Spec advice / build

[EvilMunky]

Hi Folks,

Upgrade time. It's been a couple of years since my last proper upgrade and I need some help.

I have around £550/£600 to spend.

I already have case, power, hard drives, optical drives etc so I just need to get the following:

Motherboard
Processor
memory
graphics card

I am very interested in a 6 core AMD Phenom CPU and would be quite fond of a motherboard other than asus/abit. Not overly bothered about having rediculously fast ram, but I would like 6/8gb as I will be running 64bit Win 7

I will be playing heavy games on the system so a decent but not over the top graphics card would be needed, but I would rather be best placed having more cpu power as I do a lot of photo / video editing ./encoding etc.

Suggestions please folks

Cheers

[ehhhhhhh]

What about the following:

£239.58 Phenom II x6 1090T

£96.31 Asus M4A89GTD PRO

£110 4GB(2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 Dominator DDR3 PC312800(1600)

£229 1GB Asus HD 5850

I wouldn't buy 8GB DDR3 just now, because it's too expensive, but soon you will be able to upgrade it to 8gig on the cheap.

Also, if the prices go down, you will be able to buy an other hd5850 and CF it.. i think the current generation of amd and nvidia cards just don't worth the current price....I would buy a second hand 4890 or similar (maybe 5770 for the time being), instead of the rip-off new cards....

[Domestic_Ginger]

If you have DDR2 already then the hex cores will work on a Am2+ mobo.

[Ulti]

Might be better off getting a Phenom II X6 1055T too and just overclocking it instead to save some some money. (Instead of the 1090T)

[ehhhhhhh]

Might be better off getting a Phenom II X6 1055T too and just overclocking it instead to save some some money. (Instead of the 1090T)

indeed...I would even go for a cheaper quad and you might save enough money to buy an SSD for boot drive which would make more sense...

[Skulltrail]

For £603.29

Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 - £93.86 (I know you didn't really want Asus but it really narrows down options in terms of the budget
3x 2GB Hynix DDR3-1333MHz CAS9 1.5v £121.45 (I would personally prefer 4GB of 1600MHz CAS8 or 7)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T £159.78
2x 1GB MSI HD 5770 £230.25 - comfortably outperforms a 5850

[EvilMunky]

indeed...I would even go for a cheaper quad and you might save enough money to buy an SSD for boot drive which would make more sense...

I already have a raptor for the sys disk and boot times etc aren't my main concern - but point noted about the quad core.

[EvilMunky]

For £603.29

Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 - £93.86 (I know you didn't really want Asus but it really narrows down options in terms of the budget
3x 2GB Hynix DDR3-1333MHz CAS9 1.5v £121.45 (I would personally prefer 4GB of 1600MHz CAS8 or 7)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T £159.78
2x 1GB MSI HD 5770 £230.25 - comfortably outperforms a 5850

Interesting - looking into this at the moment.

[ehhhhhhh]

I already have a raptor for the sys disk and boot times etc aren't my main concern - but point noted about the quad core.

The main advantage of an SSDs is not just the shorter boot&load times, but the insanely fast access times. It provides much better performance if you start multitasking on a higher level.

I have 2 wd blacks in raid0, but when I start to do many things at once, like PS, video encoding, browsing, playback video or music, document editing, vmware, and macromedia...then I usually feel the very need for an SSD... ;-)

basically my point is that it doesn't matter if you have a 6 core CPU if the storage subsystem cannot keep up with it....but again it depends on your usage

[EvilMunky]

The main advantage of an SSDs is not just the shorter boot&load times, but the insanely fast access times. It provides much better performance if you start multitasking on a higher level.

I have 2 wd blacks in raid0, but when I start to do many things at once, like PS, video encoding, browsing, playback video or music, document editing, vmware, and macromedia...then I usually feel the very need for an SSD... ;-)

basically my point is that it doesn't matter if you have a 6 core CPU if the storage subsystem cannot keep up with it....but again it depends on your usage

I do see your point, however, at the moment there is a bigger need for cpu / main board type upgrade rather than disks. The raptor is plenty fast enough and easily replaceable with ssd's later on anyway.

Also, for stuff like vm's, file share, all that stuff, I tend to have it on server (dl380s etc) anyway.

THanks

[EvilMunky]

If you have DDR2 already then the hex cores will work on a Am2+ mobo.

I have :

2048 MB
DDR PC2-5300
2048 MB
DDR PC2-5300
1024 MB
DDR PC2-6400
1024 MB
DDR PC2-6400

[EvilMunky]

Argh all so tempting and confusing. I am now veering towards

Intel Corei7 920 Combo
LN33444 120mm Akasa Apache Black Ultra Silent Fan HDB bearing PWM fan *OEM Fan Only
LN25348 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3, DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600) Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 9-9-9-24, 1.65V
LN32364 Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Rev.2, Intel X58, S1366, SLi/Xfire PCI-E 2, DDR3 2200<, USB3 & SATA 6Gb/s
LN27163 Intel Corei7 920 D0 SLBEJ Bloomfield 45nm, 2.66 GHz, QPI 4.8GT/s, 8MB Cache, 20x Ratio, 130W, Retail
1GB XFX HD5770, PCI-E 2.0(x16), 4800MHz GDDR5, GPU 850MHz, Cores 800, 2x DL DVI-I/HDMI

comes to about £570