Best bang for buck upgrade to current rig?

[Ah forget it]

Hey Folks, appreciate your help with a conundrum. I can't afford a new rig but I have got a couple of hundred of pounds to tweak my existing set up.

I primarily play games and have noticed a little slow down recently as it's now 4 years old. I have just been given a SSD drive to replace my current raptor HD which should help but am wondering whether I should duplicate my existing GFX card and go crossfire, buy a new high end card altogether or just save the money until next year and get a whole new rig. My current set up is ;

, Coolermaster 460W Dual 12V Rail Power Supply, INTEL i7 CORE 2 QUAD 920 (2.66GHZ, 8MB L2 CACHE, 1066MHZ FSB) , CPU IS RETAIL, GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R MOTHERBOARD, 3 x CORSAIR 2GB PC12800 DDR3 1600MHZ RAM , WESTERN DIGITAL 750GB S-ATA 7200RPM XFX ATI RADEON HD 4890 1GB PCI-E GRAPHICS CARD

Any thoughts brickbats or suggestions gratefully appreciated !

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would get a better graphics card and a new PSU.

[Pob255]

I would get a better graphics card and a new PSU.

What he said
The coolermaster elite power psu's are ok for a basic system, problem is this is full of lies, it's actually a 430w psu but at 430w the ripple is going out of ATX spec so it can only really do about 400w safely

You really want to replace that with a decent 450-550w unit and a 7850, gtx660 or 7870 (list in performance order)
eg
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/550w-...-quiet-fan-atx
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-m...0-dport-dl-dvi
or
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-x...cores-plusfree

[Ah forget it]

Thanks chaps, will the fact my board is PCI-E 2 rather than 3 bottleneck the new GFX card, assuming of course it is backwardly compatible?

[Shirty]

If you go for a single card solution (depending on your budget I'm sure you'll get some recommendations) you won't be able to saturate PCIe 2.0, so no worries there.

Stick a 670 in there for example, and you'll suddenly be back up to speed for gaming purposes. Just be aware that prices are likely to shift further downwards before you commit.

[Ah forget it]

Thanks again all. I think I've just had a pleasant surprise, when I opened up my PC this evening, the PSU seems slightly better than I remember it, looks like I have an 800W PSU which wasn't in the specs of the machine I bought.



All I need to do now is buy a new GFX card with no PSU to buy so I can spend near enough the whole £200. Total and utter result.

[flearider]

wait ...
4890 is a good card ..my lad still has his abiet with a better cpu and ram and plays most games fine .. try overclocking your cpu if you can get it to near 3.5ghz you will see an improvement ..
it would not be worth getting another card with that cpu and ram as that is where the bottle neck will be .. o/c for 6months to a yr and save for a new system ..

[KeyboardDemon]

The 4890 is not a bad card, but it is getting on a bit now, AMD/ATI are now treating any card before the 54xx series as legacy cards and these are not being fully supported with driver updates like the current range of cards, take a look at the release notes for the latest Catalyst drivers to see what's supported. I have been using a Crossfire GPU solution for quite a while now I would recommend going for the best single card solution your budget will allow as Crossfire often has issues with games not playing as smoothly as I would like due to stuttering mostly, and then when you're ready you can take this card and put it into a new rig if you decide that you still want a new build after getting your new GPU and maybe overclocking your CPU as suggested above.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The PSU OEM looks like Andyson:

http://www.realhardtechx.com/index_a...s/Page2829.htm

I am not sure if it is that great a PSU TBH!

[Shirty]

The PSU is not ideal, but it's delivered for over 4 years now so it wouldn't necessarily the the part I'd race to replace for a quick "bang for buck" upgrade. The 4890 is roughly equivalent to a GTX275, and therefore it's the biggest single bottleneck for a modern gaming system. OP has a fast quad core even by modern standards (also overclockable), and plenty of RAM.

I upgraded an E8400 based rig from an 8800GTX -> GTX280 -> GTX580 without changing any other components and each time the gaming performance increased exponentially, because the reality is that games are only just beginning to utilise more than one or CPU two threads, whereas they'll take as much graphical horsepower as you can throw at them.

I'll just add that the PSU could do with replacing down the line. Nothing super fancy required, £60-70 should cover it.

[Pob255]

If the review data base is correct then it is 80+Bronze so it's not a total duffer and "should" be able to supply the rated power without going out of atx specifications.
So you should be fine to just replace the graphics card, with the extra budget I'd look at the gtx660ti or 7950 although they are a little over budget, otherwise 7870 would be the best (about 65% faster than the 4890)

[Ah forget it]

Some great suggestions yet again folks, I'll sell the 4890 second hand methinks and I've got my eye on a 7870 as a result. So long as the current PSU doesn't have an impact on the games I play I'm tempted to leave that as is.

[Shirty]

Good plan mate, nothing else you could possibly have spent money on will have anything like the same impact on your gaming.