Budget PC upgrades to play Star Citizen advice please

AJDux

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Feb 20, 2014
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Any advice please

I really want to get PC able to run Star Citizen by release date. My current system wont cut it, and I desperately want to get it on a budget of £300 IF POSSIBLE. I know I wont get high settings, just 30fps and looking OK will do for now.

Current system -

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P
CPU - AMD athlon X2 250, 3GHZ dual core
GPU - Asus 6670
4gb RAM
PSU - Casecom ATX 500W

So the weak links are.... well all of it..... (I know the PSU sucks, but as I understand this shouldnt cause any damage/serious issues, so this I plan to sort last?)


Planned system -

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P
CPU - AMD FX6300 (clocked a little to perhaps 3.8/4ghz)
GPU - R9 270x
8gb RAM (corsair maybe? does it make huge difference??)
PSU - Casecom ATX 500W

This should cost almost exactly £300.....

The FX6300 is NOT on the supported CPU list for my motherboard, however I have read it SHOULD work, but I have then also since read it could have performance issues, 'bottlenecking' is that the right term? Especially if clocked?

If this is the case is there any other CPU's on this list that would be a reasonable improvement over what I have?
http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-Gigabyte/GA-M68MT-S2P(rev._3.0).html

I know new motherboard and i5 is the way to go, but I just dont see me being able to afford that this year WITH a new GPU.....

To save cash would an R7 260 be OK? Then I could prob afford the motherboard as well......

Or any alternatives entirely?


Thanks in advance guys :)



P.S. Oh and I run monitor on 1600x900
 
You could consider this, so you could have an upgrade path to an i5 or i7 in the future

The i3-4130 might be a bit weaker than the 6300 in applications which utilize more than 2 threads/cores, but in terms of single threaded performance the i3 is a very powerful dual core with HT. We can't know for sure how well Star Citizen does in terms of CPU scaling at this moment too

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor (£79.19 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£34.18 @ CCL Computers)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£56.83 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon R9 270 2GB Video Card (£119.99 @ Ebuyer)
Power Supply: XFX 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£44.98 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £335.17
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-02-20 12:10 GMT+0000)
 

Trustdesa

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Nov 2, 2013
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I wouldn't even bother to think NOW to something is coming out quite far in time...prices for current hardware will be more affordable and as said, requirements are not even definite yet!
 


There is absolutely no need for 1866MHz ram unless you are using integrated graphics. In fact, it will perform more or less exactly the same as 1333MHz ram in gaming. Gaming simply doesn't need the extra memory bandwidth, as the video memory onboard the graphics card does most of the heavy lifting (in the memory department).