Complete Gaming system for under £1500

bazastan

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Mar 3, 2010
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I am looking to upgrade my 5 year old pc as it is now struggling to keep up with the latest games. I don't have a great deal of computer knowledge and would appreciate any help given

My budget is around £1500 for a complete system either pre-built or attempting to build it myself :)

Thanks in advance for any advice

Barry
 
Tell you what I did...

Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition
Overclocked to 3.6 GHz

OCZ DDR3 1600MHz memory running 8-8-8-24 timings

ASROCK M3A770DE - The downside to this motherboard is that you can't run a crossfire setup at full speed because the ports are 16X and 4X not 8X and 8X

Antec 300 with 3 additional fans

I reccomend:
PC Power and Cooling power supply 680Watts or higher

Hard drive is up to you depending on how much you want to spend and how much you need to store but for good speed and plenty of storage. I reccomend 2 500GB drives running in Raid 0. If you want your drive to be even faster you could buy one large drive like a 1 or 2 TB drive then just run windows or whatever you want to load fast from a solid state drive. Personally I have an 80GB Raid 0 that windows boots from and an extra 750GB drive for storage.

Get a 4890 for excellent frame rates in games. OR if you've got the extra money left then I suggest 5870 - this card is rather large so make sure your case is big enough.

With that size budget many people would suggest buying a Core i7 PC. Personally I think they are overpriced but there is no denying their performance.
 
This budget is going to have room in it for peripherals such as monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers.

CPU: Intel Core i5 750 £160

Mobo: Asus P7P55D-E EVO £170

RAM: G-Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Ripjaw Memory Kit CL7(7-8-7-24) 1.65V £90

GPU: XFX 5870 1GB GDDR5 £315
Best single card.

PSU: Antec Truepower New TP-750 80 Plus Bronze Modular £102
Powerful enough to run two 5870s. So you can add another one when/if performance starts to drop.

HDD: Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB £60.

Case: Cooler Master HAF 922 £80

Cheapest SATA DVD Drive £20

Windows 7: £75

Total: £1072

This machine will play almost all games on the highest settings, depending on resolution. And you have plenty of money left to get a really nice monitor and such.