woodieMCFC said:
Ok blues I need help and advice on deciding which CPU to buy for my rig which I'm going to upgrade around spring time this year. I'm a gamer and have a new family now so playing time for me will be at weekends mainly.
So with cost and the amount of time I will play on my PC (which is less now) in mind, should I go for either Intel or AMD?
The CPU's I've chosen are:
Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz - £162 (highest price i've seen is £175)
or
AMD (Piledriver) FX-8350 4.00GHz - £144 (maintained at this price)
I've read reviews on various websites and they're all raving on about the Intel i5-3570k which I have seen the graphs on toms hardware and obviously it beats the AMD hands down. Its just that extra 18 quid I'm saving can go towards my graphics card or 2 tins of baby milk :P
You can't go wrong with Intel.
Anyway I've not long built this Rig (end of October) so it might give you some ideas :-
Novatech Vortex Tower Case - Black
Full tower with 4 fans big fans (with room for more) and built in fan control. Removable dust filters on the front top and bottom (bottom for keeping psu clean). It has loads and loads of trays for hdd and sdd and you can route the cables through the case, it also has plenty of USB3 and USB2 connectors and an estata connector on top.
£55
<a class="postlink" href="http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cases/novatechvortexcaseretail.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/comp ... etail.html</a>
GIGABYTE GA-Z77-DS3H MOTHERBOARD
Brilliant motherboard i can plug all sorts of crap in to it. Its SATA 3, USB3 and you can slap two big graphics card on it. Also the drivers that come with it make overclocking piss easy.
£74.99 (No longer in stock but you can get similar for cheaper now)
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB
1600Mhz PC3-12800 two sticks of 4GB, works great and only cost £33.59 so eventually I'm going to slap another two stick into my motherboard.
OCZ 240GB Agility 3 SSD
One of the best things i ever did was upgrade to an SSD its fucking brilliant. Booting up with just the SSD plugged in to the motherboard is crazy fast it takes literally seconds for windows 7 to load and me to be on the internet. It does slow down though when i plug in the additional hdd's but is still very fast.
£140
Hitachi 1TB Deskstar 3.5" SATA-III Hard Drive - 7200RPM 32MB
Its just a big data dump drive to me and its alright for £45.
Intel Core i7 3770K 3.5GHz Socket 1155 8MB
Fuck me is this processor good i can convert films now in convertxtodvd to iso format in around 5 minutes (4 gig full hd blueray rips take 20+ minutes but that's still very fast).
That is without overclocking.
£247.57
Coolermaster Hyper TX3 Evo
Its a big bloody cooler it over hangs the memory slots so i can't use Ram in one of the duel channels slots with the big fins (normal ram with heat sink is ok) but it still allows me to overclock the living daylights out of my machine.
£17 and well worth the money.
total cost £614
Atm I'm just using my old psu (you need one with long cables for full tower) and my old GTX 260 GLH which I'll upgrade at the beginning of March for my birthday.
Even with such an old graphics card i can still play the latest games on reasonably high settings as the processor is so good it takes some of the strain of the graphics card.
Note: I'm not bullshitting you either using that graphics card in my old machine i struggled to play bf3 on 30 fps while using a pro gamers config file. Now i can get 120+ fps no problem in bf3 with the pro gamers config file (the config file optimizes for performance not graphics quality).
Personally if i was in your situation woodie I'd dump the i5 and get an i7. I'd also get the full tower, the motherboard the Ram and the cooler for around £400+. Then just cannibalise everything you can out of your old machine and just upgrade slowly one thing at a time when you can.
