to spend more money for certain features why spend £80 to £100 on a motherboard when a £50 to £60 will do??

Also are you also going to be upgrading the processor that much as socket 775 is being replaced in the next 12 months anyway by socket 1156??

It seems a lot of people on forums knock budget boards without even having tried some themselves!!

I have used a number of budget orientated motherboards in the past few years and I have never had any problems ever. The P35 based motherboard in my backup computer when new was less than £60 and was one of the cheapest P35 based motherboards ever made. I can get my E4300 to 3ghz+ easily and with no stability problems(Intel Burn Test,Orthos,OCCT and 3DMark06 stable). It has been at 3ghz for nearly two years. I did not see the point of clocking it any higher BTW.

If you are going to spend more on a processor a AMD X3 710(around £100) or 720(around £120) will be the next step up from a E5200.

Many games are in fact more GPU limited than CPU limited in many cases. If anything the games which are more CPU limited are those which take advantage of more than 2 cores. The majority of games so far don't.

I have to agree with cat-the fifth, there is nothing wrong with a decent budget motherboard, it just depends whats important in the budget. As he said these days they still OC well, I used a P31 chipset board and clocked a Q6600 to 3Ghz no problem and an E2200 to 3Ghz without even bumping the vcore. the problem with th budget chipsets is they lack features, but if you dont need things like RAID, Xfire, more than 4Gb RAM then its no problem. If your focus is just gaming speed I would say a budget motherboard and better GPU is a fair choice, but if your after features then a better mobo is more appropriate.

Hawker

well it sounds to me that this build is going to be a bit of a temp build until *decent* quads come down in price. Baring in mind S775 is about to be removed from production, i would make sure you get the case you want then just build up a budget PC around that. For this reason you are probably better with the E5200.

I would tend to disagree with goin as cheap as CAT is suggesting for the motherboard because it will be extremely limited all round and it sounds like you want to do a bit of fiddling which would result in some serious frustration. I would maybe even recommend spending a couple quid more than the one i suggested and getting something from Asus or Biostar.

This is a build with a much nicer case
http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...Picture3-4.png
The RC 690 is very popular and a lot of people have had a lot of success using it :)

well it sounds to me that this build is going to be a bit of a temp build until *decent* quads come down in price. Baring in mind S775 is about to be removed from production, i would make sure you get the case you want then just build up a budget PC around that. For this reason you are probably better with the E5200.

I would tend to disagree with goin as cheap as CAT is suggesting for the motherboard because it will be extremely limited all round and it sounds like you want to do a bit of fiddling which would result in some serious frustration. I would maybe even recommend spending a couple quid more than the one i suggested and getting something from Asus or Biostar.

This is a build with a much nicer case
http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...Picture3-4.png
The RC 690 is very popular and a lot of people have had a lot of success using it :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Biscuit

I would tend to disagree with goin as cheap as CAT is suggesting for the motherboard because it will be extremely limited all round and it sounds like you want to do a bit of fiddling which would result in some serious frustration. I would maybe even recommend spending a couple quid more than the one i suggested and getting something from Asus or Biostar.

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??????????? Have you even read the reviews for this motherboard?? Some Hexus members have it and it is perfectly fine.

This is the conclusion from one review:

"Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L is a mainstream motherboard targeted to average users that want a platform with good features, outstanding overclocking capability, high performance but doesn’t want to give an arm to buy a high-end product. In our opinion this motherboard brings an excellent cost/benefit ratio for the average user that is building an Intel-based PC.

It has several advantages over entry-level products such as four memory sockets (instead of just two), Gigabit Ethernet, very high overclocking capability, on-board digital audio outputs and more.

The only negative point from this motherboard is the absence of a RAID controller and eSATA ports but frankly we wouldn’t expect that from a motherboard that costs far less than a high-end model."

You can lock the PCI-E frequency too. With a E5200 with its 12.5x multiplier you will only need to raise the FSB from 800mhz (12.5X200) to 960mhz(12.5x240) to get to 3ghz. In the review they could raise the FSB to 1500mhz with no problems.

Here is a review of the similiar GA-P31-DS3L:

http://www.virtual-hideout.net/revie...L/index6.shtml

Here is their conclusion:

"For me to talk about what this board is, first I must talk about what it’s not. It’s not your high end enthusiast level bragging rights board. However, the board is much less expensive and is based on older technology with its ICH7 Southbridge. Despite the technology limitations, this board features near identical performance to the higher end P35 boards I have tested. All at a price point that won’t make your significant other beat you with the stupid stick for feeding your computer habit.

The BIOS offers up a significantly large amount of BIOS tweaking options, on par with its more expensive Gigabyte counter parts. The use of Solid caps is also a nice touch, adding to longevity of this board."

In short, I have never had such a solid board come across my test bench at this price point. This board is just screaming to be paired with a budget CPU and overclocked to get premium performance at a fraction of the cost. I highly recommend this board to any builder on a budget, that is not looking to sacrifice BIOS configuration options, or board quality.

Considering that it also has all solid capacitors it is brilliant value for money. The difference between the GA-EP31-DS3L and the GA-P31-DS3L is that has the former has "Dynamic Energy Saver(DES) technology" which is meant to cut power consumption(more marketing hype probably).

Here is another review:

http://www.overclockersclub.com/revi...p31ds3l/22.htm

Here is their conclusion:

"The GA-P31-DS3L acts like both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As a budget desktop offering, it is the mild mannered Dr. Jekyll. Start playing in the M.I.T. section of the BIOS and Mr. Hyde comes out to play. That can be taken one of two ways, very good or very bad. In this case, it is very good. I was pleasantly surprised to see a budget offering overclocking like some of the better known hardware on the market. I was able to adjust the front side bus up to 465MHz with the default multiplier on the E6750 and stopped at 425x8 with my Q6600 used in this review. In no way was I expecting the overclocking results that I pulled from this board. It was not the best in every benchmarking category, but it was at least comparable to its big brothers' performance when it was not exceeding their results. The two things that I really did not like were the hidden performance options in the BIOS, and the voltage settings. It really is more of a nuisance to find the performance settings without doing the research in the manual. Once found, they do offer enough flexibility to get the job done. If you don't know what the beginning voltages are for the chipset and memory, it makes it difficult to make sane adjustments to the voltages. If you are looking for a motherboard that is inexpensive yet has excellent overclocking potential, you may just want to check out the Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L. It has the neccesary tools to function as both the little desktop that could, as well as performing like a thoroughbred purpose-built overclocking board if it needs to."

Microdirect have the GA-P31-DS3L for under £50:

http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Pr...ource=googleps

I'm roughly in the same position but i'm leaning more towards the p4* chipset as it's just a bit more modern and i've read bad things about dual sided memory not working in the p31

Quote:

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Originally Posted by handscombmp

I'm roughly in the same position but i'm leaning more towards the p4* chipset as it's just a bit more modern and i've read bad things about dual sided memory not working in the p31

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The P31 chipset is limited to two sticks of dual sided RAM, so if you want 4GB you have to go 2x2GB not 4x1Gb even if the mobo has 4 memory slots, there are no problems so long as you do that.

Hawker

4gb is going to be more than enough for gaming for the next two years or so. Most people use a 32bit OS anyway and it can only address 4gb RAM in total including the graphics card.
Considering that it is usually cheaper to get 2x2gb instead of 4x1gb it is not really a limitation IMHO.

im allowed to disagree with u u know... I dont really care what reviews say its quite an old board and the features it has will most likely be there and with quite a few others in the P43.