New Build\Upgrade Time - Advice Needed!

Greetings Geeks. It seems my current 3 year old workhorse has decided to act up. It freezes on the BIOS screen. I ain't gonna mess with it. I will be upgrading from an AMD 5600X2. I recently purchased a EVGA 460GTX OC when my old 8800GT gave up the ghost, so that video card will be carried over to my new build. I must say, that card is a great card. I am looking forward to running it in my new setup. As for my old computer, I ran most things great right up until the end. Anyway, on to the task at hand . . . .

I am pretty much out of the loop as far as current generation nomenclature and performance. I am not necessarily brand loyal, however I just about all of my builds in the last 15 years have been AMD. I would like to stick with AMD, but I am open to INTEL as well. I use my desktop mostly for gaming and I am not concerned in minor performance differences to save a few money. For example, 256 FPS in Left 4 Dead 2 vs. 230. I have a wide range of interest in games, and a few that come to mind that I will be looking to play are Civ 5, Rise of Flight, FSX, and Dragon Age II.

I might want to tinker with a little overclocking out of curiosity more than anything. I understand their is only a minor gain to be had with the quickest top-shelf RAM, so I would not mind saving a few dollars on that.

As for budget, not sure. Here is my ballpark estimate: Motherboard ~$100, CPU ~ $160, RAM at whatever 4 gigs of decent RAM would run. I will be running Windows 7 and as I said I will be making use of my relatively fresh EVGA 460GTX OC with 768 megs o' RAM. I also have a new WD 1 terabyte HD waiting to be used.

It seems that an Athlon II X4 or Intel Core 2 Duo would be what I would end up getting. So, can anyone recommend a setup and good vendor? I can build everything myself, but I don't mind paying a small fee for setup and testing. I am looking to buy as soon as possible.

Thanks for any advice.

 

Hi

Usually the best site I've found for purchasing PC parts is http://www.newegg.com .

It's easy to browse, and their prices are usually the best, plus they have a lot of good shipping deals.

I'll post back in a bit with a few hardware ideas if you're still needing help.

 

Here's a few ideas:

Processor

Motherboard

RAM

PSU (and yes, you should definitely buy a new PSU for a new system!)

CASES sorted by best rated (also good idea to get a new case, as they've changed case designs to match hardware heat dissipation requirements)

 

One note (edit time expired):

The motherboard I listed will work, unless you plan on running two Nvidia cards SLI... in which case you need a motherboard that supports SLI. Above motherboard only supports ATI Crossfire. Not an issue if you're only running a single GPU, though.

 

mcsmc -

It seems my computer has started working again. I have no idea why, as I did no tinkering whatsoever. So - for now I keep my workhorse! I will return in few months when I perform my planned upgrade.

Thanks for the advice!

 

Well, that's definitely good news! Hopefully in a few months, you'll be able to get better hardware for your money. I myself have an aging computer that I've upgraded as much as I can... waiting on my tax return to build a new one. I can hardly wait.