If you were upgrading this PC, what would you get?

[jordancondi]

From:

Intel i5 3570
ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M
G Skill Ares 8GB DDR3-1600mhz
Sapphire AMD Radeon R9 270X
Seagate Barracuda 2TB hard drive 7200RPM
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB HDD
Corsair HX 650W 80+ Gold PSU

What would you get? Would you keep any of it? Assume that you could spend US$2000 and it needed to be a portable mini ITX or mATX machine I can take anywhere. Preference for RAM is G Skill.

 

[you2]

I would keep the whole thing and just pick up a mini-1070. For $2000 I would just get a zotac en1070 and call it a day; but for $1000 build i might go a different route. One problem with upgrading to itx from ivy is that most of the ivy and haswell itx boards are no longer available. I had this problem this summer and got lucky because ecs drone (itx z97) board suddenly appeared in stock everywhere for $70 for 2 weeks and then vanished. I was also able to pick up an asus p something z77 itx board for $155 (i moved two atx boards to itx over the summer so I could stack them). However, unless you get very lucky you will have to upgrade to kaby or skylake and that likely means you will be using ddr4.

Since portability is your target check out the en1070. It will cost around $1400 with memory/disk. It has a mobile 1070 so a little slower than the desktop version but still pretty close. Also the processor is the mobile processor so again it is going to be a little slower. There is an en1080 but it is 2K and hard to find.

 

[jordancondi]

I would keep the whole thing and just pick up a mini-1070. For $2000 I would just get a zotac en1070 and call it a day; but for $1000 build i might go a different route. One problem with upgrading to itx from ivy is that most of the ivy and haswell itx boards are no longer available. I had this problem this summer and got lucky because ecs drone (itx z97) board suddenly appeared in stock everywhere for $70 for 2 weeks and then vanished. I was also able to pick up an asus p something z77 itx board for $155 (i moved two atx boards to itx over the summer so I could stack them). However, unless you get very lucky you will have to upgrade to kaby or skylake and that likely means you will be using ddr4.

Since portability is your target check out the en1070. It will cost around $1400 with memory/disk. It has a mobile 1070 so a little slower than the desktop version but still pretty close. Also the processor is the mobile processor so again it is going to be a little slower. There is an en1080 but it is 2K and hard to find.

I'm not buying a prebuilt PC

 

[you2]

The case is smaller than what you will otherwise be able to obtain but the choice is yours. itx boards for ivy bridge are hard to obtain; as I said I found an asus this summer for $155 (z77); so about the only thing worth keeping are the disk drives and maybe psu. If you want to get even close to an en1070/en1080 (of course your defn of portable might not be the same as mine); then you will need Dan's case (approx $300). I've used elite 130 (sucks) and pc-q33 (very nice) but i wouldn't call them portable. You can go smaller without the expense of Dan's case if you go with an sfx psu - i recommend corsair 400 or 600. Won't recommend a case other than those already since mentioned because i have no clue what you consider 'portable'. In either case I would look at the mini 1070 but you didn't mention your target resolution - i would dump the gpu you have - too large but if it is powerful enough a mini 1060 might meet your needs. You might be able to get the power requirement down to 400 with the 1060. Nothing is wrong iwth your ram or cpu other than itx requirement. Well there are a few H61 boards out there and of course the use market.

 

[whm1974]

I would upgrade the video card and add more memory. Otherwise for $2000 I would build a new system.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Really depends on what you want to do with it. Want to game? Stream media?

Tell us what your goals and budget are and it will be easier for us to advise you.

 

[whm1974]

Really depends on what you want to do with it. Want to game? Stream media?

Tell us what your goals and budget are and it will be easier for us to advise you.

If he wants to build a mITX system that's portable, then he should take a look at the Silverstone Milo-08BH case with the handle.

 

[spat55]

If you want to play games at 1080p/1440p then just add in a GTX 1070 + 8GB RAM otherwise you'll want to start looking at upgrading the CPU/Mobo/RAM.

 

[luhai]

wow, we have the same exact PC... Same CPU, same GPU, same PSU, same memory, the only thing different is I have a gigabyte Z77 instead and I later upgrade my memory to 16GB thanks to the resource hog called simulink. Used a 256 GB SSD (which itself was an upgrade, since the system initially inherited a pair of velociraptors in raid 0) and upgraded to a 4TB hdd from my original 1.5TB.

Given we had the thing thing, we might have similar use pattern. It mostly gaming more me and support some Matlab and simulation stuff for school. (not that i graduated, it mostly for hobby engineering stuff)

I think thing about upgrade too, but with slightly low budget. Here is what I'm thinking.

CPU, Ryzen 1600 (the extra cores may come in handy if i decide to pick up those engineering stuff again)
GPU, 1070 or similar.
Mobo, B350 based mATX (looking to down size into mATX in a few year)
Memory: 2x8GB with speed enough to do a mild overclock. add more when price hit more reasonable levels
SSD, some faster 512GB ssd.
HDD, use the old one.



(Spam removed)

 

[sm625]

So what did you end up getting?