£600 to upgrade PC

[jamesebaker]

Need some advice:

This is what I want, an Athlon 64 processor, 256mb graphics card, a motherboard, 1Gb RAM (currently have 512Mb DDR RAM), new case and possibliy a new soundcard but within this budget I may have to keep my Audigy 2 card I currently have and upgrade later. My hard drives are fine (I have 480Gb in total spread over 3 HDD's), got a new TFT so thats not a problem, CDR and disk drives are fine, ethernet & wireless cards are all good. I suppose I may need to buy 1 Gb DDR RAM so I'll end up having 1.5Gb in total unless you guys recommend just buying 512Mb and putting them together?

The PC will be used for a variety of things: Rendering architectural drawings, downloading music and eventually music production hence I may buy a better soundcard later on. So it needs to be an all round performer but I want it to render as quickly as possible.

Is there anything I've missed out? My budget is a bit flexible and I can add bits on later but ideally I want to keep it under £600 if possible.

Are there any barebones systems out there that are really good value at high spec or do you pay a premium for them to build it for you.

Where are the cheapest places to buy seperate parts from? Any comparison sites/shopbots you'd recommend for PC bits?

Thanks in advance for your help :o)

[Halcyon]

Hi,
Welcome to the forums.

Well if you are going to be doing a lot of rendering, RAM is your main contender that you need to concentrate on, and ofcourse a good graphics card too. A 256mb ATI card should be fine.
I presume your new motherboard will be PCI-E ready so look at PCI-E graphic cards.
For the RAM......If I was you I would sell the 512mb you have on ebay and get yourself a stick of 1GB.
Do this becuase 1) it will mean less slots are taken up by loads of 512mb ones, and 2) if you want to stick in another 1gb too, it will run perfectly nicely in dual channel with the other one in there.

With that amount of money you should have no problem getting what you need.

As for sites I'd reccomend..... For memory:
http://www.crucial.com/uk/
Just choose your motherboard and it will find you the right type of RAM.
And for PC parts, I tend to use www.overclockers.co.uk

Buy a Dual core Amd x2 I promise you will not be sorry

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/AMD_64_X2.html £246

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatal...ocket_939.html mobo £70

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Corsair_XMS.html buy a dual channel kit as you get extra bandwidth £90 for 2x512 - £200 for a dual kit 2x1gig

£520 without case so this leaves enough in budget and it gives you 2 gig of ram

[jamesebaker]

So you would recommend selling the RAM rather than buying 1Gb and keeping the 512Mb or is that just instead of adding another 512Mb to my existing one? I presume also that the type of RAM may not be right i.e. it may not be 3200 DDR RAM (whatever the 3200 bit means!).

Also, is AGP dead as far as graphics cards are concerned and is PCI Express the way forward?

And what is the current debate regarding nvidia v radeon?

Finally is athlon 64 definitely the way to go and steer clear of intel?

i missed gfx me bad lol

[2||Para]

For video encoding/rendering the Intel [top end] are better. Bang for buck the AMD64 wins everytime.

Either go x2 as previously posted or if on a budget get a Opteron 146. the Opteron is a fantastic cpu with 1MB L2 cache and overclocks like crazy.

You can get a 146 for 1/4 of the price of a FX55/FX57 and clock it to the same speeds.

[jamesebaker]

Is overclocking easy enough to do (and safe enough!) not done it before!

I presume opteron is an AMD 64 processor?

[2||Para]

Yes it is and yes it is.

Signup to this forum and any questions you have we will gladly try to help.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/

A few of the lads have 146 opts running at 3GHZ.Not to bad for a £140 CPU.

[LemonyBrainAid]

Originally Posted by 2||Para

Yes it is and yes it is.

Signup to this forum and any questions you have we will gladly try to help.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/

A few of the lads have 146 opts running at 3GHZ.Not to bad for a £140 CPU.

Not necciserily (sp).

Overclocking is basically making your processor work harder and faster, meaning you could potentially burn out your processor and/or make it run very very hot, meaning you may have to invest in a new cooling system.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, hell, there have been many cases where the processor runs faster but simply runs hotter... but personally, I don't want to risk destroying a brand new £140 processor.

[2||Para]

Originally Posted by LemonyBrainAid

Not necciserily (sp).

Overclocking is basically making your processor work harder and faster, meaning you could potentially burn out your processor and/or make it run very very hot, meaning you may have to invest in a new cooling system.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, hell, there have been many cases where the processor runs faster but simply runs hotter... but personally, I don't want to risk destroying a brand new £140 processor.

That's where reading,learning,tweaking and reading some more comes in.As for running very very hot,

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[patrickp]

Originally Posted by jamesebaker

So you would recommend selling the RAM rather than buying 1Gb and keeping the 512Mb or is that just instead of adding another 512Mb to my existing one? I presume also that the type of RAM may not be right i.e. it may not be 3200 DDR RAM (whatever the 3200 bit means!).

Whatever RAM you get, it's likely the motherboard you get for your new processor will have dual channel memory capability: this doubles the speed (or bandwidth) of your memory. Whatever memory you get, you want to have two sticks of the same value and specs: easiest is always to get two of the same model; this is necessary to take advantage of the dual channel option.

So your options here are to get another 512MB stick identical to the one you have, get two new 512MB sticks if you can't match the old one, or get two 1GB sticks if you can run to that. However, whatever you buy, it's worth getting good quality memory as lower grade stuff may not work well with dual channel.

Originally Posted by jamesebaker

Also, is AGP dead as far as graphics cards are concerned and is PCI Express the way forward?

If you're buying all new kit, yes. PCI Express is capable of faster data transfers than AGP, but nothing is making use of this ATM: in the future it will, and it would be as well to be prepared. If you're buying a new mobo, there's no reason not to go for PCI Express, and, in fact, I believe PCI-E cards tend to be cheaper than the equivalent AGP ones.

Originally Posted by jamesebaker

And what is the current debate regarding nvidia v radeon?

I'd say whichever you prefer. Depends what you want to do with your system - it also makes a difference what level card you want to go for. ATI fanboys will tell you ATI and NVidia fanboys NVidia - they're both good.

Originally Posted by jamesebaker

Finally is athlon 64 definitely the way to go and steer clear of intel?

It seems to be the first thing AMD have produced that clearly upstages the Intel equivalents. Only wish I could afford to go that route myself...

[Halcyon]

If you are buying a new processor that will be damn fast, Overclocking should be the last thing on your mind as you wont need to overclock.

[etccarmageddon]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

Buy a Dual core Amd x2 I promise you will not be sorry

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/AMD_64_X2.html £246

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatal...ocket_939.html mobo £70

so is the future - abandon the athlon single core 64 and FX and purchase dual core instead?

[LemonyBrainAid]

Originally Posted by 2||Para

That's where reading,learning,tweaking and reading some more comes in.As for running very very hot,

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That all depends on your fanning capabilities. I know that if I were to overclock my Athlon 2400+, it would run faster, therefore hotter, meaning I'll have to buy a new fan to replace my stock one.

[2||Para]

£18 Arctic Freezer64 and some AS5.

I used to clock my XP2000 a while back and will admit that after 14 months of 33% overclock it gave up the ghost.

Although after about a year i am ready to move onto a new CPU anyway.Damn these companies and there new product releases