Budget Desktop upgrade

J

Jladan

Senior Member
Joined
Nov 19, 2009
Messages
846
Reaction score
101
Hi all,

So I currently have a getting long in the tooth core 2 duo setup, and have about 5K do some fixing up. My drives are all ok and apart from the fact that its DDR2 and the graphix card is getting on its still performing perfectly for what I need.

Current specs are:

Old Core 2 Duo 2.1 at 2.8
6 gigs DDR 2 800
8800 GTS
10000 ROM cheetahs in RAID 1 and a whole rack of other drives
600 Thermaltake PSU

So my thinking goes along the line of upgrading CPU to a newer core 2 duo (they are dirt cheap at the moment) and OC the hell out it and then get a geforce 460 or something similar. Goal being to keep my PC able to play newer games at 1650 x 1080 at higher quality settings without breaking the bank. thinking core I7 / next gen chips can be 2011 or 2012's problem.

This raised 2 questions:

1. Will the PSU keep up with the additional power requirements? The PSU was oringally aquired to run 2 8800's in SLI
2. Will the CPU / DDR2 combo choke the graphics card ?

Any suggestions / help appreciated
 
Oh yeah the PSU will keep up. A good Core 2 Duo 45nm overclocked should do well. Nice upgrade.
 
600W PSU should suffice for the i7 upgrade. My i7 940 + 2x MSI GTX 460's, all overclocked, never exceeded 530W.

The E8600's can be overclocked like hell, but they're still quite expensive brand new.

Now it might be worth while to rather go for the AMD HD 6850 / 6870. The GTX 460's are still brilliant.
 
1) Keep the PSU
2) 460 1GB or 6870 depending on the relative prices you can acquire each for.. I'd take the 6870 though :)
3) donate me your CPU :D Please
 
Hurrah , good news the PSU can stay :)

Onto my second question. I've read articles about the CPU bottlenecking the GPU, however considering most games still only really see the 2 cores that the core 2 duo (for now at least, I'm sure the game producers are workign on properly multithreaded game apps). The question is will a Core 2 Duo at 2.8 choke a 460 oc edition?
 
That is very dependant on the game and resolution.
I would say not choke, but a game such as BFBC2 (I love this example) needs a quad core for decent performance. However most games are still happy to run on a dual core, so I wouldn't worry to much...
 
Last edited:
Besides donating, I will BUY your old CPU etc... obviously not a a rediculous price but I have a P4 3Ghz, not core 2 ANYTHING!

Was going to go for the Q6600 but a bit out of my price range :( Wuld be really nice to get a decent overclocking capable Core 2 Duo. E8600?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X