PC Upgrade for the other half.

[Flibster]

As I've got the spare time now to finally do it, time to upgrade the other half's PC.

But to what...

She's currently running a X2 @ 2.7ghz, a 1950XT and a old Epox s939 motherboard.

Any upgrade will involve a new Motherboard, cpu, memory and graphics card. Probably a new HDD as well as I'm sure she's running PATA.

I'm thinking:
3ghz C2D or a 2.4 C2Quad
Big huge heatsink. Probably something like the Arctic Cooling Freezer XTREME
4gb of ram. 2x2gb geil probably
4850 or 4870 - purely because I prefer the drivers that ATI produce to the nvidia ones.
Motherboards - I have no idea about. Gigabit lan is essential though. Probably go with an Intel chipset.
HDD - Samsung F1 job. Running 2 of the 750gb ones in my machine and they rock.
Will be installing Vista Ultimate 64bit on it too

Any suggestions?

[Mark]

Unless she does a lot of multitasking () or uses software that can take advantage of the extra cores, then faster C2D might be better than slower C2Quad.

I'm a fan of Gigabyte motherboards, especially the solid capacitor variants.

The rest seems about right.

Make sure you've got signed drivers for everything though - otherwise running Vista 64 will get annoying rather quickly.

[MarcLister]

No idea on your budget but what about:

CPU - E8200 - £114 / E8400 - £123

Motherboard - Asus P5Q - £86. Is an Intel P45

Memory - Scan don't sell Geil but I've just bought some OCZ DDR2 6400 4Gb (2 x 2Gb) CL4 RAM.

Graphics - 4850 - £118 / 4870 - £182. Totally agree with you on ATI.

Hard disk - Samsung 1Tb - £77

CPU Heatsink - Noctua NH-U12P - £42. Mahoosive. Should keep a C2D nice and cool and quiet too.

CPU fan - NF-P12 - £14. You wouldn't need this but for a bit of extra cooling you could get another CPU fan. The Noctua heatsink has one but get another one and you could put two on the heatsink in a push-pull arrangement. Simply put one blows air onto the heatsink and the other pulls air off. Arrange the heatsink and fans so the fan blowing onto the heatsink is blowing air in the direction of the case rear/exhaust fan. Then get the second fan to blow air off the heatsink towards the case rear.

If my maths is right then that above would cost from £481 for the E8200 and 4850 but no RAM. Then up to £524 with the E8400 and 4870. This is what I just got for £56. But there is some Corsair 4Gb CL5 for £40.

No idea what the PSU is like but you could get a Corsair 520HX for about £70 from Scan.

Like I say, no idea on your budget and whether you need a new PSU/Case etc but I hope the above gives you something to think about and then diss me.

[divine]

I agree with all of the above bar the heatsink, i'd be getting the Freezer 7 Pro just out of preference and price, as £56 is hugely overkill on air cooling if you're running at stock or just a mild clock (3.8GHz and lower)

RAM you don't really need special edition stuff, as from memory PC2-6400 is good for running an E8400 at 3.6GHz whilst running the RAM at standard speed still.

PSU i'm a fan Seasonic if you can afford one (500W +, i'd go for a nice 600W personally). If not, Antec, Corsair and Tagan are making nice PSUs atm.

edit - also, if going for the Samsung F1s bear in mind the 320/640/1TB are faster and quieter than the 500 and 750GB as they use newer and better ~330GB platters, rather than the older 250GB ones.

[Mark]

The Freezer 7 Pro is certainly a good'un (I've got one) - it'll quite happily cool my E6600 (2.4 OC'd to 2.88) to 50-ish under full load with the fan inaudible above the other system noise, which is very acceptable indeed, but the Noctua is a very good cooler too. I wouldn't bother with the second fan if there's a case exhaust fan nearby though (it'll likely be self-defeating).

[divine]

Indeed, i'm not doubting it's good, just seems a little overkill (at £42 vs £17) unless he's planning on rinsing the balls out of whatever CPU he puts in there.

[Stan_Lite]

I have difficulty recommending anything other than the Q6600. Yes, I know it's "old" 65nm technology but for value for money it's difficult to beat - 4 cores for around £135. Most will overclock to 3.0GHz without touching the voltage, which means you can still use the stock cooler. If you want to clock it further or you want a quieter cooler, get the Freezer 7 Pro, brilliant cooler for under £20.

I'm using 2x2Gb sticks of PC2-6400 OCZ Gold in a couple of my rigs and it's good solid RAM for a very reasonable price.

Like Mark, I have a preference for Gigabyte boards, much prefer them to Asus. I'm using P35 DS3s in a few of my rigs but, if I was building a new rig, I'd probably go with P43/P45 or higher - bit more expensive but good for future upgrades.

I'm with Divine on the PSU - Seasonic make good solid, reliable PSUs.

Haven't tried the newer ATI cards but if I was upgrading, I'd probably go for one due to Nvidia driver support being pants.

[Justsomebloke]

I'm running a Gigabyte Mobo on my main rig, A GA-P35-DQ6 Lovely Mobos but having read around since I got it the Asus P45 is supposed to be a better board than the current Gigabyte P45 board. Having said that my P35 was/is an Awesome mobo dripping with features. Easy install, great features & it looks the nutz once in, (Lots of Copper )
I'd say budget wise a P35 would do most people as you get All the features without the current gen premium on price.
Chip wise it has to be a Dual core even though I myself run a Xeon Quad core. Personally I have the time to tweak my system to the max & am always messing about with the infinity's & assigning them accordingly but for an easy maintainable PC I'd go for a Dual core just for ease of use. They also clock better so it'll give you a bit of head room in the future.
4 Gig of that Geil Black Dragon @ 1066 would do nicely an all for around 55-60 quid.
GFX card is down to how much money you have left & what you prefer, Having run both Ati & NVid for extended periods I have No preference surprisingly. I have Always managed to get my games running at a high level & snobbishly blame users for PC/Game incompatibility not GFX cards or Systems.
Also.
No mention of a PSU there ? I needed to upgrade my PSU when I went P35 as I needed more & different fittings, Bare that in mind.

[divine]

Originally Posted by Bigstan

I have difficulty recommending anything other than the Q6600. Yes, I know it's "old" 65nm technology but for value for money it's difficult to beat - 4 cores for around £135. Most will overclock to 3.0GHz without touching the voltage, which means you can still use the stock cooler. If you want to clock it further or you want a quieter cooler, get the Freezer 7 Pro, brilliant cooler for under £20.

Depends.

The E8400 is cheaper, clocks better, runs cooler and unless you're using applications that can really properly take advantage of four cores, will at stock outperform a 3GHz overclocked Q6600 in most cases.

With so few things really able to take advantage of four cores, i'd question the value of quad core unless being used for fairly specific tasks still.

[Mark]

Pretty much what I said above. Aside distributed computing, I haven't yet found software that can take advantage of more than two cores (unless, of course, you run more than one copy). Not saying it doesn't exist, but it's still very much a niche sector.