Forced upgrade, what to do ?

[Nerfherder]

Recently I have been spending my spare cash on some pretty neat upgrades, namely a 6870 and Vertex 4.
I was happy with my CPU and MB but the ram is slow and the board wont support more than 4 gigs.
I have a Q6600 quad core and a DDR2 MB, so upgrading these things individually is pretty pointless, because they are so old (almost 5 years) its just better to do it all at once.
BUT I was happy with performance so decided to just save up.

.... THEN on friday I boot up and I get 3 beeps... and nothing.
Pull the entire rig apart testing ram, drives, PS, GPU... stays the same. Dead, 3 beeps mean memory but I have a feeling is the memory controller not the RAM. I had an error earlier that amount of memory had changed, but then when I logged on to windows the amount of RAM was the same. Now it wont boot.

FLip... so pretty much now I am forced to upgrade. The thing is I don't want to spread my self too thin but I also don't want to get something that can't be improved later. I know it sounds impossible but I want to spend about 2k and still have something I can play games on.
I suppose I could go and pick up one stick of DDR2 just to test, but what are the chances that all my RAM failed at the same time ?
I could get a replacement MB for my CPU, but they are scarce and what if the CPU is actually the problem ?
Its still a decent CPU but its very old


I suppose that the logical thing is to get it tested by some one with the correct gear and then have them tell me what to do... but i'm tempted to just get a decent board with a dual core i3 that I can upgrade later.

Would that even be worth it ? Can you play games on an i3 ?

[killadoob]

Yup you can play games on an i3 but i would go quadcore if you can. there are a few games that love the quadcore and struggle without one. So for future proofing a quadcore would be ideal but that is dependent on budget of course.

[Nerfherder]

This is what I was worried about.

[killadoob]

This is what I was worried about.

What budget you got?

[Chevron]

You can get a board and a Phenom II 965 for like R2200.

[PsyWulf]

For 2k bucks you can get an Entry 1155 board,i3 2120 and 8gig of Corsair DDR3

[Nerfherder]

Worth switching to AMD ?

[Nerfherder]

For 2k bucks you can get an Entry 1155 board,i3 2120 and 8gig of Corsair DDR3

That's what I wanted to do... eish.

[killadoob]

That's what I wanted to do... eish.

You can do it but if the budget allows for try get a quadcore, if not go for the i3

[zolly]

I got an old socket 1156 i3-530, 4 gigs of ram and a 7770. I play BF3, MP3 and a lot of games without many problems, just don't run them on absolutely max settings.

[Nerfherder]

Cool thanks.

[ponder]

What make & model MB do you have?
How many dimms do you have?

[Nerfherder]

What make & model MB do you have?
How many dimms do you have?

Its a 4 dimm MB, I don't have the model no with me now... its an Intel P45 Express Chipset, the max speed for the RAM is 800mhz and it can either take 4 gigs at DDR2 800 or 8 gigs at DDR 600/500... pretty sucky

EDIT : intel DQ965GF

[Chevron]

Worth switching to AMD ?

For your budget yes.

This forum is full of Intel fanboys though.

[stevovo]

+1 on the quad core. I had an i3 with a GTX560ti and the cpu throttled my gaming. Add an i5 later and presto quite a good boost in speed for some games