current spec

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My current hardware spec is below, I have had this machine for a few years now and it's time for a big upgrade, I have always been an Intel man, but following a previous thread of mine I am stuck between whether to stick with Intel or go AMD due to the price.

I won't be upgrading the HDDs over to SSD's for a while yet, until the price comes down, I don't play many heavy graphic games so whether I upgrade the graphics card may be a future update also.

So I am just looking for suggestions with the CPU, RAM, and Motherboard... I will probably be upgrading the RAM to 16gb as I found a great deal on ebuyer.

CPU
Intel Pentium D 915 Socket 775LGA, 2.8ghz, single core
Presler 65nm Technology
RAM
3.00 GB Single-Channel DDR2 @ 266MHz (4-4-4-12)
Motherboard
ConRoeXFire-eSATA2
Graphics
P223W (1680x1050@59Hz)
256MB GeForce 7900 GS (XFX Pine Group)
Hard Drives
244GB Seagate ST3250310AS ATA Device (SATA)
313GB SAMSUNG SAMSUNG HD320KJ ATA Device (SATA)

 

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Depends what you are doing, as with everything

It would possibly be worth upgrading the SATA drives, as you will probably be using SATA I, and you could easily take advantage of the speeds of SATA 3 now.

Actually, a good idea would be to get a mobo with SATA 3 support, and get a SATA 3 SSD (you can pick a 120GB drive up for £70 on eBuyer at the moment), and use the existing HDD for storage. Get Windows on the SSD and you will get much faster boot times. (and a really good responsiveness from Windows)

 

Ade, that was my thinking that the motherboard will definetly have SATA 3 on, also USB 3.0, my current motherboard spec has SATA 2, so will be a nice upgrade to SATA standard 3.

I noticed a 128gb SSD on ebuyer for around £70-£80 but the reviews were not great on that particular model so I may wait another couple of months as I can see prices coming down even further now that everyone is jumped on the SSD bandwagon.

The PC will be mostly used for watching online video & music streams, and then the usual day to day use.

 

I just saw this on HotUKDeals

i7 QUAD CORE, NO OS, 2600k 8GB DDR3,GTX 550Ti 500GB WIFI Asus PC 1 Yr Warranty £459 @ Compsol computers and laptops / Ebay - Hot UK Deals

The drive I was talking about was the Kingston

Kingston 120GB V+200 SSD - 2.5'' SATA-III - Read 535MB/s Write 480MB/s for £70.00 @ Ebuyer - Hot UK Deals

 

Should point out that they are all around 70-80 quid now though, so you can be highly selective!

 

I'd definitely look at a 128 GB SSD as the boot volume if upgrading and a 1-2 TB HDD drive as a data volume.

I'd also look for SATA 3 as advised.

Intel is now working on tri-gate 22 nm processors, You want 45nm or below for an upgrade.

I'd also be looking for at least a Quad core processor these days.

AMD can be ok for desktop but tend not to be as power efficient as Intel in general.

There is not much worth keeping in your current PC to be honest.

Maybe keep the keyboard, mouse, LCD, case and PSU and ditch everything else.

£600-800 should get you a decent modern bare bones system.

The old components you could keep could each be replaced by faster modern ones for £50-100 a piece.

Depending on the system you could always use on board graphics if its for business use.

If your are doing MS admin certs you probably want virtualisation support on the CPU and 12 GB + RAM.

Modern RAM is triple channel DDR3 so get that instead and ditch your old stuff.

Motherboards by ASUS and Gigabyte tend to be ok.

Have a look at overclockers and on ebay.

AMD systems are likely to be far cheaper on average.

 

good advice guys, thanks... I was thinking of doing a whole upgrade, but then looking at a cost of up to £800, I could probably buy a PC for less than that ready built... hmmm

 

Had nothing but issues with the Kingston drives at work, had about 90 failed over time. AVOID!