Need help, upgrading my PC on a £300 budget

Mxhawthy

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Looking to upgrade my PC with a £300 budget (about $500). I only need SOME parts to upgrade, which I will mention below. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Here is my current PC specs that I would like to upgrade, with links to them on Amazon:

CPU - AMD Athlon X4 750K Quad Core - http://goo.gl/i7fbmZ

Motherboard - Gigabyte F2A55M-DS2 - http://goo.gl/pi9Jq3

Graphics Card - AMD Radeon HD 6670 - http://goo.gl/H2e6uE

Power Supply - 500W ATX Switching Power Supply - That's all I know.

The following are things that I DON'T want to upgrade. I have just included them so you know if your suggestions are compatible with them:

Computer Case - Galaxy 3 Mid Tower ATX Case - http://goo.gl/0Qvm6H (ignore stuff about the power supply that was included, I got this PC custom built from www.vibox.co.uk with a 500W power supply, not the 450W one that this mentions.

RAM - 16GB ( 2 sticks of 8GB ) DDR3. I don't know make/model of this.

Hard Drive - 1 Terabyte SATA drive - Again, I don't know much else about this.


Here are some more details:

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Budget Range: £300 for upgrades in total.

System Usage from Most to Least Important: Gaming, but quite a lot of internet browsing aswell, and must be able to do word documents, etc for homework.


The parts that I need are: CPU, with a CPU cooler if I need one (I don't know about this sort of stuff), Motherboard, Graphics card, and a Power Supply.


Do I need to buy an Operating System: No

Preferred Website(s) for Parts: www.amazon.co.uk www.novatech.co.uk www.maplin.co.uk www.pcworld.co.uk www.currys.co.uk or basically any reliable UK company selling PC components.

Location: England.

Parts Preferences: I don't really mind, as long as everything is compatible with each other (i.e as long as a Nvidia Graphics card is compatible with a AMD CPU, or an Intel CPU is compatible with a Nvidia graphics card, etc)

Overclocking: No.

SLI or Crossfire: No.

Some things, such as cooling systems, and compatibility, I am completely clueless about, so could you please make sure you include a cooling system if the CPU that you suggest needs one, and make sure everything is compatible with whichever motherboard you suggest for me. Thanks, and sorry for being a pain.

Additional Comments: I would like it if my PC wasn't ridiculously loud, (although this isn't a HUGE worry) and could play games such as BF4, Far Cry 3, Watchdogs, Titanfall, and Minecraft, all on high settings.
I also need it to be able to surf the web with good speed, and be able to handle spreadsheets, and documents easily.

Any help is very appreciated, as I haven't got a clue where to start with this.
 

toddybody

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Hi Friend, I would put the entire budget into a new graphics card...and then upgrade your motherboard and CPU later.

You can grab a selection of GTX 770's on Amazon right now from £229. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=gtx+770&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Agtx+770

That leaves plenty of money for a great aftermarket CPU cooler you can use now...and for an upcoming CPU/Motherboard upgrade later. If you got all the parts listed above, it would make you sacrifice on the most important part of all for gaming: GPU.

Good luck with your new system friend!
 

+1

A great aftermarket CPU cooler is the CM Hyper 212 EVO. Especially for the price!
 

Mxhawthy

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Thanks for the advice, after doing some research I have found that another very good graphics card is the GTX 760. This would save me around £80-£100. The problem with the 770 that you suggested is that it's going to be a long time until I have enough money to upgrade my PSU, CPU and motherboard, so it would be ideal if I could save just a little bit more on my Graphics card.
 

Vic 40

Titan
Ambassador
I would like some more info about your current psu,there must be a sticker or something on the side of it.Give the maker,model,wattage and amps on the +12 voltrail if possible.

I would go for something like the next,

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-4440 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor (£125.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock H87 Pro4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£54.37 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon R9 270 2GB Video Card (£128.71 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £309.07
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-03-23 13:18 GMT+0000)

A bit over budget,still a nice gpu which can be overclocked and a better cpu for games that do rely on it.Look for reviews about the r9 270 for results.
For instance,
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-270-review-benchmarks,3669-4.html
 

I thought a few extra quids could get you the 750Ti which I heard is better than the R9 270.