To give my old PC a new lease of life?

Smudge · 26 Sep 2009 at 14:27

Hi all,

I fancy giving my PC a bit of an upgrade but wanted to ask the fine folk of OCUK for some advice. My current setup is Asus P5Q DH Deluxe (rev 1.xx I got it when they first came out), Q6600 at 2.9ghz, 4gb corsair value ram, 8800GTX, oldskool raptor boot drive and oldskool raptor storage drive.

I was thinking of slapping the following in:

XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Crucial M225 64GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive
OCZ Blade Series 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-9200C5 Low Voltage Dual Channel

and trying to bump the cpu clock up a little.

Which comes to £385

BUT... would I be better spending my money on something else? I5 maybe? I'm trying to get a noticeable upgrade without breaking the bank.

Thanks for any replies.
Matt.

Drake22 · 26 Sep 2009 at 14:47

oc your q6600 to 3.5 and get decent cooler for it. (titan fenrir for example is cheap now)
and get 5850. (or even 5870)

That will do.
no need in ssd and that dodgy ram.

The next step will be i9 when it comes out next year. No point doing i5 or i7 over q6600

Zenduri · 26 Sep 2009 at 15:06

realsitically who will be able to afford £400+ i9...... Bar the people already minted or paying through work.
The i5 is mainstream yes but its a upgrade path thats easier on the wallet

Zenduri · 26 Sep 2009 at 15:18

Personally I would do this:

1)Buy 5850
2) Slap the dual platter samsung f3 1TB as your storage drive, im hearing it has a very nice read write speed.
3) Slap the corsair h50 on your q6600 and use some mx5, drop the CPU temps and overclock as high as you can safely go.