£250 budget upgrade?

S

spicetek

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 1, 2005
Messages
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That's a shade over $400 (taking into account the fact that stuff is a bit cheaper in the USA)

My friend needs a budget upgrade - mobo/ram/cpu/gfx (and a new PSU is gonna be required to power that I guess)

How do you fit all that into £250 / $400 ?

I was thinking..

  • £58 / 1GB Crucial (everyone tells me the budget stuff causes system instability, crashes, generaly screws your system and you can never fix or trace the prob
  • £70 / 6600 of some sort
  • £20 / cheapo PSU (well he is on a tight budget)

That leaves around £100 (about $170) for the cpu/mobo. This where I'm a bit stuck - what do you guys recommend? (oh, he doesn't need onboard sound, already has a good creative card)

The computer will be for all round use - bit of gaming, bit of DVD encoding, you know.. no one particular intensive application. I think the idea is for it to be able to do everything for the next 2 years or so (althought obviously games are gonna have to run on min settings, but that's exptected.. my mate plays COD2 min settings on his 9200 and it runs smooth as ice and looks great).

So I was thinking.. Sempron 3000+ CPU maybe + one of those shitty brand mobos (foxcom, PC Chips, etc)? What do you reckon, I've never bought a cheap mobo before, how much of a difference does it make? Does the the poorer quality chipsets and such really impact on performance?

Also I thought my first 3 choices (ram/gfx/psu) were no brainers.. but if you have better suggestions please do tell me.

Thanks guys :)

PS oh yeah, one other thing. Are there any geuinely reputable budget PSU brands? I picked this random £20 one... it looks pretty cheeasy though - flashing LEDs, 550w (ahahaha, yeah, sure), although the customer feedback was decent. So generally.. can you get a decent budget PSU (ie one that will have just enough juice to power a moderate system like the one above) for around the £20 (about $35) mark?
 
Buying a budget mobo or budget power supply is a deadly mistake. It's not performance you're sacrificing here, but rather the issue of whether or not the computer will actually work after two weeks.
 
PWMK2 said:
Buying a budget mobo or budget power supply is a deadly mistake. It's not performance you're sacrificing here, but rather the issue of whether or not the computer will actually work after two weeks.
Click to expand...

Yeah but for £250 what are you supposed to do? All these low end branded PCs ship with budget type mobos and PSUs, and they seem to work fine. And there's literally millions of em. Now I know if you're gonna be powering a 7800GTX SLI / FX60 (etc etc blah) type setup, than a cheapo PSU that claims 650 watts is gonna results in disaster, but are you seriously saying that budget mobos/psus wont work if theyre matched with budget systems?
 
Any ideas then? Theres about a billion GFX cards in the £60-100 price bracket, I'm rearing my hair out trying to work out which one's the most suitable..
 
Sorry, but prices are horrible for you guys over there in the kingdom. It's hard to get a suitable upgrade that only costs £250 that takes into account a RAM, video card, mobo and PSU upgrade. That's basically the entire computer minus the drives and case! Now, according to current exchange rates, £250 = $435.07. Even with our cheaper prices, $435.07 to upgrade all that stuff to a midrange machine will be stretching it.

- Ram upgrade: ~$120 / ~£70
- Video card upgrade (to a 6600 or similar): ~$140 / ~£80
- Motherboard upgrade (to one that won't die): ~$90 / ~£50
- PSU upgrade (ditto: ~$75 / ~£45

This comes out to $425, or ~£244. Just shy of your budget's limit but with U.S. prices.

If anything, in order to cut your costs, consider getting cheaper RAM. I personally haven't heard of any crazy things happening with Corsair Value RAM. All it is is Corsair's regular stuff with lower latencies. In terms of video cards, I would go for something like an X800XL. Don't ever get a PSU that's only £20 unless you want to see your friend's computer blow up (and they do! seriously!) I'd cut costs in this order:

- Cheaper RAM
- Cheaper video card
- Cheaper motherboard
- Cheaper PSU (because a cheap PSU could fry everything else ;) )
 
PWMK2 said:
Sorry, but prices are horrible for you guys over there in the kingdom. It's hard to get a suitable upgrade that only costs £250 that takes into account a RAM, video card, mobo and PSU upgrade. That's basically the entire computer minus the drives and case! Now, according to current exchange rates, £250 = $435.07. Even with our cheaper prices, $435.07 to upgrade all that stuff to a midrange machine will be stretching it.

- Ram upgrade: ~$120 / ~£70
- Video card upgrade (to a 6600 or similar): ~$140 / ~£80
- Motherboard upgrade (to one that won't die): ~$90 / ~£50
- PSU upgrade (ditto: ~$75 / ~£45

This comes out to $425, or ~£244. Just shy of your budget's limit but with U.S. prices.

If anything, in order to cut your costs, consider getting cheaper RAM. I personally haven't heard of any crazy things happening with Corsair Value RAM. All it is is Corsair's regular stuff with lower latencies. In terms of video cards, I would go for something like an X800XL. Don't ever get a PSU that's only £20 unless you want to see your friend's computer blow up (and they do! seriously!) I'd cut costs in this order:

- Cheaper RAM
- Cheaper video card
- Cheaper motherboard
- Cheaper PSU (because a cheap PSU could fry everything else ;) )
Click to expand...

good advice but you missed out the cpu :p it just shows how hard upgrading with such a low budget is...especially in england :(

why not try buying second hand things? it could cut prices by 40%+ and allow you to get better parts...and im using value ram atm and ive got no problem..it oc's ok considering its price but most of all its extremely stable :)
 
Another option is to look at a mobo with either the GF6150 or the GF6100 chipset.

Then it becomes.......
Mobo £60.
Ram £55.
CPU £100
PSU £25.
Total £240.
Prices from Scan.

How well the onboard vid will play games is ???.
But an upgrade would be to drop in a PCI-E vid card & a better PSU.

Luck............... :D
 
Mayhs said:
good advice but you missed out the cpu :p
Click to expand...

D'oh! I did forget something! Well, now it's official: 250 pounds definitely won't do as much spicetek wants to do.

Tigerbiten said:
How well the onboard vid will play games is ???.
Click to expand...

The best onboard graphics in the world can play CS:S (not the most demanding game) at about 800x600 with very low settings. F.E.A.R. only plays at 640x480 with everything turned all the way down (so much that the game doesn't even have shadows any more) and plays at about 35 FPS. COD2 is even worse. You have to turn everything down as far as it will go. The game becomes a slideshow in DX9 mode, so you have to run it in DX8 mode - and then you're getting 25 FPS. This comes from my own experience with the XPRESS 200 onboard graphics, which are supposedly even better than nVidia's onboard offerings.

In other words, unless your friend plays only original Half-Life (or doesn't mind sluggish gameplay), I would definitely not suggest onboard graphics.
 
We managed it in the end for £270

It doesnt consist of the best components in the world.. but hey, its not a bad puter for the price.

£20 psu
£55 ram (crucial value, quite happy with that one)
£85 6600GT
£50 mobo (Nforce4 chipset, was happy about that too)
£55 sempron 3000 cpu (i know i know, had to compromise somewhere)
£5 HSF

Actually those prices are approx, I dont have the exact spec here, but you get the idea. It came to £270.

I'll be shit hot for office windows type work for a good while, and should play games admirably for a while to come. He doesn't mind turning the settings down (remember I said, my other mate plays COD2 on a 9200 and loves it)

So it turned out ok in the end. Thumbs up for mega budget upgrades!

Aside note : Thank f'ck I intervened though.. he was going to go with one of these prebuilt systems from the local shop. They were doing entire systems (including mouse kb speakers, the lot) for around £250-£400.. he showed me the ad sheet. Who knows what god awful components they put in them for that sorta price *shudders* - I dont even want to think about it. :p
 
pretty decent but the next thing id do is upgrade the psu..pretty quickly :p
 
Yup. Good stuff except for that PSU. Let's just hope it holds on long enough for it to be replaced.

Oh, and even though your friend doesn't mind turning stuff down, keep in mind that a radeon 9200 pretty much beats all onboard graphics out there... so it's a good thing you got a 6600GT.
 
The GF6150 or the GF6100 chipset's use onboard 6600's which is why I thought they would be worth a look at.

How much slower than a true 6600GT is open to question.

My MSI boards with the GF6150 chipset I only use for folding so have not tried to push the graphics on it.

Luck........ :D
 
do you guys reckon this vid card

Sapphire Radeon X1600XT 256mb GDDR3 PCI-E VGA/TVO/DVI-I

is worth the £30 extra from the 6600GT?

I'm thinking about selling him my nexus 400Watt silent PSU for about £25 .. tiss an EXCELLENT PSU

opinions?

will the sempon be ok for games, or will the lack of cache be a real crippling factor / bottleneck?

worth upgrading it to a similar MHZ athlon 64 model? like the 3000+ ?

Cheers guys
 
I persuaded him to take my nexus 4090 400W for £30 quid instead.

Reckon I could have got a lot more on ebay but.. oh well. favour for a mate :cool:
 
spicetek said:
do you guys reckon this vid card

Sapphire Radeon X1600XT 256mb GDDR3 PCI-E VGA/TVO/DVI-I

is worth the £30 extra from the 6600GT?

I'm thinking about selling him my nexus 400Watt silent PSU for about £25 .. tiss an EXCELLENT PSU

opinions?

will the sempon be ok for games, or will the lack of cache be a real crippling factor / bottleneck?

worth upgrading it to a similar MHZ athlon 64 model? like the 3000+ ?

Cheers guys
Click to expand...

Yes, the X1600XT is much better than the 6600GT. Whether or not you want to shell out £30 extra for it is up to you but I personally would.

The Sempron will be OK for games, just make sure to turn physics down when available (settings are starting to show up in some new games, including FEAR). There might be a few hitches here and there. If there is a delay when firing weapons in FPSs or when objects move across the screen or the like, then it is probably CPU-related. I don't think it will really be bottlenecking last year's games, although it certainly could start to do that with this year's games. It don't know if it would be worth much to upgrade to the 3000+ though. I'd have your friend save up for a 3500+ later if he is having problems.
 
Thanks for all the advice guys. We went with the 6600GT and the sempon 3000 in the end, with my nexus PSU. Money was tight and inveitably the deciding factor.

It'll be good for all the current and previous games out (which is what he wants to play basically), and should slog along for another couple of years with perhaps a cpu and a vid card upgrade along the way.

Still quite chuffed we managed to squeeze a game capable upgrade into a measleyy £250! (well, ok, £270) :)

[H]ard as fook.

Ta muchly :) :cool:
 
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