kristos

Greetings and salutations Madshrimpers!

It's been a few years since I frequented this site and World of Warcraft stole me away from the hardware scene. Where there once was a time when I would have known what to buy and what not to buy I now find myself in need of some advice on this matter. And where better to ask it then here amirite?

I am looking for a new graphics card and perhaps a whole new core system altogether. When making suggestions please keep a few things in mind:
- good overclocking potential while remaining stable for every day use. I don't need some motherboard that only runs good when it feels like it or a cpu that has a 1 in 6 chance of being a good oc'er.
- readily available. Not some exotic graphics card that I need to import from Malaysia and have to wait half a year for.
- reasonably priced. I know that's all relative but usually the latest and gratest also costs an arm and a leg while the next best thing is already a lot more, you guessed it, reasonably priced Also another downside of being out of the scene for so long is that I don't know what is considered reasonably priced anymore. 200-300 € for a good cpu or motherboard and 500€ for a top end vidcard is what I'd expect to see 4 years ago but now? I haven't got a clue...


Now first things first. The graphics card. I'm getting artifacts in games and thought the graphics card isn't necessarily the culprit it usually is. I don't have any spare hardware I can switch out to be sure but it's not the system memory, I know that much.
Performance wise I'm thinking along the lines of a next best thing type of card. Basically so I end up with something that is still very good now and for some time to come but not the priciest of the lot.
Unless offcourse there is a new line of cards coming up in a couple of months (preferably no more then 1-2 months, 4 months at the most) in wich case a low budget gaming card will do.

On a side note I'm currently using an old 20 pin Antec PSU since I blew my (also old ) OCZ 24 pin up a few years ago and haven't bothered to try and fix it. I'm guessing this may also need upgrading?


Then on to the core components: Motherboard, CPU and Memory. Perhaps even a couple hard disks.
This isn't a must like the graphics card is but I do feel it's time I upgraded this old beasty. For those who wonder that's an AMD3000+ on an MSI K8N SLI Platinum with 2* 512MB TCCD and a 7900 GTX so yeah, óóóóóóóóóld! :P
With these components holding off a bit is no problem if something bigger and better is coming out soon. I've had a breef look around and a thread about the Phenom 2 X4 caught my eye? Though I hold my hart when I'm thinking of what it might cost ^^ Eh, I think I'm daydreaming again



PS: It's by no means a must but it would be nice if all the components were available from the same shop. It Would save some cash on shipping/driving around.

kristos

My mistake

jmke

- Intel P35 or P45 based motherboard
- HD4870 GPU , at 170-200 euro, nothing better out there as bang/buck, wait for the price drop to come to EU stores, in some US stores the price was adjusted, ATI just lowered it for the holiday season
- E8400 CPU
- 4gb DDR2 PC2-6400 at least
- Known brand 500-600W PSU

should get you a very decent system for not a whole lot of money

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kristos

thx jmke

when you say HD4870 GPU , at 170-200 euro I assume that's a 512MB version after the price drop?Because I'm looking at Jaha.be right now, wich seems to be a very competitively priced shop, and all the 4870's with 512MB go for 235€ and up

piotke

They indeed cost about 220-235 euro atm. So a 20-30 euro should get them below 200 euro. Tough 170 seems a bit optimistic


Agree on the CPU, E8400 of 8400 can be found at sub 150 euro ranges, paired with a cheap P35 or 45 chipset based board such as the P5K from asus at 75 euro, and with a tad overclocking you have a +4 Ghz stable silent aircooled setup.

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jmke

www.alternate.de , lower pricing

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kristos

Looks like I'll also be needing a new hard disk :x

Anything in particular to look out for?
How big is too big?

jmke

does "too big" exist?
no preferences here, get one with a nice long warranty, that should not be neglected

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kristos

Wel I see disks with 1.5TB for sale. I might be wrong but if my memory serves me correctly, large disks used to have a higher fail rate. And I'm not sure if it's the case with harddisks but space is limited so I imagine what they do is - physically - make the data smaller to be able to fit it closer together. That would in turn require a more accurate and more stable reading head(?) That's the way it should be, but that's not always the way it is. I think I've read it somewhere but well, my memory...



yeah

jmke

have not seen this trend with the latest HDDs
look into €/gb to get a good deal, with the 1.5TB out, the 1TB Drives make for a nice deal; stick two of them in RAID1 and you can store data on them without risk of sudden data loss

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