Advice Computer upgrade time

[Vae]

Well seems like my Radeon 4870 is on its last legs as the fan is dying so may be time to upgrade my computer as its been almost 4 years!

I'm no longer up to speed with chip developments and relative performance any more so any advice to point me in the right direction is appreciated! What should I be looking for in that sweet spot of maximum performance per price? I'm not that demanding on performance as you can see from the fact I've lasted 4 years with this setup!


This is what I currently have:
ASUS P5Q PRO Turbo iP45 Socket 775 8 -Channel Audio ATX Motherboard
Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500 HyperX Memory CL5 2.2V
Coolermaster Black Elite 330 Case With eXtreme Power 460W PSU with Side Window
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache
XFX HD 4870 1GB DDR5 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card
LG GH22NS40 22X SATA DVD±RW/DL/RAM Black Bare Drive - OEM

I assume the case is still ok or have motherboard dimensions changed? I also have a SSD and Win 8 (Yuck) that is the boot drive. So I presume I just need Motherboard, CPU, RAM and GFX card. Based on what I spent last time I guess I'm looking at about £400 but there's no fixed budget.

 

[BloodOmen]

You'll likely need a new PSU as well depending on what card you get, not sure if 460w will be enough for hardware out now + all the other stuff.

 

[Hawkwind]

I assume the case is still ok or have motherboard dimensions changed? I also have a SSD and Win 8 (Yuck) that is the boot drive. So I presume I just need Motherboard, CPU, RAM and GFX card. Based on what I spent last time I guess I'm looking at about £400 but there's no fixed budget.

Should be OK, I can recommend the Asus Sabretooth Z87, very nice layout and simple setup. As Bloodomen stated new PSU will be required, get something 600W or more. I have Coolermaster 1000W Silent Pro Gold with twin GTX 780's, 4 x SSDD and BlueRay but that is overkill for most.

 

[Raven]

£400 is plenty, unless you want to run several monitors at obscene resolutions then £150 on a card will be fine. http://www.ebuyer.com/390921-sapphi...-displayport-pci-e-graphics-card-11200-14-20g for example.

CPU/MOB I would say another £150 on the CPU (not that clued up on these but find any intel at that price is usually the current best bang for your buck)

£100 ish on a mobo (Again I find that to be the best price range)

You might want to spend a but more and look at getting a fairly decent amount of RAM, it's still pretty cheap - When I got mine it was about £80 for 16 gig, overkill but big numbers are nice.

PSU depends, check what each component needs and go from there. Ebuyer and such usually list it in the details on each part. Obviously a bigger one will give you more headroom in the future but meh, you could buy one later one if necessary.

You only need large PSUs if you are going down the multi graphics card route really.

 

[BloodOmen]

Yea, wife has the 7850 as linked above, good card for the price.

 

[Syri]

You'll likely need a new PSU as well depending on what card you get, not sure if 460w will be enough for hardware out now + all the other stuff.

Depends a lot on the parts used, and also on the current PSU. I'm not sure how coolermaster's PSUs rate, but I've got a basic Corsair psu, that's only 430 watts, and that's doing fine running an i5 with a radeon 7770. Some brands are better than others at coping with their rated load. I wouldn't recommend going for the cheapest 600w PSU though, if a new one is needed. Been there, done that, took the motherboard with it when it blew.
For the CPU, the core i5 is good for all round performance, no point going to an i7 unless you're doing serious number crunching. Also, unless you're really thinking of overclocking, might aswell save a bit and avoid the K version of the CPU, as the only difference is the multiplier is unlocked, so it can be overclocked. If stock speeds are all you'll use, save a bit there too.
as Raven said, more RAM can be nice, not essential, but if it's cheap to grab plenty, doesn't do any harm to give windows more to play with. For the graphics side, any card around the £130 mark will probably play most games near full detail at 1080p, though more demanding titles might need to drop to medium settings at that resolution. If you're going higher resolution though, or want everything to fly with all the sliders on max, you'll want to be going for something around the £200 mark. Anything more and you're starting to go into the multiple screen territory, or serious future proofing.
That's my take on things as they are anyway. No specific cpu or gpu advice though, as I upgraded last year, and there's new ranges out, which I've just not looked into, due to only just changing mine. Hope some of that is some help though.

 

[Athan]

When pondering CPU(/motherboard) upgrades I always check the latest Tom's Hardware "Best Gaming CPUs for the money" round-up. It's currently still pointing to an i5-3570k as the best bang for the buck:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,review-32739-4.html

Pay particular attention to the "Diminishing Returns Kick In:" section.

 

[Vae]

I wanted to say thanks for the advice. I seriously considered a Haswell 4670 + Motherboard and RAM but for now I've just upgraded the GFX card to the 7850 as that is the only faulty part and it is still running everything I want it to run so I'm going to hold off on the CPU etc a bit longer.

 

[Tom]

My computer was randomly shutting down, probably a dry joint on the motherboard somewhere. Anyway, it was built in 2007/2008, so ancient. I bought 4 gigs of ram to expand to 8 gigs (£30), a Gigabyte Z87-HD3 motherboard (£80), 120GB Samsung SSD (£65), Intel i5 4430 (£120) and an OEM copy of Windows 8 (because I'm sick of fannying around with cracks and updates).

Apart from one tense moment when I dropped the CPU into the socket and bent a pin (fortunately in the correct direction), it all works splendidly. Installing the OS on the SSD makes the system amazingly fast and quiet. Everything else is installed on my old drive (now d.

My graphics card is a GTX 560 but I bought that months ago. I'm a bit like you, unless you work in computers it's impossible to keep up. So I walked into Scan and said to the bloke "this is how much money I want to spend, what's the best thing to get?" And he sorted it all out for me.

I can't wait for SSDs to get even cheaper. Not having to listen to a HD clicking away when I do something is amazing, the system is lovely and quiet (silent PSU) although when gaming, the PSU does tend to spin up every minute or so.