Another person upgrading..

[Shantei]

Well, Ive only had this computer for nearly 2 years, so it almost seems insane upgrading so soon. But, games get better and better...

So, I wouldn't really need to buy anything like, optical drives, hard drives, memory (ddr3 isn't necessary is it?), etc ... I guess just a new processor and gpu, but with those, a new motherboard .. and a new PSU.

By buying anything other than a quad core I'd feel like I'm make a wrong buy ... but how much longer will the Q6600 last? Are there any upcoming processors I should be aware of? - I wouldn't spend anything over £200.

As for motherboards .. they're hard to decide on aren't they? Which ones are the good overclockable ones? Most stable ones.. and good for price.

As for the graphics card, I was thinking of going a little nuts and getting the upcoming HD Radeon 4850 .. but who knows.

Advice is greatly appreciated!

Edit: Oh, and what are the advantages of getting Vista?

 

[A True Folder]

DDR3 is still pretty pricey and not that much faster than DDR2, imo get DDR2 and put the money you save toward the other parts.

PSU, my current one is the first Antec I have owned and I have to say the 12v rails are rock solid, they never waiver, so I would say consider one of these, I also have a Thermaltake Tough Power, the first one I had to RMA as it was faulty but the replacement hasn't skipped a beat, I like the modular cabling.

The Q6600 has already been superceded by the 45nm quads (Q9450 and the X33x0 range of Xeon chips) and are relatively cheap now, they're still good value for money

If you're not going SLi then look for P35 or X38 chipset boards, these have also been superceded by the P45 and X48 chipsets so should be dropping in price too making them better value

I haven't had an ATi card since the Voodoo3 days so I haven't been paying much attention to them, with the 9800 series nVidia cards out and the 9900 series due out soonish the 8800 series cards are dropping in price as well making them good buying.

Vista by all accounts is maturing nicely but I'll leave that for someone else to give input as I haven't run Vista since the RTM days.

I hope that gives you some ideas.

 

[worshipme]

By buying anything other than a quad core I'd feel like I'm make a wrong buy ... but how much longer will the Q6600 last? Are there any upcoming processors I should be aware of? - I wouldn't spend anything over £200.

It depends on what apps you are running, but from what I can gather you are using this for gaming? If so then you'd be better off with a higher clocked and more overclockable dual core as 95% of games run no more than two threads meaning four cores are useless. The E8400/E3110 would be the chip for you. 3.0GHz stock speed and overclocks to 4GHz+

As for motherboards .. they're hard to decide on aren't they? Which ones are the good overclockable ones? Most stable ones.. and good for price.

Gigabyte make some very good P35 boards as do ASUS and Abit. The Abit IP35-PRO, the Gigabyte P35 DS3R and the ASUS P5K are all good mobos. If you've got a bigger budget then there's always the X38...

But like ATF said, the P45 which will have PCI-E 2.0 and CrossfireX support will be out soon, probably sometime in June.

As for the graphics card, I was thinking of going a little nuts and getting the upcoming HD Radeon 4850 .. but who knows.

Release date is 15 June. I am personnally aiming for the HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 but we'll just have to wait and see how they perform.

(ddr3 isn't necessary is it?)

Not with the FSB, no. It limits the bandwidth too much. Even when the FSB frequency is 400 (1600 quad pumped), the bandwidth is only 12.8GB/s (DDR 800 speeds) so it's pointless buying DDR3 memory. Get some quality DDR2 800MHz CAS 4 sticks. I'd recommend Corsair XMS2 but Mushkin, Crucial, OCZ etc are all good brands.

Edit: Oh, and what are the advantages of getting Vista?

DX10 support which will become more useful in the future even if doesn't seem to be now. And it's a nice OS. I have had it for about six months and I think it's great. No complaints whatsoever from me. But if you already have XP, unless you absolutely have to have Vista, it's not worth spending $100 on it.

And I'd like to back ATF up on the Tt Toughpower, my 12V rail doesn't budge even with an overclocked Q6600 running Prime95.

 

[Shantei]

Thanks very much guys, very useful!