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Upgrading help required

N

nindisp

Junior Member
Hi,

Wondering if the experts can help, as i'm quite out of touch with latest specs etc.
I have a pc about 5yrs old, just got a message the other day that the HDD is going to fail.
Also been thinking about giving it a little upgrade anyway.

Can you help me with what is the best most cost effective way of upgrading current setup.

I do want, extra RAM, a solid state HDD for at least the windows 7 64-bit that i have, and a normal HDD for everything else.
Maybe upgrade video card if mine is outdated... I play a few games (fifa/civ) although they seem to run well enough as it is.
I don't want to change motherboard, and want to do it myself so want easy components I can do myself.

Current Setup:
CUP Intel Core i7 920 Bloomfield
Specification Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz
Motherboard: Mainboard Model EX58-UD5
RAM: Corsair 6GB Triple channel DDR3 (in slot 1,3,5)
Graphics: ATI radeon hd 5870
Hard Disk: 931GB

Budget: between £150 up to a max of £250GBP.

Thank you for any help!
 
thank you both... just wondering for an extra 100 could I get a new graphics card that would be much of an upgrade on the current one?
 
Burpo said:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-NVIDIA-750Ti-PCI-E-Graphics/dp/B00IGQ4UX8
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, that's a sidegrade except for the VRAM amount. Not even close to worth buying.

I would consider GTX 960 2GB / R9 280 3GB the slowest cards to upgrade to from a 5870, but GTX 970 / R9 290 would be preferable. Which means if you can't afford that - keep saving or buy used. These upgrades would also require a CPU upgrade - or a heavy overclock. i7-920 @ 2.66GHz just isn't good enough for current mid-high cards.

You have to consider the $ spent per % increase in framerate...
  • R9 270 at £120 is only 30% faster in most games -> about £4.00 per % increase in framerate, plus double the VRAM
  • R9 280 at £150 is already 60% faster -> about £2.50 per % increase in framerate, plus triple the VRAM
  • R9 290 at £210 is even better: 130% faster -> only about £1.60 per % increase in framerate, plus quadruple the VRAM!
 
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