Pc upgrade

[doggerdaz]

Hello, i bet you hear this all the time but i could do with a few awnsers from you guys please.

My pc as started to coem to its age and needs upgrading or a full new build. I dont have alot of cash atm and ive got only around £200 (uk pounds). I could sell my pc parts and add abit more cash that way of needed.

heres my current system specs:

win7 ult 64 bit
E8400 hyper 212 plus heatsink/fan oc @ 3.2ghz
asus p5n-D 750I
4 gig ddr2 800 ocz reaper HPC
GTX260 sp216
ocz gamesXtreme 700W
320 gb HD 7200 rpm
plus a few externals for storage

ok heres my deal. With the little cash i have whats my best options to see an improvement in gaming. i only game and burn 1/2 movies per month
Can i upgrade any more or should i just keep saving up untill next year and completly rebuild a new pc.

any replys welcome. thx guyz

 

[Deleted member 217926]

What exactly is wrong with it? My E8400 is still amazingly fast considering the age. My hard drives are alot faster than yours and I have a better graphics card but I am still pretty happy with it and have not found a game it cant handle.

Get an GTX460 1GB and overclock to 3.6 or more. 3.6 is the E8400s sweet spot anyway.

Also a new C: drive of the newest 500GB per platter hard drive would help. The Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB or 1TB are a great value. An SSD would also show you just how fast that system is.

 

[doggerdaz]

oh right, so my HDD could be slowing me down alot in games? i never knew that. my HDD only cost me £35 2 years ago and is a samsung.
so my best bet is to buy a new hard drive? and better gfx card?

What exactly is wrong with it? Well its starting to lag ingames, ive just played gothic 4 and it was horrid lol.

but thx for your advise, very helpful. i will try find the model of my HDD and then u can see if it is that whats causing me probs


also would i see a big improvement if i oc my ram/gfx and cpu (cpu to 3.6 like u said)

 

[Deleted member 217926]

The hard drive is just an older (quite a bit) slower design compared with what is out there now.

If Windows just suddenly became slow I would run a virus scan and Malwarebytes. It might be infested.

As for the GFX card well of course newer games are harder on old hardware.

The E8400 really has a sweet spot at 3.6 running 1:1 with DDR2-800.

 

[capt_taco]

Your motherboard does support socket 775 quad-cores, so you could put in a q9550 (or something like a q8400 if you don't want to spend as much, it's really your call on how much you want to spend). I don't think that's absolutely essential yet, but that's the max upgrade path for your machine. That plus a video card upgrade will make it just about as good for gaming as any machine on the market today, by the way, unless you're more concerned about benchmarks than playability.

I'm also guessing that your machine is 3+ years old, in which case a fresh install of Windows usually does a ton of good. After a few years, the OS just gets junked up and there's not a whole lot you can do about it. That also makes things run a lot more slowly, hard drive spins more, etc.

 

[doggerdaz]

@ capt-taco
My pc is 2 years old almost and i only installed win7 about 12 months ago, When i bought my e8400 i did alot of reserch and found that the q8400 wasnt as good as the e8400 for gaming, i was also thinking like you said and to get a new q9550 or the 9450 and a gtx 460. As my psu got enough adaptors for the gtx460? is it just the same 6/8 pin like my gtx260 as?

also i can only seem to oc my cpu to 362 mhz @ 3.258mhz and any higher just freezers up my pc. Im using the nvidia control panel program to oc so it might be that why it wont go higher?

 

[Deleted member 217926]

You have stock cooling for your CPU? Are your BIOS locked? BIOS overclocking is much more stable usually.

To be honest I would not go with a Q9xxx chip right now. They are too overpriced. LGA775 is pretty much dead and while still fast you have the even newer LGA1156 being replaced by Sandy Bridge soon...........how far do you want to get behind? Save your money for an i5 750 system or an Athlon II x4 955/965 box.

 

[capt_taco]

@ capt-taco
My pc is 2 years old almost and i only installed win7 about 12 months ago, When i bought my e8400 i did alot of reserch and found that the q8400 wasnt as good as the e8400 for gaming, i was also thinking like you said and to get a new q9550 or the 9450 and a gtx 460. As my psu got enough adaptors for the gtx460? is it just the same 6/8 pin like my gtx260 as?

also i can only seem to oc my cpu to 362 mhz @ 3.258mhz and any higher just freezers up my pc. Im using the nvidia control panel program to oc so it might be that why it wont go higher?

Yes, your PSU should be able to handle the 460. Power connectors have been pretty much standardized, so any 6-pin or 6+2 pin plug on the power supply will fit the 6-pin connectors on the 460. Nothing to worry about there.

I think you're exactly right about the overclocking. Software-only overclocking is generally not very good and can only take you so far; you're much better off doing it in the BIOS, though that takes a little more research. Mainly, I think the issue it sounds like you're running into is that you can do a small overclock without needing to mess with the CPU voltage, but to do a serious overclock, you need to increase the voltage, and the software fails at that, so you hit a certain point and stop. You can overclock the E8400 to 3.6 GHz pretty decently, and if you push it you can get it to 4GHz. If you really want to do that, I would do some research on it first, both about BIOS settings and CPU cooling, since that will come into play with any serious overclocking.

You have stock cooling for your CPU? Are your BIOS locked? BIOS overclocking is much more stable usually.

To be honest I would not go with a Q9xxx chip right now. They are too overpriced. LGA775 is pretty much dead and while still fast you have the even newer LGA1156 being replaced by Sandy Bridge soon...........how far do you want to get behind? Save your money for an i5 750 system or an Athlon II x4 955/965 box.

I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time. Q9xxx does cost too much -- but then again, what Intel CPU doesn't? The i5 and i7 are overpriced too for what they do. Pretty much any machine I build these days is AMD for that reason.

However, the high-end LGA775 processors like the q9550 are still among the better CPUs out there. Even though they're "dead technology," they still beat the hell out of most of the i5s and AMD quad-cores that people are always recommending for gaming. They're called "dead technology" only because you can't upgrade past the 9xxx, not because their performance is bad. A system with a 9550 will probably be good for another 3 years -- most systems not specifically marketed as "gaming systems" are still dual-cores, for chrissakes.

I definitely wouldn't build a new system with a q9xxx (or any LGA775 processor, for that matter), but if LGA775 is what you've got already, I still think that if you drop in one of the top LGA775 quad-cores, that's the best you can do for the money as long as you hang on to the system for 2-3 years. Yeah, 1156/1366/Sandy Bridge/AM3/Bulldozer/Whatever may be better if you're going for benchmark supremacy, but you're paying for a new motherboard too, so add that into the cost you figure for the CPU. The best LGA775 systems are going to remain viable as good gaming machines for a while, so if money is a concern, the upgrade is the way I'd go.

 

[doggerdaz]

thc taco you make alot of sence. if a q5500/4550 and a gtx460 as a upgrade with all my old parts will take me through another 2 years ill be happy. so it looks like thats the way to go. i never knew the q5500 was as good if not better than the i5.
and yes im not into benchmarking i just want games to run smoothly on med/high settings. i only have a 19" 1440x900 monitor as well so its not high res.

but thx alot taco you have help alot