Looking to Upgrade - Help Required

[Oakey]

It's been five years since I last upgraded my PC and in that time I haven't kept track of what's what these days.

Looking for a new mobo and CPU, preferably intel, budget of around £300. Recommendations please.

[CooperXS]

With a 5 year old rig you probably would need set of new memory and a GPU ?
What's yr current PC ?

[Oakey]

Current setup is AMD 64 4600+, 3GB RAM, Nvidia 7800GTX.

I didn't mention memory as it's not something that usually causes me issues.

The variety of motherboards, chipsets, sockets, etc gives me a headache.

I'm considering these:

ASUS P8P67 Pro Intel P67 (REV B3) Socket 1155 DDR3 PCI-Express Motherboard &

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor

or

Intel Core i5-2400 3.10GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor

I understand the former has better overclocking capabilities.

For RAM, 4Gb of branded DDR? (Corsair, etc)

[Blackmage]

You going to use SLI? if not I would get the ASUS P8P67 and save some cash!

[Benihana]

The intel 2500K will overclock, the other wont, any with the 'K' suffix are overclockable.

[Oakey]

You going to use SLI? if not I would get the ASUS P8P67 and save some cash!

Is that the only difference between the P8P67 and P8P67 Pro?

[Blackmage]

Dual lan, SLI are some of the things the P8P67 is missing.

[Oakey]

The SLI, is this the likes of 'Crossfire', etc that I keep reading of? Where you can use an Nvidia and Ati card together? How does that work?

[Tattysnuc]

You can't effectively use AMD and NVidia together. They do work on a Lucid enabled motherboard, but they are very limited.

Invariably, you;'re better buying the fastest single card you can afford, as SLI/Crossfire requires optimised drivers to be written.

Regarding the Sandybridge Intel chips, the K series chip (2500K and 2600K) are the ONLY one that is overclockable to any note. You can ONLY overclock the BCLK and multi on Sandybridge, and on non K models, the multi is locked.

The GPU is inbuilt, as is the memory controller, so overclocking the BCLK is limited to about 7-10 mhz extra ONLY. Therefore, if you want to overclock, then you have to buy an unlocked CPU. don;t worry because they really are easy to overclock. I'm under water, but under air you can easily get to 4.5Ghz on a 2500K. See the Hardware section - I posted a link to the P8P67 board.

The difference between the models is negigible. IIRC the Pro has SLI, and the Deluxe has 16 phase power as opposed to 12. See: http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1973

The basic model REALLY is more than adequate.

I'd also advise, don't bother with more than 4gb of Ram as you most likely wont use it. It's just plain expense for the sake of expense. I've 8 Gb and folding on this rig 24/7 only uses 2Gb of it. I have to start using several virtual machines to start hitting the ram. If you already have some 1.65v DDR3 ram, you can re-use that.

I really cannot recommend a Sandybridge mobo enough. I've gone for the 2600K and am currently hardly pushing it hard and it is running at 4.9Ghz. I've the Pro edition of the board and I normally buy the ROG branded ones, but you really don;t need to.

I've replaced a 6Gb, 12 Core i7 970 @ 4.3Ghz with this board/cpu combo, and I won;t look back.

With a similar system overclocked, I was second last time I checked the fastest computers here in Hexus...

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...astest-pc.html