New everyday PC

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
About the 10th thread iv posted asking for advice so sorry in advance...

In theory i now have a budget of about £1200 against my original £600 thanks to a nice little wager on the winner of the F1 world championship.

I have had advice on a spec maxed out at £600 before and am making 1 last post to seek advise on anything i could add for a few quid that would be worth it now i have a little room for it.

I have chosen the gt430 because i DO NOT inten to buy any new games and all games i have are well over 2 years old - and i understand that this card will handle them fine. i would rather max out other components and leave room for a graphics card upgrade when and if required in the future.

Case
COOLERMASTER ELITE 310 BLUE CASE
Processor (CPU)
AMD PHENOM II X4 965 (3.40GHz/8MB CACHE/AM3) - BLACK EDITION
Motherboard
ASUS® M4A87TD/USB3: DUAL DDR3,SATA 6.0GB/s, USB 3.0
Memory (RAM)
4GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 2GB)
Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GT430 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk
640GB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD6400AARS, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply & Case Cooling
450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£29)

Uses - the usual internet and office programmes + fairly low spec gaming, minimal photo editing and hd video playback.

For future proofing would i be better to upgrade the cpu to an intel one or a 6 core amd now i have some slight headroom in the budget.

If i was to add a 2nd hard drive would i notice any read/write performance increase from a 64mb cached drive over the basic 8mb one as it would only be used as a backup and never really be used for accessing files to work on?

Thanks and i promise this is the last one, as im gonan buy next week now i have the money.
 

Phoenix

Prolific Poster
Upgrading to the Phenom II x6 1090t is a good idea to future proof the system and while you could spend £1,200.00 on a build using the i7-960 I really wouldn't bother because you're not going to see any difference for general office work and light photo editing, it would just be a waste of money.

I would spend some of that extra money on a solid state drive instead to load windows and other application up extremely quickly. If you don't really want to spend that much on a small storage drive just stick with the caviar green drive instead because having 64mb of cache is nice for a quicker performing system (over the 8mb cache HDD's). You could upgrade the case to something like the coolermaster sileo for an even quieter computer if that's something you're wanting. It would be worth getting a better power supply like a TX650 so that you can add in a better graphics card later if you're sticking with the GT430 and have intentions to upgrade in the future.
 
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