What should Santa get me?

cryptic1

cryptic1

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Hello chaps :),

With the silly season upon us I'm yet again tempted to upgrade my pc. However with Mweb's 4 meg account I find myself looking for more HDD space. I've been wanting to upgrade since 2009 and I've now become stuck in lga775 land :o. My pc needs are fairly simple - no hardcore gaming (well now and again), watching movies and series and basically that's it.

My specs are:
Q6600 (stock clock), 4gig, 9600gt 1gig and limited by a P5n32esli mobo.

Hard drives have become cheap with a 2TB going for R 900 at PC Zone. How much longer do you guys think my current spec would last? It turns 3 years old in January '11.
 
Well, you could do with a newer graphics card (AMD HD6850/6870 or NVidia GTX 460), but the CPU & RAM should still last you at least a year.

What do you have in terms of hard drive space & power supply?

Since you have a Mweb 4Mbps account, I would actually go as far as to say that you wouldn't need that much HDD space any more, since you can just download something whenever you need it :D
 
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I'd make it last till early next year rather :) If you want, you can get a CM hyper212 and give your chip a little OC if it feels slugish.. but I doubt you neeeeed an upgrade.. maybe buy a 6850/460/6870 graphics card to keep your gaming going

EDIT: lol pada beat me to it :/
 
Pada said:
Well, you could do with a newer graphics card (AMD HD6850/6870 or NVidia GTX 460), but the CPU & RAM should still last you at least a year.

What do you have in terms of hard drive space & power supply?

Since you have a Mweb 4Mbps account, I would actually go as far as to say that you wouldn't need that much HDD space any more, since you can just download something whenever you need it :D
Click to expand...

Hey Pada :), well I've got 2 old external 500gig Seagates (2007 & 08 respectively), 1TB, 500 & 250gig Seagate (2009). The other 200 & 320 are 2005 & 2006 if I can remember. I dload HD / BRay movies and series so ja drive space is important, Dexter seasons 1-4 was like 17gigs a season.

There are certain movies (wink) or series you'd have to keep.

Edit - I have a 2 year old 700w psu
 
hehe Nakedpeanut :p

Wow cryptic, you surely have many small hard drives. Since you're downloading BluRay movies, it would make sense to get another HDD, because it certainly takes a couple of hours to download those (10GB each?) even on a 4Mbps line.
Could you perhaps be a little bit more specific on the 700W PSU brand & model?
 
Pada said:
hehe Nakedpeanut :p

Wow cryptic, you surely have many small hard drives. Since you're downloading BluRay movies, it would make sense to get another HDD, because it certainly takes a couple of hours to download those (10GB each?) even on a 4Mbps line.
Could you perhaps be a little bit more specific on the 700W PSU brand & model?
Click to expand...

Thanz Pada, it's a no name brand psu. Apparently they don't make them anymore so says the 'pal' that I got it from.
 
what budget are you looking at. I'd look to get a good sized monitor / tv.
 
Yeah, a slightly newer graphics card, in the region of R1,500 - R2,000: from the lower mid-range of a 1Gb AMD 5770, to an AMD 6850 or Nvidia 460GTX, would keep your gaming needs sorted. Tb HDD's are insanely cheap, so you could consolidate some of those smaller devices and rather keep your important data (!!!) safe.
 
Upgrade the mobo and cpu as well. I had that exact same combo and you can forget about overclocking a Q6600 on that mobo. My Q6600 actually became the bottleneck when gaming, so getting a faster GPU is pointless if you don't have the juice and pipes to feed it correctly.
 
Penquin said:
....My Q6600 actually became the bottleneck when gaming, so getting a faster GPU is pointless if you don't have the juice and pipes to feed it correctly.
Click to expand...
I find that hard to believe, unless you got like an HD 5970 or something ridiculous.
 
Pada said:
I find that hard to believe, unless you got like an HD 5970 or something ridiculous.
Click to expand...
Nope, this was with my 8800GT. Playing Bad Company 2, getting 25 fps. CPU usage was maxed out and GPU usage only running @ 70%. Which is indicative of an under powered CPU not being able to feed the GPU enough juice. Now I've got all 6 cores running @ 45% with my 5850 @ 60%, getting 60 - 100fps all the time.
 
Wait till January. Sandy Bridge !!! ;) Prices are going to crash through the floor... I hope :wtf:
 
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