PC Upgrade

[Jawloms]

After some advice. My PC at home has an Intel i5-2500 @3.3GHz, 16GB RAM, an SSD and an NVidia GeForce GTX 560. I have only around £110 to play with in amazon vouchers. Are there any sensible upgrades I can do?

 

Thanks

 

Stuart

[LincolnE]

For that amount, I'd personally just look at a new graphics card. But the question has to be What do you want to get out of the machine, is there any where it's currently lacking for what you personally use it for?

[Jawloms]

Just gaming, but nothing too trying. Minecraft, a few ragdoll games. It seems to cope fine at the moment. It's more about it will need upgrading at some point, what's best to do first. The video card gets very noisy when it's having to work! Any recommendations on a card?

[Dos_Box]

Well, if you can sell your vouchers, you can get some good bundle deals on eBay.

I sniped an ASUS motherboard with an i5 6400 for just over £60 earlier in the month which formed the base of a new PC for my daughter.

Throw a 128GB M.2 drive in there for just over £20 and 8GB DDR4 for £20 from CEX and it's very nippy indeed.

It's only runnng on an old GTX460 for graphics but runs Minecraft very well and her favorite, The Sims is running on max everything.

[Ditto]

If you stick with the same PC, you could get a passive GT 1030. If you top up a little, go for a GTX 1050 To and treat yourself to a new Steam game to make use of the extra GPU oomph!

[mikes]

For £110, I personally could not purchase the motherboard and CPU I would want; you may end up buying a motherboard and CPU that does not offer that much more performance than what you have now.

My friend managed to pick up an NVidia 970 on ebay for £100. It's a solid card for the price and would last a while. If you can pick up something similar it would be a nice upgrade, plus you can carry it over if you ever upgrade the motherboard in future.

Sadly on Amazon prices for the 970 seem to fluctuate wildly. I'm seeing them being sold for £160 on one hand, and £400 on another. No idea why

I have a Core i7 with a 1070. My friend (who is more into bikes than computers) bought an AMD Ryzen and the ebay 970; and got a computer that is only really 10-20% slower than mine; for much less cash.

[Dos_Box]

I posted this up in the Ryzen thread the other day, but this could be a very nice base for a new system at around £85 for 6C 12T - https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-US-85-AMD-Ryzen-5-1600-AF-looks-to-be-a-new-12nm-Zen-part-and-even-outperforms-the-Ryzen-5-2600.447885.0.html

They quietly slipped it out the door last week.

You would have to save for a motherboard (lots of AM4 on eBay for the £40-£50 mark), but I am now considering this combo for the next upgrade on my sons PC who is currently running an FX6300.

[sonofsanta]

If you stick with the same PC, you could get a passive GT 1030. If you top up a little, go for a GTX 1050 To and treat yourself to a new Steam game to make use of the extra GPU oomph!

 

 

A 1030 won't be an upgrade over a a 560; it'll be a backwards step I expect, as the x30 cards are basically just video outputs for office machines.

 

If you can chip in another £23, you can get an 8GB Radeon 580 for £143; I can't find a direct comparison as your 560 is so old (sorry), but that new AMD 580 vs an nVidia 750Ti (about the same as your 560) shows the new card to be about 3 times better. The Radeon 570 is not much cheaper, so it's worth the £13 extra for the 580 IMHO--and definitely get an 8GB card, so it will last you a good few years yet.

 

An i5-2500 was a very fine processor in its day, and honestly probably still holds up--certainly more so than your GPU will.

[PotNoodleTech]

Hi @Jawloms , If it's any help I have a GTX1050 left over from a small form factor projects that I've abandoned. £55 posted to you good sir! Hardly used original box etc. (my own personal cards).

 

I put it into my gaming PC instead of my 1080ti for fun and was very suprised it was happy with gaming at 1080p at medium to high depending on the game!

[Jawloms]

Thanks to all for your input, I now feel slightly bad for the time and effort you've contributed as after discussions with my 13 yr old son he's gone completely left field and decided he doesn't need to upgrade the computer after all and instead has bought himself some books and a bunch of different sized rubik cubes! He now has a 2x2x2, a 3x3x3, a 4x4x4 and a pyramid one. He can already do two of them without instructions.......

[Dos_Box]

Hi @Jawloms , If it's any help I have a GTX1050 left over from a small form factor projects that I've abandoned. £55 posted to you good sir! Hardly used original box etc. (my own personal cards).

 

I put it into my gaming PC instead of my 1080ti for fun and was very suprised it was happy with gaming at 1080p at medium to high depending on the game!

 

+1 for the GTX 1050. Just upgraded the graphics card in my sons from a GTX 1050 and it did sterling service with pretty much anything he was running.

Edited January 6, 2020 by Dos_Box

[DrBeaker]

Depending on what you want your system to do - I'd still say that's a mid-to-high end system that's nearing the end of it's useful life, but not quite yet. E.g. My laptop has a i5-3rd Gen 2.5GHz. It's 7x years old this year. The limit is not the max 8GB RAM and a failing CPU fan, not the spec of the unit itself.

 

Save the vouchers for a while and put them towards another computer in a few months or next few years.

[Ditto]

Thanks to all for your input, I now feel slightly bad for the time and effort you've contributed as after discussions with my 13 yr old son he's gone completely left field and decided he doesn't need to upgrade the computer after all and instead has bought himself some books and a bunch of different sized rubik cubes! He now has a 2x2x2, a 3x3x3, a 4x4x4 and a pyramid one. He can already do two of them without instructions.......

Sensible lad! My son had the traditional 3x3 but now has the pyramid one (quite straight forward), but also got the 12 side pentagon faced one which is very hard. I took me hours even with instructions!