Upgrades to PC advice needed.

[JJ_Young]

Hi

I bought my PC from pcspecialist almost 4 years ago and its been great but I haven't upgraded anything since I got it (except another SSD drive and bluray drive), games etc seem to run fine on medium settings but thought it might be time to give it a little upgrade so it can last another few years, can you have a look over the specs and advise what I should do, thanks

Case COOLERMASTER HAF 922 MID TOWER GAMING CASE
Overclocked CPU OverClocked Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-930 (2.8GHz @ max 3.8GHz)
Motherboard ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI
Ram 6GB KINGSTON HYPER-X TRI-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (3 x 2GB KIT)
Graphics Card 1GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5870 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 50GB OCZ VERTEX 2 SATA II 2.5" SSD (upto 285MB/sR | 275MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 100GB OCZ VERTEX 2 SATA II 2.5" SSD (upto 285MB/sR | 275MB/sW)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 10x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW
Power Supply CORSAIR 850W PSU (TX850) 80+ ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling TITAN FENRIR EXTREME DIRECT TOUCH COPPER CPU COOLER
Sound Card Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ Titanium - Fatal1ty Professional Series
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit

Thanks

 

[keynes]

Do you have a budget?

 

[vanthus]

Much the same as my PC,upgrading the 5870 GPU to an R9 280X has made a massive improvement.
The 2GB GTX 770 would also be a good choice,if you can afford the GTX 780,even better.

 

[JJ_Young]

Hi

Keynes - My budget would probably be around £300-£400 or so.

Vanthus - I was thinking about upgrading the graphics card, was going to try and move to Nvidia for a change as my last couple of Pcs have always been Radeon but wasn't sure on what was the best upgrade.

Im not that computer savvy to know what will be compatible with what I already have, I was thinking about upgrading to 8gb Ram but wasn't sure if I could just by another 2gb stick and add to it or if I would have to replace what's already there?

Thanks

 

[keynes]

I would get the gtx 780 for your budget, I don't think the 2gb additional ram would be needed.

 

[JJ_Young]

thanks, i'll look into that.

JJ

 

[Karnor00]

I'd agree with the others that upgrading the GPU would be a significant boost to performance.

The CPU is still pretty decent - overclocked it will be pretty much equivalent to an standard clocked modern i5, and so is fine for gaming. And in any case you can't upgrade the CPU without also upgrading the motherboard.

6GB of RAM is still plenty for gaming.

My only other comment is that the amount of storage space on the HDD/SDD looks quite small (to me at least), but you'll be the one who knows best exactly how much you need.

 

[JJ_Young]

Thanks Karnor00

Yeah I forgot that I need to look for another hard drive also so will have to add that into the budget, I have 1x 60gb SSD and 2x 100Gb SSD so looking for a 1TB drive as I'm fed up deleting games off steam to fit others in.

If I use the upgrade my existing pc on my pc specialist account there is only 2 hard drives and the rest are other SSD drives so I will need to get it else where as I don't fancy spending £162 for the one they have.

With that added in I might drop down to the GTX 770 but not sure if I should go for the 2gb or 4gb which is about £45 more? the price on here seems to be around the same as other sites but I wonder what brand it is, most reviews say that the 4gb isn't worth it but I'll need this to last me for another good few years....

JJ

 

[Karnor00]

Unless you plan on gaming with multiple monitors, there is pretty much no benefit to having 4GB over 2GB.

Typically the Nvidia brand used by PCSpecialist is Palit, but that's not guaranteed as it will depend on availability so you might get a different brand.