Time for a overdue upgrade!

Y

Yue

Member
Hi Guys,

I am looking to upgrade my current set-up (details in sig below) to a more powerful machine. I have been out of the loop for a while so I am not up to date with the new component lines hence I am not 100% sure on this list but it looks okay to me. I was wondering if you could have a look at it and see where I am going wrong (if I am) or if you could make any suggestions.

My budget is up to £1200 and I would need to pay via finance so at the moment I am limited to www.scan.co.uk but if you know of any other UK based sites that offer finance be my guest to bring them up.

Here is my list:

Intel Core i5 2500K 1155 SandyBridge - Was looking at the i7 range but read that this would handle anything that was thrown at it???
Cost £163.40 inc.VAT

4GB Corsair XMS3, DDR3 PC3-10666 - Is there any benefits of 8Gb on a 32-bit version of windows?
Cost £34.92 inc.VAT

1GB Asus GTX 560 Ti X2 SLi - This would be my first time with a SLi set-up and reviews of this card in SLi are pretty good showing it beating out a 580GTX.
Cost £364.96 inc.VAT for both

MSI P67A-GD53 (B3), Intel P6 Motherboard - Not sure on this board but have always had good results with previous MSI motherboards
Cost £108.88 inc.VAT

120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD, 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s - I have wanted a SSD drive for a while and this has some impressive (to me) read/write times.
Cost £172.99 inc.VAT

650W Corsair HX Series, 80 PLUS Bronze, 85% Eff', SLI/CrossFire - It has 52A on the 12+V rail, would this be enough?

Fractal Design Define XL, Titanium Grey, Full Tower Casee - Looks nice and is a good size
Cost £83.94 inc.VAT

23" LG W2361V-PF, Black Widescreen LCD, 1920x1080 - Looks good to me, had no problems with LG in the past
Cost £160.76 inc.VAT

Total cost is £1184.78 inc. VAT + Delivery
It would be great to get some input/opinions about this set-up as I plan to keep it for a long looooooong time.

Many Thanks,
Peter
 
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There could be a benifit to 8GB RAM with an SSD. More and more are moving to 8GB even w/o it. But you'd have to use something like a program to fully utilize 8GB with 32bit. Why not go for 64bit? Does 1600 cost a lot more than 1333 over there?

I don't see a HDD. Do you have one already? With 32bit on it? If so, I sugggest you get 64 bit anyways, with an SSD you'll want more than 3.6GB memory anyways. If you gon't have a hdd, I also suggest you get one to compliment and save, on the SSD as well.

Unless you have a lot of big going to the SSD, you could get a smaller one to save some $ if need be.
 
Hi Bennyboy, I think I think I will leave it at 4Gb RAM as I dont use any program that would benefit from 64-bit. The RAM is 1333 not 10666 sorry, I missed that bit on my editing.

I was going to use the SSD as my main drive with windows 7 on it, so I think 120Gb would be good for the operating system and games/software I have two 320Gb 7200 Sata drives for storage.

What benefits would 64-bit hold over 32-bit? Is 32-bit easier to use for comparability reasons?
 
64 bit applications will run faster.
64 bit has more and better memory management. It's capable of using the memory remapping feature of BIOSes.
With 32, Windows will page (pagefile.sys) more data to the HDD(if that's where you put it).
DDR3 1600 RAM is only a couple bucks more than 1333.
 
I dont use any 64-bit applications so it will be wasted one me, I'll still with 32-bit. I will however swap the ram for some 1600, thanks.

Hi FXB, I will use it for gaming and general use.
 
In that case you probably dont need that big of an SSD compare prices maybe you could get an 80gb SSD and 500gb HDD to store everything else. If your interested to go the AMD way I'm selling my PC check my sig.
 
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Yue said:
I dont use any 64-bit applications so it will be wasted one me, I'll still with 32-bit. I will however swap the ram for some 1600, thanks.

Hi FXB, I will use it for gaming and general use.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure your gonna want to utilize all 4GB.
Suit yourself.
 
if you are going to have this rig for a "looooooooonnnggg" time, 64bit would be a wise choice for futureproofness.
 
Just a note on the RAM, PC3 10666 is 1333Mhz, PC3 12800 is 1600Mhz. Confusing, but it started back with regular DDR memory and has doubled ever since. I'f grab 4GB of the 1600Mhz XMS3, or even 8GB, plus a 64-bit OS.

Instead of 560 Ti SLI, I'd buy a single GTX 570. You will benefit from 1.2gb of VRAM over 1GB that the 560 has. If you feel it's not powerful enough, you can always buy another one later. In that light, you would also need a 700-850W PSU for 570 SLI.

Everything else looks okay. You have an SSD selected but I'd also recommend a Samsung F3 1TB for storage, games, etc. as you don't want everything on a 120GB SSD, it will fill up fast.
 
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