A mistake leads to upgrade?

[frankthetank195]

I recently built a gaming rig, but I was hasty and skimped on a few essentials. After Christmas I had some cash and got a job, so I was fixing and upgrading. Bought a better PSU, chassis fans, etc.

As I was installing my just delivered Corsair H60, I realized something wasn't screwed in right. I went to pull it out and the CPU (Phenom II x4 965 BE) decided to come with it. I bumped it on something, pins bent, and much swearing insued.

Now I need to decide whether I should buy a new 965, or go up to a fx-8350, octo-core. I'd like an i7-3770k, but I don't want to buy a new mobo. Which would be best for lots of gaming? I do a little encoding but not enough to warrant a $100 increase.

Also, I'm going to buy an SSD larger than 32GB. I was thinking intel, and I'd like to keep that at $100 max. Input? No OCZ please.

I'll also try to buy another 8GB of RAM and hopefully 2 x 660ti 3GB in SLI.

 

[mfenn]

What is your total budget and what exact parts do you have right now? For the type of money you're looking at spending on pieces parts, you can probably get something much better if you consider the machine as a whole.

 

[Smoove910]

How bad are the pins bent? If not too bad, a mechanical pencil can be your friend here.

 

[frankthetank195]

I just put my build into my signature. And they were so bad that when I carefully used one of those, a pin fell off.

 

[frankthetank195]

Bump

 

[T_Yamamoto]

If you're gaming. Best bang for buck is with a i5 (in your case I believe you'd be fine without over clocking so a 3450) and a h77 motherboard.

For a good cheap ssd. Look into the crucial m4s and Intel 330 series.

You can also recoup some of the cost by selling your old gear.

 

[DSF]

I don't see any point in going SLI for that monitor.

I also don't see the point in capping your SSD budget at $100 if you have enough money to be pondering almost $600 in graphics cards. If you're going to want to store some of your games on your SSD you'll want at least 128GB and realistically more like 180GB or 256GB. If you're OK with having one or two large games or none at all on the SSD, then you could fit it within your $100 mark.

You haven't mentioned any uses for the machine other than gaming, so it seems to me the most logical plan is to buy a reasonable AMD CPU (eight cores isn't going to do much for gaming), a single graphics card in the neighborhood of $250-350 depending on how high you want to crank the settings, and an SSD of decent size.

Leave the rest of it just the way it is until the machine actually starts to show its age, at which point a complete platform change would make more sense.

As mfenn said though, you should really tell us how much money you're working with.

 

[Hubb1e]

Well, an FX4300 matches the 965 for gaming but is a bit more expensive. It does overclock nicely though. Then a FX6300 adds another two cores that mostly go unused but can have some benefits in some games and can also overclock nicely. For gaming I've never seen a reason to go beyond a FX6300 on the AMD platform and since you don't encode that much you can save some $ going with 6 rather than 8 and you'll still get a nice boost over the old 965.

I'd probably get myself a FX6300 and overclock it to 4.5ghz+ if I was in your situation just because I'd feel like buying a new 965 would suck after ruining your last one. What's the fun in that?

 

[mfenn]

Looking at your rig, you have some decent stuff there. The main things I see to upgrade are (in this order):

- Working CPU (Intel w/ mobo or another AMD depending on total budget)
- SSD (a 32GB v4 is just about the slowest, crappiest thing that you can buy)
- GPU