Gaming rig needs an upgrade. But what to spend the £120/$160 on?

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Hi all,

In advance, genuine thanks to any rig owners who can spare some basic knowledge to help me out.

I'm about to throw around £120/$160USD at my rig, which I purchased secondhand 6 months ago.

My objective is FPShooter games on higher settings, retaining around 60fpsecond.

As this is my first rig, and I'm a relative beginner, I'm not clear on what components I should now replace / add to the mix.

What should I spend my hard earned money on next, guys?

Here's what I've got:

E8400 CORE2DUO PROCESSOR 3ghz 6 MB

Video Card: ATI Radeon HD '4870 X2'

MOBO: Asus P5K Premium wifi ap

- DMA/ATA 133 (Ultra) x 1, DMA/ATA 66 (Ultra) x 1, Socket LGA775, ATX, Intel P35 Chipset

Sound card: Creative SB X-Fi ExtremeGamer

Memory: 6GB

(2x2GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2

+(2x1GB) Geil Black Dragon 2GB 2x 1GB 800Mhz Dual Channel DDR2

Hard drive: 750GB Samsung HD753LJ

Operating System Version: Windows 7 (64 bit)

If you can advise, I pledge in return to think that you are most excellent. :)

Thanks.
 
Tbh fella all you really can do on that budget is buy a decent air cooler and clock the cpu a little. you dont have enough money to make any big hardware changes and tbh what your have with a bit of clocking would do you well.
 
If you want to see a significant speed increase with that sort of a budget I would get an SSD.

Intel do a great one in their value range for about £90. It's 40gb so more than enough to store Win7 providing you know how to cut the fat off the bone a bit (disable hibernate and restore etc).

And then get a Titan Fenrir cooler as Tom says and do some overclocking. The E8400 has masses of headroom if partnered with a good cooler.

Should come in around the £120 mark plus some shipping but the SSD will transform your PC into a totally different animal.
 
yer a decent CPU cooler on that budget get something like a prolwmtech megahalms and some noctua fans,orr a noctua heatsink i can remember the name
 
Unless you are willing to sell the component that you wish to replace, I don't think £120 will get you far other than what the people above have said.
 
SSD make no difference to frame rates in games, just makes everything snappy. His best best really is a Noctua NH-D14 and a decent overclock, benefits all round that way.
 
name='tinytomlogan' said:
SSD make no difference to frame rates in games, just makes everything snappy. His best best really is a Noctua NH-D14 and a decent overclock, benefits all round that way.
Click to expand...

Of course. £120 (aside from a decent cooler) won't get you much of anything these days. An SSD will make a difference though. Maybe not in games but tbh he has more than enough for that.
 
I think what he means is how the heck is he supposed to answer that. Proof will most certainly be in the pudding I would guess. Would take a rocket scientist to predict the gains from an overclock. Too many variables.
 
Well which games in particular are you looking at? As some games use the CPU a lot more than the GPU they will respond a lot better to overclocking your processor to 4GHz. Others wont use the CPU as much so may only increase by 1 or 2 fps.
 
Guys, very cool of you all to chip in for me. Thanks.

Revised Budget: £150/£225 + ...

So I'm being a bit tight with my cash? OK, all-in as much as I can currently afford:

£150/$225 + Sale price of replaced component.



CPU Requirements:

DuckySpud: Most of the time I'm playing L4D2 (CPU intensive, currently shows both cores 85%-100%) and MW2. Does this indicate that an SSD would give improved results?

Annoyingly, L4D2 was fine with all settings maxed (except AA: 4 x edge detect) until very recently when the game started lagging during busy scenes, and ONLY when turning and strafing at the same time. An unfortunately common problem with L4D2) which has several supposed fixes, none of which work for me.

I spent so long trying to solve the problem that I decided to upgrade instead, hence my post.

(Previous attempts to resolve L4D2 lag: Game reinstall, defrag, firewall disable, hard drive defrag/create extra space, disable ALL unneccessary startups and processes and exe's and AV, enable/disable multicore support, ATI/XFI driver updates/older drivers, ran Avira/Malwarebytes/Defender/AdAware/SBSD).

Overclocking:

Got a feeling that asking "So how do i overclock my system please" without first doing a bit of research will get me shouted at, so I'll scout the pages here and get an idea of just how much knowledge I am going to need :)
 
An SSD as stated will not improve your framerates. It will just make the system snappier at running tasks and getting into Windows, but only because of read and load times.

Your CPU and GPU can only take on the computational tasks at the speed they are set at. Stuffing them in faster will not make your system process them any faster.

To make games go faster you are going to have to either overclock quite a lot to see a notable difference or replace the GPU. Another good idea for your machine may be going for a Q6600 as these can be easily overclocked to 3ghz with a half decent cooler and have four cores. If the specific game you play is multi threaded to use four cores then that will boost performance quite considerably.

I almost went for a Q6600 myself but I had a bum motherboard (eVGA 680i) that would not support anything more than that. That would have been end of the road. Thus I decided to spend around £70 more all in over the price of the Q6600 and go for a new board and Phenom 2 940. It supported my existing ram too. This has given me the option to go to six cores and the Phenom 2 work pretty much on par with Intel's Q series CPUs.

Your budget would allow for a Q6600 and possibly if you bargain hunt for long enough a QX6700. This is basically an unlocked Q6600 so a lot easier for laymen to overclock.

I just had a poke around and sure enough

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Intel-Core-2-...m&pt=UK_Motherboards_CPUs&hash=item2308047ccb

Falls into your budget. Pushed gently that should produce better results in multi threaded games.
 
Oh definitely yeah.

There's no way you can overclock without a decent cooler. I'm just wondering if his board will support the newer 45nm quads by Intel. I shall check :)

It seems you can indeed put the newer Q series in there.
 
Thanks for the input and explanation Tom, and AlienALX for some wicked personal shopping.

Seems I forgot to include details of my current cooler. You probably know whether this is any good at all:

Thermalright Ultra 120 + crappy Xilence 7-blade fan.

Reckon this gives me any room to:

a) OC on my current setup, before I shell out any cash?

b) Do a little OC'ing on QX6700/similar, before shelling out on a proper cooler/fan?
 
Simple then fella, buy a Yate Loon 2000rpm fan, and get clocking that dual. Its been a while since Ive played with 775 but youll get 3.6ghz dead easy. 3.8 - 4.2ghz depending on your cooling and what the cpu is actually like.

Aim for 400fsb with about 1.4 - 1.5v. Key thing is to watch the temps though dude. download prime95 and hwmonitor.

70c - 80c is max. Just remember volt = heat ;)

You may need to tweak the NB and FSB volts but thats all stuff we can help you with ;)
 
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