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Rev

closed wrote: »

You could buy a media player, and put £400 into the bank for when you really need it?

Already have a media player which will be moving downstairs.

weegie.geek wrote: »

PCI(e?) sata controller and a bigger case?

Don't actually have room for a bigger case.

I know it may seem impractical to some, and I do appreciate the alternative suggestions, this is MSE after all lol. But I have cash, I'd like to spend it on upgrading my CPU and mobo and graphics card (although the G210 looks just the job).

So can someone tell me what gets me the best bang for buck these days...please lol.

weegie.geek

Best bang for the buck isn't a straight cut thing these days unfortunately. It completely depends what applications you'll run. If the apps you run are well threaded, the more cores the better, so the 6 core AMD stuff is worth looking at. If it's not, raw clock speed is king so you'll be looking at I7 probably. You'll be able to get I7 cpu/board/DDR3/G210 for around the 450 quid mark. You might find you'll need a beefier PSU depending on how good your current one is.

Rev

weegie.geek wrote: »

Best bang for the buck isn't a straight cut thing these days unfortunately. It completely depends what applications you'll run. If the apps you run are well threaded, the more cores the better, so the 6 core AMD stuff is worth looking at. If it's not, raw clock speed is king so you'll be looking at I7 probably. You'll be able to get I7 cpu/board/DDR3/G210 for around the 450 quid mark. You might find you'll need a beefier PSU depending on how good your current one is.

Thanks.

The 6 core AMD stuff, is that the socket AM3 CPUs?

Currently have this PSU.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131052

Is i7 worth the extra over i5?

weegie.geek

The corsair should be ok, yeah. If you were getting a beefier video card then you'd probably need a more powerful one, but 450W for I7/G210/drives/etc will be fine.

The Thubans are AM2+/AM3, yep.

Whether the i7 is worth the extra depends on what chips you're looking at I guess. In some benchmarks there's not much difference between similarly clocked chips, but in others the i7 obviously sneaks ahead.

In all honesty, if I were upgrading I'd probably go 6-core AMD partially because most of the work my current quad core does is video encoding which will use all 6 cores quite happily, and the difference in cost between an AM2+/AM3 motherboard and a socket 1366 is significant. The cheapest S1366 ones are nearly 3x the price of the price of the cheapest AM3 ones. That difference will buy you a few GB of ram...

Rev

So something like this:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/186428

Will be a better buy than this

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/151477

I've always been a bit of an intel fan, had one AMD system in my life and had nothing but trouble with it, kind of put me off, although I know it shouldn't have.

weegie.geek

Like I said, it depends what you'll be doing with it. that 50 quid difference will buy you a 1TB drive. Is the extra performance worth the difference? Take a look at benchmarks for what you'll be using it for.

ddoris

You can get i7 920 for £165-170 del. -You don't need one!
2TB h/drive about £90 + low power consuming graphics, like 4670 or newer, passively cooled.
I3 or i7 ,the i5's are unnecessary.

Rev

ddoris wrote: »

I3 or i7 ,the i5's are unnecessary.

So you think i3 or i7? Why is i5 unnecessary?

I know I don't need i7, I know I don't really need an upgrade, as I've said, I WANT to upgrade and am looking for what is best for my budget.

JasX

other options depending on what you have already would be to buy something you don't have that could be easily migrated to your next PC and still be of benefit, eg you can get a blu-ray writer drive for £130 odd these days (reader only for £50), for a similar price you can get a high end sound card (passivley cooled) that'll take a little load off the CPU and give you high end digital/optical/dolby compliant surround sound, or perhaps a decent surround sound speaker set. All would enhance a HD movie experience, plus when you come to upgrade/get a new machine you can drop all those components into the new machine and nothing will have been wasted