Desktopn help wanted.

Deckchair

New member
Two years ago I purchased a desktop fro PC Specialist which has served me extremely well.

However I am thinking of upgrading the GFX card and possibly the RAM (If required) and I throw myself at the mercy of you the members of this forum in asking for help. This PC is used generally for gaming, but doesnt need anything too hardcore as it currently seems to manage most new games very well. My budget would be approx £200 - £300 but would like to keep the price down as much as possible!

My current spec is as below. Would anyone be able to offer some insight as to the best way forward?

CURRENT SPEC

Case: PCS MAELSTROM T900 BLACK GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU): AMD PHENOM II X4 945 SOCKET AM3 (3.00GHz/8MB CACHE)
Motherboard: ASUS® M4A77TD: DUAL DDR3, S-ATA II, 1 x PCIe x16, 1 x PCIe x1, 3 x PCI
Memory (RAM): 4GB CORSAIR DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz - LIFETIME WARRANTY!
Graphics Card: 1GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5770 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
2nd Graphics Card: NONE
Memory - 1st Hard Disk: 1TB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 16MB CACHE (7,200rpm)
2nd Hard Disk: NONE
RAID: NONE
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive: 22x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
2nd DVD/BLU-RAY Drive: NONE
Power Supply: 600W Quiet Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan
Processor Cooling: STANDARD AMD CPU COOLER
Sound Card: ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)


Many thanks in advance for any help you guys can give.

Cheers

Deckchair
 

tom_gr7

Life Serving
I'd look at a 6950, you can pick one up for about 200 quid :)

if you wanted more ram, why not not give pcs a bell and get 8gig of samsung ram? or try and get another 4gig of the exact ram you have now.
 

paul1224

Well-known member
4GB RAM is probably sufficient for the uses you have mentioned so adding extra may not offer a huge performance increase.

Not an expert on the GPU's so leave that to others.
 

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
Well you could swap out the 4GB of ram you have for 8GB of ram for less than £50, leaving you with anything up to £250 for a GPU. That leaves you in the 6950-6970 or maybe a GTX 570 range. Any of those cards would get you gaming for a very long time.

I am going to wait for the full series of next gen cards to be released then buy one of those to update my rig, might be worth thinking about if your interested in something thats going to last as long as possible.
 

Phoenix

Prolific Poster
I'd look at a 6950, you can pick one up for about 200 quid :)
This is the best thing you can do right now. I doubt that you'll need more RAM but you could monitor it in windows task manager; if you see that you reach 3.8GB a lot of the time then it would be worth getting another 4GB.
 

Deckchair

New member
Many thanks for your input chaps.

I think I will go for the 6950 option and leave the RAM as it is atm.

Again many thanks, you are all doing a wonderful job!
 
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