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Budget Upgrade £300

b0dyr0ck2006

Likes # 0

Posted August 31, 2012 at 8:50AM

Hi guys and girls, I'm looking for a little advice. I'll save you the background story but needless to say I wish to upgrade what I have and have a budget of £300 max. Based in the UK.

MY current specs are:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Motherboard: Gigabyte M68M-S2P Ram: DDR2 4GB - 2x 2GB Kingston PC2-5300 Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTS450 1GB PSU: Corsair TX 650w HDD: 2x 500GB Seagate SATA

I'm running windows 7 64bit ultimate and would like to be able to play some of the newer games, which I'm finding my old CPU it's struggling to do. I also play with a bit of video editing and music creation and general basic coding etc. this is not just my gaming/work rig but also my HTPC so need it to run blu-ray smoothly and ideally optical audio to my receiver.

So with a budget of £300 what would you do?

I was looking at something like this:

AMD Bulldozer FX-8 Eight Core 8120@8150 Black Edition 3.60Ghz (Socket AM3+) Processor - £20 Cashback £134.99

Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB 1600MHz CL9 DDR3 Vengeance Memory Two Module Kit £38.65

ASUS AM3+ SABERTOOTH 990FX S/L £121.97

TOTAL £295.61

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frybluff

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Posted August 31, 2012 at 5:53PM

What concerns me, slightly, is that you may be expecting too much, from the proposed upgrade. Whilst the bulldozer is not a BAD chip, it's not as good as you might expect an eight core to be.

You will get a decent improvement, in non gaming tasks, but while you will get some gaming boost, from better CPU, and RAM, you will still be held back by your GPU. It's not really up to a lot of modern games, unless you are playing at fairly low resolution.

I'm not too sure how well AMD, generally, handles tasks, you are doing, other than gaming. Maybe difficult to quantify, but some idea would be helpful: how far short is your current system in terms of handling your non-gaming processes? Also, what is your monitor resolution?

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