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rjw1979

Honorable
May 10, 2013
10
0
10,510
Good Morning All

The time has come to upgrade my sluggish 7 year old PC. It has served me well and still does most tasks well but when it comes to most games other than Diablo II it struggles.

I'm the kind of person who try to research something to death before committing cash to it, after much research I have decided an AMD Trinity based system would both carry a decent punch and not break my bank.

I'm an avid AMD fan and will not go anywhere near Intel for a PC system.

I will use the machine for general internet / computing use and also would like to play slightly older games such as Killing Floor or Left For Dead. I stress that I'm not too interested in the latest of games.

My queries are below, I would be grateful for any advice please

1 - Which MB should I go for out of these two choices and why?

ASRock FM2A55M-DGS
Gigabyte F2A85XM-HD3

Both look good and have good reviews and are quite similar Micro-ATX sized but I'm curious to hear what people think.

2 - Which CPU & amount of RAM is best?

A6 5400K 3.6Ghz with 8 GB RAM
A8 5600K 3.6Ghz with 8 GB of RAM if I can stretch to it or else will be 4 GB
A10 5800K 3.8Ghz with 4 GB RAM

3 - And finally probably the trickiest question of which RAM?

I get I need DDR 3 but get very confused over the speeds. Most people seem to like PC-1600 but is that the better option and what are the advantages? I'm not talking about benchmarks here, I'm just talking about would I notice a difference more than things being a fraction of a second faster?

Thanks in advance guys.

Ryan
 
Solution
ksham
It's fine. It's not a bad plan. It's a good idea to gauge how much resources you really need so you don't end up wasting money. A dual core should be fine for everything that you listed. It depends how often you plan to upgrade your system. If you don't plan on upgrading your system for a few years, then buy the quad core in case you need it. If you plan to upgrade a few parts every year or so, then stick to the cheaper option.
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ksham

ksham

Splendid
Mar 29, 2013
8,398
1
29,960
1. Gigabyte F2A85XM-HD3. You won't see much, if any, performance increase over the ASRock FM2A55M-DGS with what you're doing. I chose it because it provides a few extra perks such as SATA 3, USB 3.0, better build quality, and 2 more RAM slots.

2. Any. A6-5400K is a dual core CPU. That may be fine. I don't know if your older games can use quad cores. I also don't know what computing you'll be doing and if it requires quad core or not. So get the cheaper CPU of the three that matches your needs.

3. 1600MHz is more than enough. Even 1333MHz is fine for you, I think. Most applications are not sensitive to your RAM speed. You also will not likely notice any performance increase/decrease unless you're running memory-intensive applications like video/graphical rendering.
 
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Jack Revenant

Honorable
Apr 16, 2013
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13,160


Actually, given that he's using an APU, he may be one of the only people who will actually see serious benefit from higher-speed RAM. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-bandwidth-scaling-trinity,3419-8.html
 
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R

rjw1979

Honorable
May 10, 2013
10
0
10,510
Guys, thanks for your advice and comments but as usual as I try to do more research things appear to be even more confusing!

I'm going with the Gigabyte board, my existing board in my old PC is a Gigabyte and I trust the brand.

I'm now thinking would I be better to go with the A6 with 4GB of RAM and see how it runs, then if needs be I can slip a Radeon HD 6570 for about £50. Would that be a better option than the A8 or the A6 with 8GB RAM.

I will be purchasing Win 7 running at 64 bit
 
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ksham

ksham

Splendid
Mar 29, 2013
8,398
1
29,960
It's fine. It's not a bad plan. It's a good idea to gauge how much resources you really need so you don't end up wasting money. A dual core should be fine for everything that you listed. It depends how often you plan to upgrade your system. If you don't plan on upgrading your system for a few years, then buy the quad core in case you need it. If you plan to upgrade a few parts every year or so, then stick to the cheaper option.
 
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