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Budget upgrade help

B

Brujah-99

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 7, 2005
Messages
71
I've been wanting to upgrade my PC for awhile now. Here's my current setup:
Core2Duo 6420
4GB RAM
ATI 5750

I've been looking at a z68 board with a core i5, but that's going to be out of my budget for the forseable future. Would it be worthwile to upgrade to a sandy bridge i3 or would I get better bang for my buck so to speak upgrading my processor to a used q6600 or q6700? I already have this RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145345

I'm on planning on replacing my video card right now as I only have an old 19" dell monitor that does 1280x1024. My budget for the upgrades is going to be about $200.
 
I'm in roughly the same boat. I'm really leaning towards Z68 MoBo paired with either a Celeron G530, a Pentium G620, or i3-2100 to tide me over until IB comes out.

Then, I'll buy a used 2500K/2600K from a SB -> IB adopter, or just buy an IB myself depending on price and performance.
 
For today anyway Newegg has the I3 2120 for $120, which is very good. Price may be for the week.
Amazon has Pentium G620 from a supplier just under $63 ( $56.26+6.59 or close to it).
Either deal is worth while.
Reputedly the the G620 while not an I3 does very well at gaming. The 2120 at the 2100 price is worth consideration.
There are several SB motherboard deals "of interest".
 
So should I stick with trying to get a z68 so I can upgrade to an ivy bridge later, or will one of the cheaper h67's or p67's be alright?
 
Do you have an idea how much of a performance bump I'd see over my existing setup? Just based on the number of cores and clock speed it doesn't seem like much difference.
 
You're welcome. Seems like a 20% performance increase on average. Not to shabby for budget Z68 platform that's IB ready, eh?
 
I'd wait til you have $50 more, then get a cheap h61 mobo and i5-2500k quad

Don't worry about Ivy, it's a ways out. And you'll have more resell value in the 2500k then a dual core (should you decide to sell it off) and if you need more cpu, then pickup a z68 mobo or ivy chipset based mobo and oc that 2500k.

There's also deals at a site that we can't link here all the time on the 2500k for $179, newegg has a MSI h67 mobo for $41 after rebate, that's really close to your budget, close enough that I would recommend you hold off till you add a little more to the budget.
 
Any chance you could PM me the name of that site? I knew there was a games site that was taboo, but I hadn't heard about another deals site.
 
paperwastage said:
not worth it.... better to get and i3 for 120 and a cheaper $80 Z68 mobo

if you have a microcenter nearby, i3 is at 99, but after tax, not that much less than newegg/nc ix, so dont spend $30 gas driving there and back.
Click to expand...

Did you see the comparison link I posted earlier? The Sandy Pentium will still yield gains over the C2D, and that motherboard is pretty feature rich given it's price point. Unfortunately, the price has gone up $25 and the $20 mir is now over...
 
DejaWiz said:
Did you see the comparison link I posted earlier? The Sandy Pentium will still yield gains over the C2D, and that motherboard is pretty feature rich given it's price point. Unfortunately, the price has gone up $25 and the $20 mir is now over...
Click to expand...

maybe thats why... for that price, you could have gotten a i3 2100 which is maybe a 10% improvement over the Pentium.... with a lower cost motherboard.

You could get a similar feature rich mobo for under $80, to make the total cost the same

with his budget, theres probably no need for both CF/SLI support or SRT right now... Z68 OC for future 2500k drop-in OCing is enough

Pentium over an i3
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/404?vs=289
 
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paperwastage, thus the dilemma that the OP and many others like myself face: cheaper omobo and an i3, or slightly better board and a Celeron/Pentium until a quad core in the future.

Rody, the link is saying the combo no longer exists.
 
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