Motherboard and CPU Upgrade Recommendations

[SuperBeatBoy]

i have an intel core duo 2.1 e6400 and im playing games at 1920x1080. So i'm thinking its about time for an upgrade. lol. Especially with The Witcher 2 just around the corner.

Also is it better to have Corsair 2x2gb XMS3 Ram or just 1x4GB? The latter works out about £5 cheaper.

[eastyy]

think the 1x4gb one should work fine

though saying that i got a single 2gb stick and that was all i had ....and it went wrong so meant i could not use the computer at all till i got another stick so perhaps might be better to have two incase one ever went wrong

[SuperBeatBoy]

Right, heres what i'm going for now

Motherboard: ASRock M3A770DE (Would love to go for the other one i picked, but trying to save as much money as possible - £50 difference)
CPU: Phenom II x4 965
Ram: Corsair XM3 DDR3 2x2GB 1600mhz
PSU: Corsair CX500

Works out about £251 with paypal surcharges & next day delivery.

Hopefully that should be dandy.

[eastyy]

thats a pretty good price was having a look at bundles online and the bundles i found cost more then that

[SuperBeatBoy]

I found this website http://www.crescentelectronics.co.uk/ The site could use some work, but their prices are good. Just hope they are reputable. I'm willing to give them a chance.

[abigsmurf]

The site looks like it's been built quickly and cheaply from a kit yet has products like : http://www.crescentelectronics.co.uk...99b210885.html

Freaky.

Does seem at least on the surface to be reputable though. Lots of positive reviews around and no scam warnings.

[SuperBeatBoy]

Just found another board. Seems perfect for what i have in mind. Been thinking i'm not going to go Sli down the line as i have this pc hooked up to my tv. I could always do with the extra slots on this board.

Anything i'm missing? http://www.crescentelectronics.co.uk...nvidia-nf.html

[abigsmurf]

If you intend to overclock it's probably a no-go. ASRock are an extreme budget brand and that'll be fairly feature stripped. It'll do the job but that's all.

[SuperBeatBoy]

Its got some overclocking features. But to be honest, i probably wouldn't even bother. If i save as much as i can, i can probably get a new graphics card once i've sold all my components.

How much should i be paying to get a significant increase over my 8800 GT, I keep hearing nice things about the Radeon HD 6870.

[eastyy]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU/87

handy comparison site there

[SuperBeatBoy]

Thanks for that mate. That site is brilliant!

[eastyy]

got to say my best upgrade in recent years for just speeding up every day use was a SSD hardrive shame there so expensive per gb

[abigsmurf]

I'd get an SSD for my PC if it wasn't such a hassle. It's just a shame you can't easily just shift a Windows install to a different hdd.

Incidentally, it's worth checking out the Toms Hardware benchmarks too (it's got newer cards on it): http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2...amer,2659.html

The 6870 to me seems to be AMD's best mid range offering. Similar grunt to the 5870 but cooler, cheaper and more feature rich.

[SuperBeatBoy]

What do you mean by more feature rich? From what i can tell the 5870 seems to be outperforming it slightly in fps.

[abigsmurf]

The 5870 doesn't cope as well with tesselation (going to be a major feature in games soon), the 68xx handles it much better.

The series also is going to get a fairly notable performance boost in the newest drivers.