Upgarde advice needed

Psycho Pitbull

Psycho Pitbull

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I have been out of the IT field for about 4 years now, so subsequently I have seriously dumbed down on the latest hardware out there.

So I basically need some help with upgrading my loyal serving gaming PC.

Here are the current specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon 7750 Dual Core 2.7 Ghz
MB: Asus M2N68-AM Plus
RAM: 4GB DDR2 memory
PSU: Some generic 500W one
GPU: GeForce 9600 GT

So I was thinking of upgrading the CPU, GPU and PSU

Here is what I was looking at:
GPU: AMD HD6770
PSU: Probaly getting a 700w one
CPU: Either Phenom II 4x 955 3.2 Ghz or Phenom II 6x 1075T 3 Ghz

Made some rough calculations, and the price for this will probably be around R3500 - R4000 'ish.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, is it worth it, is there maybe something else I need to consider.

P.S: Oh, it's for gaming purposes, mainly getting it ready for BF3 :D

Thanx
 
Is "Upgarde" almost like avant-garde? :p

You'd probably need a new motherboard. It's all fine and well that AMD boards use the same socket for years and years, but it becomes a problem since you're still using DDR2. 4GB should be quite enough (more than enough for any games etc), but if you ever want to upgrade you might find DDR2 can be hard to come by these days, and much more expensive than DDR3.

A 700W PSU is waaaay overkill for what you're planning. Not to mention expensive. You could save youself some money there. Especially if you're using a 500W no-name brand one now, a good-quality 450W would probably deliver more actual power. In fact, taking the specs you want to upgrade to (along with a few assumptions like you have 3HDD's for example, and using an HD6790 which draws more power), the PSU calculator says your system will need only 351W at peak. So 400W would be more than enough.

http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine
 
TJ99 said:
Is "Upgarde" almost like avant-garde? :p

You'd probably need a new motherboard. It's all fine and well that AMD boards use the same socket for years and years, but it becomes a problem since you're still using DDR2. 4GB should be quite enough (more than enough for any games etc), but if you ever want to upgrade you might find DDR2 can be hard to come by these days, and much more expensive than DDR3.

A 700W PSU is waaaay overkill for what you're planning. Not to mention expensive. You could save youself some money there. Especially if you're using a 500W no-name brand one now, a good-quality 450W would probably deliver more actual power. In fact, taking the specs you want to upgrade to (along with a few assumptions like you have 3HDD's for example, and using an HD6790 which draws more power), the PSU calculator says your system will need only 351W at peak. So 400W would be more than enough.

http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine
Click to expand...

Thanx for that.
I kinda "borrowed" the PSU from my friend before he moved out of our place, he said that it is apparantly a very good PSU (I was just too lazy to look at any branding on the module)
I only run 2 Hdd's on it atm.
I was thinking of getting a new mobo at a later stage.
 
Last edited:
If you do end up buying the new motherboard, just buy a Core i3. It will be faster.
 
No Ancalagon an i3 will not be faster than an AMD Phenom II x4. The i3 is a dual core while the x4 is quad core and the x6 is 6 core. In all the benchmarks the X4 compares with the i5.

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T passmark of 6,052
AMD Phenom II X4 965 passmark of 4,288
Intel Core i3-2120 @ 3.30GHz passmark of 4,077

@Pitbull I am looking at the same thing at the moment, but noticed the new AMD A8-3850 APUs. It includes a Radeon 6550 GPU built in to the CPU, that is why it is called an APU. It retails for about R1400 the motherboards for about R1200. You can then add in some of the other 6 series AMD graphics cards as a crossfire. From the reviews I have seen it is a pretty decent setup. The down side is that the A8-3850 does not seem to be as easy to overclock as the black edition X4 or X6. I believe the x4 black edition with a lot of cooling will overclock like you won't believe.

Add in some 8GB memory, and a 1TB drive and you are looking at about
 
The X6 1090T BE (Black Edition) costs less than the X6 1075T - or at least at Prophecy Shop ;)
At Rebeltech, the X6 1075T is cheaper than the X6 1090T BE, but not by much.

I'd rather recommend that you go for the X4 965 BE, which costs less than the X6 1075T/1090T BE, because it's cheaper and you'll get better performance in games with it than with the X6.

Your motherboard should support all the AM3 CPU's, but the performance might be slightly restricted due to it being just an AM2+ socket motherboard. Just make sure that you update your BIOS to 0603 or newer before attempting to replace the CPU!

Getting a 700W PSU for any single GPU graphics card is absurd. The HD6790 doesn't consume that much power, so I'd suppose that your current 500W PSU should suffice, unless you're going to overclock both the graphics card and your CPU.

If you really want to get a new PSU, look at something like the Corsair GS600/Antec HCG520, which would allow you to overclock both the CPU and GPU by a great deal.

I would actually suggest that you go for a better graphics card than the HD6790, since you have a budget of like R4k.

For R4k, you should be able to upgrade to something like:
AMD X4 965BE @ R 1,328
Corsair GS600 @ R720
MSI HD6870 Hawk @ R1,899
* Prices taken from Takealot - but the CPU & GFX card is out of stock

Ideally you'd want to get an aftermarket CPU cooler, so that you can overclock the CPU, which should be very easy with the Black Edition CPU, since you just increase the CPU multiplier :D

Could you please try to find out what PSU you currently have, and if you may keep it? Because a decent 500W PSU - like the Antec HCG520 would be more than enough for a single GPU setup!
 
Logo said:
No Ancalagon an i3 will not be faster than an AMD Phenom II x4. The i3 is a dual core while the x4 is quad core and the x6 is 6 core. In all the benchmarks the X4 compares with the i5.

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T passmark of 6,052
AMD Phenom II X4 965 passmark of 4,288
Intel Core i3-2120 @ 3.30GHz passmark of 4,077

@Pitbull I am looking at the same thing at the moment, but noticed the new AMD A8-3850 APUs. It includes a Radeon 6550 GPU built in to the CPU, that is why it is called an APU. It retails for about R1400 the motherboards for about R1200. You can then add in some of the other 6 series AMD graphics cards as a crossfire. From the reviews I have seen it is a pretty decent setup. The down side is that the A8-3850 does not seem to be as easy to overclock as the black edition X4 or X6. I believe the x4 black edition with a lot of cooling will overclock like you won't believe.

Add in some 8GB memory, and a 1TB drive and you are looking at about
Click to expand...

Thanx for that Logo
I am looking more towards the Phenom II x6 1070T (that is as high as my current mobo can support)
WRT overclocking..... i don't really do that, so cooling shouldn't be a problem.
I do currently have a 1TB Hdd in my machine along with an old IDE Hdd.
 
Ok.... so I think I will leave out the PSU for the moment.
Seems I might have enough juice in the tank to run everything hundred cement.
 
Pada said:
For R4k, you should be able to upgrade to something like:
AMD X4 965BE @ R 1,328
Corsair GS600 @ R720
MSI HD6870 Hawk @ R1,899
* Prices taken from Takealot - but the CPU & GFX card is out of stock
!
Click to expand...

I don't think my mobo supports the 965 AMD, I do believe that can take the 955 and the 960.
 
Nope its faster

Just because the X4 is a quad core, doesnt make it magically faster. The Core i3 has two very efficient and high clocked cores, with hyperthreading, so in most cases it will be faster.
 
New AMD Bulldozer chips will be out very soon and the prices look good compared to the Intel ones, will just have to wait and see how they compare. The top of the line AMD 8-core is cheaper than a Intel 2500k from what I read a day or two ago.
 
New new Sandy Bridge Core i3 are indeed impressive in terms of performance compared to the AMD AM3 CPU, but going for an Core i3 would mean that he has to get a new motherboard, CPU and RAM instead of just a R1400 worth CPU.

It would probably be a month of so before the AMD Bulldozer would be available in SA, but I might be wrong - or at least I hope I'm wrong :D
 
Yeah but if he needs to buy a new motherboard he may as well go Sandy Bridge, thats my point. Benchmarks that I've seen of BD havent been promising, so I wouldnt buy a new AMD motherboard until I can see official BD benchmarks.
 
Yes, when he is going to buy a new motherboard, then he might as well just wait for Bulldozer or go for Sandy Bridge - depending on the performance & price of the Bulldozer components.

I'm pretty sure that his motherboard would support the AMD X4 965 BE CPU, since it supports all the other AM3 CPU's.
 
if I needed a new PC today, I would buy Sandy Bridge. If I could afford to wait, I'd wait until Bulldozer. Although that may be 2-3 months away since only the server CPUs have started shipping so far.

If his motherboard supports it, then I'd probably just buy a Phenom X4 or maybe a Phenom X2 if his motherboard could unlock the additional cores.
 
Pada said:
Yes, when he is going to buy a new motherboard, then he might as well just wait for Bulldozer or go for Sandy Bridge - depending on the performance & price of the Bulldozer components.

I'm pretty sure that his motherboard would support the AMD X4 965 BE CPU, since it supports all the other AM3 CPU's.
Click to expand...

Here is a list of CPU's that i managed to find that will work with my mobo:
http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-ASUS/M2N68-AM_PLUS.html

Oddly enough the 965 doesn't seem to be on there.



Thanx to all for the bits of info, I think I have got a good idea of what I need to do now.
 
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