Help Desktop Upgrade Time again - can I get some advice, please?

[Bobby]

Hey Everybody!

It's that time again - when you take a look at your hardware and realise it's just not up to scratch for what you want recently, and as I've done before with my computer and monitor upgrades, I've come to you fantastic FH Techies to enlist proper expertise and assistance in my quest for better computer hardware.

This time round, I'm not needing to upgrade too much, and have a pretty comfortable budget for what I want to do - I think. Essentially, my tech specs read as such:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q8400 @ 2.66GHz
RAM: 4 Gigs
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
Power Supply: Xilence 700W XP700
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-D Socket 775
Operating System: Windows 7 - 64-Bit
Monitor: Samsung P2470HD 24-inch Widescreen LCD TV/Monitor (5ms, 1000:1, HDMI) at 1920 x 1080 Resolution.

Essentially, I'm not after too demanding an upgrade - heck, ideally I'd like to just be able to play The Old Republic at the highest settings to fully enjoy the beast of a game, but even if I can just make my computer run a bit faster and improve the quality of gameplay a bit, that'd be sweet. The budget is £250-to-£300. Primary upgrade priorities are probably the graphics card and quantity/quality of the RAM. Oh, I'm also not running my computer in HD - which I think I got told last time I was here, I had the potential to do with the compliant graphics card and HDMI monitor I have? Not sure, but any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance, FH techies!

- Bobby

 

[Himse]

RAM is pretty cheap, even DDR3 you can get 8-16 gig quite cheap.

Try http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&...aps&hvadid=17222001470&ref=pd_sl_23ify8mcks_b for gfx perhaps?

Can pick up a gb card for 150 ish, that should see you through?

I just got two 2GB versions of those cards for my new PC! Should be beast!

I'm no PC expert, but between the 560 and 580 there is apparently a 4fps difference or something running BF3 at max? If you're a casual gamer that's not so bad tbh!

 

[Sar]

I recently did an upgrade, which was fairly needed after 4 years with the same rig (Q6600/8800GT combo).

i5-2500k
GTX560 TI
4Gb Ram (upgrading this in Jan to 16gb)

Fucking flies like a greased leopard. Handles Skyrim, Witcher 2 and BF3 all on high/ultra settings with no effort at all.

£500 all in, including new mobo and sata dvd drive.

 

[Keitanz]

Is it just me who thinks spending over £700 on a PC is silly? we could be needing 1TB of memory to play modern games in a few years..... the people who are spending 3-4k on a PC now which they think will last 10 years are taking a risk..

Of course if you have a few grand in the bank I guess there aren't much better things to spend money on though ;P

 

[gmloki]

If you have a budget of £250.00-£300.00 then I would look at your bottlenecks in your system. At your budget, you are not going to be able to do a system overhaul as there are no socket 775 CPU's being built or much better than your Q8400. The quickest fix would be your VGA card and memory.

Asus GTX 560 TI Direct CU II http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-247-AS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1341. I have one of these at the moment and it copes with BF3 and Skyrim at pretty much the highest settings @ 1920 x 1080. Another 4Gb of memory would be a nice boost but it would be good to get 2x4Gb of a matcher pair

 

[Himse]

Is it just me who thinks spending over £700 on a PC is silly? we could be needing 1TB of memory to play modern games in a few years..... the people who are spending 3-4k on a PC now which they think will last 10 years are taking a risk..

Of course if you have a few grand in the bank I guess there aren't much better things to spend money on though ;P

Not really, spent around 1700 on a pc last time, lasted me 7 years.. it's only now i'm noticing a dip in performance and games won't run.

I spent roughly the same this time, it'll run all the latest titles with super ease, and probably far into the future, if it doesn't, i'll learn my lesson.

 

[ECA]

Haha himse, have you tried some UE3 games? Damn that engine is a fucking awful unoptimized hog.

 

[Keitanz]

The thing is though, in the past 6-7 years computing technology hasn't really increased by THAT much and that seems like the reason why.. compare say... 1990 - 2000 and 2000 - 2010 and you will see a massive improvement from 1990 -2000...

Though there doesn't seem to be a real need for them to try improve the technologies any more, since we have games like BF3 which have simply amazing graphics.. I don't think it's possible for them to get much better.

 

[Himse]

Haha himse, have you tried some UE3 games? Damn that engine is a fucking awful unoptimized hog.

Basically on my 7600GT's, I could run Mw2 on good gfx.

I would try BF3, but I don't have windows 7 Still running xp64bit. HERO.

 

[Himse]

The thing is though, in the past 6-7 years computing technology hasn't really increased by THAT much and that seems like the reason why.. compare say... 1990 - 2000 and 2000 - 2010 and you will see a massive improvement from 1990 -2000...

Though there doesn't seem to be a real need for them to try improve the technologies any more, since we have games like BF3 which have simply amazing graphics.. I don't think it's possible for them to get much better.

Exactly, I doubt for another 5 years they'll bring a much better engine than the Frostbite engine.

It'll Tbh from 2000-2010 think about the gfx changes, DAoC was 2001? Look at the original release gfx compared to now

Alot has changed, and probably will continue to change until we're basically running gfx similar to real life.

 

[ECA]

Tbh consoles kind of lock us into a cycle, if your pc outperforms the next gen of consoles then it will be fine for a LONG LONG TIME.

Even in 2 years my card will still be fine, so It should easily last 5-10 years if I wanted to ghetto it up ( I'll prob buy a new system before then though :d )

Slightly miffed I got right onboard the new SSD gen when it was super pricey, can get double the capacity for the same price now

 

[caLLous]

The Radeon 7000's are going to start shipping sometime in the near future aren't they? You might want to wait a couple of weeks to see what that does to the 6xxx prices.

 

[Sar]

If you have a budget of £250.00-£300.00 then I would look at your bottlenecks in your system. At your budget, you are not going to be able to do a system overhaul as there are no socket 775 CPU's being built or much better than your Q8400. The quickest fix would be your VGA card and memory.

Asus GTX 560 TI Direct CU II http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-247-AS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1341. I have one of these at the moment and it copes with BF3 and Skyrim at pretty much the highest settings @ 1920 x 1080. Another 4Gb of memory would be a nice boost but it would be good to get 2x4Gb of a matcher pair

That's exactly what I did. My 8800gt was the bottleneck for most new games in my system, so I bought that exact same graphics card myself, and things were fine until my motherboard died inside of 2 days. I think dust shorted it out, so I ended up having to get new parts anyway. :Z

 

[Himse]

Tbh consoles kind of lock us into a cycle, if your pc outperforms the next gen of consoles then it will be fine for a LONG LONG TIME.

Even in 2 years my card will still be fine, so It should easily last 5-10 years if I wanted to ghetto it up ( I'll prob buy a new system before then though :d )

Slightly miffed I got right onboard the new SSD gen when it was super pricey, can get double the capacity for the same price now

Agreed!

I have a 120gb SSD in the new build purely for the operating system, speedy!