5 year old rig

[Guest]

The core system is still in place:

X2 4400+ Toledo Socket 939
K8N Neo4 Platinum nForce4 Ultra
2 x 1GB Crucial

Some things have been upgraded along the way. It now has:

640 GB WD Black
1.5 TB WD Green
8600 GT
700 W OCZ
CM 690 Case

It's getting long in the tooth though and I'm looking at what kind of new system I can put together.

I would keep the HDDs, power supply, case/fans, DVD burner, sound card, keyboard, mouse, speakers, and monitor (Dell 2007fp).

So basically need CPU/MB/RAM/GPU. Would like to spend as little as possible but still get quality to last another 3 years or so. Don't really do all that much on it - surf, office, database, game, messing with pro tools.

Was thinking I could get by with something like this until the sandy/dozer/core battle sorts out:

AMD Athlon II X4 640 - $99
MSI 870A-G54 AM3 - $99
G Skill Ripjaw 4GB DDR3 1600 - $87
5750 or 5770 ~ $100-$125

That's around $400 and it seems my old parts are still fetching a decent price on ebay which could offset some of the cost.

Or I could just get a Xbox 360 slim and wait for this thing to die completely?

 

[cmcghee358]

What kind of games and at what resolution?

 

[Guest]

The Dell goes up to 1600 x 1200 but I don't think I've ever played that high except for maybe the Wolfenstein game a couple years ago. Usually set it at whatever I can get by with which is usually around 1100 x 800. I like to play mostly action/RPG/FPS - Fallout, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, Half Life, Borderlands and the like.

 

[cmcghee358]

Then yeah your proposed upgrades will suit you just fine. I'd get the 5770 if I were you but you seem pretty reasonable. As in, if the performance is low, you simply adjust settings until it's where you like it.

One thing I'd say. Check your RAM make sure it's DDR3-1600 CAS 7 latency (aka 7-8-7-20ish) It's usually around the same price and just naturally faster than CAS 9 latency RAM of the same 1600 speed.

Other than that, enjoy!

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the advice on the GPU and RAM latency. Speaking of latency though do you think the Athlon 640 would run into trouble with recording latency and music? It's just a hobby but if another $50-100 on CPU/MB made a big difference I could probably find it somewhere.

 

[cmcghee358]

No it's perfectly fine for recording. If you have to convert the files into another format, the Athlon might bog down some. You wouldn't expereince lag on the system, its just it would take a little longer