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#1 Oct 21 2013 at 12:35 PM Rating: Excellent
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No, I'm not paying some jock merc to make me an empyrean, I'm building my PC again, this time with more money.

Mobo: Asus P5b tmx gb si
Psu: this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/550w-ace-psuace550br-black-with-red-12cm-fan-atx-v203-psu
Processor: Core2Duo E8400, or a Core2Duo X6800 Extreme. I'll be buying it last, so as to be able to cash in on old parts and spend a bit more on it.
Ram: 2x 2GB sticks.
Graphics card: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
DX10. Costs £35. Ten more £ than that damn htpc card.

I'm thinking of sticking in a 500GB hard drive, and a newer drive, maybe a ssd for use as an os drive. I've only ever used single hard drive PCs, so I'm not sure.

I chose to upgrade because I wanted to play ffxiv. I checked out the benchmark thread, and consequently chose the graphics card (chose, in the same way people choose Pokemon), but I have doubts about everything else but the psu.


Have I done anything wrong? Will everything blow up 2 mins after purchasing the components?

Edited, Oct 21st 2013 2:37pm by Demoncard
#2 Oct 21 2013 at 12:51 PM Rating: Excellent
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Do you have an operating system? What's your budget?
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#3 Oct 21 2013 at 12:54 PM Rating: Good
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I've got XP 32 bit installed, and i've got a copy of 7 32 bit professional.

Budget is around £100, and whatever I can make by trading in old parts.

Edited, Oct 21st 2013 2:56pm by Demoncard
#4 Oct 21 2013 at 5:52 PM Rating: Excellent
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Core 2 duo processors are 6 years old. So is that video card. I'd be shocked if you can find any of them for sale actually.
You can literally find computers with those same components or better on Craigslist or the local equivelent for around £60-ish assuming I did my math right. Upgrading to that particular level of technology isn't worth the time. A low end core i3 is going to blow all of the Core 2 duo's out of the water, and from personal experiance with the P5B I can assure you that you really don't want that particular board if you can help it.

Thats a really, really really tiny budget. If what you are upgrading is lower end than those parts, expect £0 on trade in. I'd also advise going with AMD with that small of a budget.

You also want to go windows 7 64 bit for gaming, not 32 bit due to the ram limitations.

I don't know UK specific power supply manufacturers, so you're on your own there.

A barebones bundle in an AM3+ amd or Intel core i3 might be the best place to start with that budget range, and even then, triple it at a minimum. http://www.novatech.co.uk/barebonebundles/
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#5 Oct 22 2013 at 9:52 AM Rating: Good
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It's not about size, but how you use it! That goes for budgets, and the other thing! I can also find all of those cheap outdated components. I have a lot of things to trade in, and cex buys nearly anything, so regardless of whether it's worth anything, selling to them in bulk should improve my budget.

I can probably spend an extra £200. I *can* go over, but I'd rather not. All I'm hoping for is to be able to play ffxiv without spending too much. I also want to play Medieval Total War 1 with giant unit sizes for nostalgia, but the latter isn't important.

Edit: Checking Amazon for another. I can't find that board anywhere close.

Edit edit: www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=638 found this for £40. Has a pcie 3.0 slot, takes an i3, 5 or 7, and takes ddr3 ram. Does that cut it?

Edited, Oct 22nd 2013 12:19pm by Demoncard
#6 Oct 22 2013 at 11:38 AM Rating: Excellent
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Medieval: Total War doesn't play well with Win7 in my experience but that was with the 64 bit edition.

Too bad, too since it's still my favorite from the series.
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#8 Dec 18 2013 at 1:02 PM Rating: Good
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I agree, Medieval Total War 1 is best Total War.


Anyway, all of my prior posts in this thread have went out of the window, because everything I talked about buying is almost legacy hardware and rather than making another thread, I'ma posting here;

I bought a H63MGV3 board. www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=638

The plan is, I buy an i3 3220 now, and sell it off later and upgrade. I'm going for a HD 7770 graphics card, solely because my monitor is a 4:3 1024x768 unbranded curiosity (I think it's an LG, but I don't know. There's no sticker.), and because my 400w psu can support that, the i3 and hard drive at max TDP. The psu has a max of 19a on the 12v+ rail, and according to a table on msi's forum (I'm not sure it's theirs, that table's everywhere) that shows recommended power supplies, 19a and 500w is "recommended". The 500w, they took from AMD's spec page - according to people, it only uses 80w, and is good for low power PCs and whatnot.

For what is hopefully the last time, am I doing anything stupid?

Edit: I plan on upgrading the psu to a corsair builder ???w after upgrading the processor. Right now, I want to run down the new 400w no name psu.

Edit edit: Rise thread, and feast on discarded placentas!

Edited, Dec 18th 2013 2:08pm by Demoncard
Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.
#9 Dec 18 2013 at 3:54 PM Rating: Excellent
I have the 7770. It's a great little card and will play FFXIV without missing a beat, so you should definitely get some mileage out of it.
#10 Dec 18 2013 at 5:07 PM Rating: Good
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Catwho wrote:
I have the 7770. It's a great little card and will play FFXIV without missing a beat, so you should definitely get some mileage out of it.

Excellent. That's what I wanted to hear, given the vagueness of benchmark results threads on the card. They're all too busy comparing gigaultramegawattpowerdraw sli/crossfire liquid nitrogen cooled setups to talk about anything less.


I'm going to buy the rest of the parts over the course of the next two weeks, quicker if I can find a sale or special offers of some sort.

Edited, Dec 18th 2013 6:12pm by Demoncard
#11 Dec 21 2013 at 2:36 PM Rating: Good
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I got impatient, bought a bunch of stuff, and now I regret it. Kinda.

The nearest HD 7770 that wasn't on eBay was in Bradford, which is more than a single bus ride away, so I bought a HD 6850 instead.

To go with it, I bought a e6750 core 2 duo. It cost me peanuts, and it's less of a bottleneck than the Pentium D in my old motherboard (P5B TMX GB SI). It'll do until I can afford a socket 1155 one. Or so I thought.

I installed both without much fuss (the stock heatsink was annoying), applied thermal paste before putting in the processor, was gentle, put it in with care and didn't force it, etc etc, BUT

After closing everything up, it didn't turn on. I'm greeted by a black screen and an amber light on my monitor, then a power off a minute after. All the fans were working, and according to the system speaker crackle, something was going on. The air was cool, and there was no burning or sparks. In the bios, I had the display set to load from PEG/IGD, the rest was default. Am I correct in thinking I need to update the bios to accommodate the e6750?

I'm not much of a writer. That'll read horribly.

Edited, Dec 21st 2013 3:39pm by Demoncard
#12 Dec 21 2013 at 2:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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Well, hopefully you didn't pay too much for the processor. You've discovered one of the more annoying aspects of the socket 775 processor family. Basically, about half the socket 775 early motherboards lack the chipset instructions to run any of the core 2 duo processors. A few of those can be bios upgraded to work, most of them flat out will never accept a Core 2 Duo processor even though the socket type is identical and the pins all line up. So, you either need a new motherboard, or put the old processor back in and try a bios update if you can even find one at this late a date, and then try again and see if you get lucky.

You may also run into some fun pci express bottlenecks trying to use newer cards in older motherboards too occasionally, so be prepared for that.
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#13 Dec 21 2013 at 2:50 PM Rating: Good
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I suppose I deserve it, rushing to buy myself presents.

Apparently, the P5B TMX/S supports an e6700, but doesn't say anything about e6750. It also supports an e4700, which Google tells me is roughly the same strength, and I could probably get as an exchange for this one.

I'll search up a bios update. I've still got the lolPentium D, although I was tempted to blend it. Mesh's update section's down for some reason, however, so I could be searching a while.

How bad'll the bottleneck be? It can't be much worse than using the Pentium D with the integrated graphics processor.

If sh%$ hits the fan, which it may well do, given how much trouble it's given me, I'll just wait for ram and an I3 for that micro atx I bought.

Edited, Dec 21st 2013 3:52pm by Demoncard

Edited, Dec 21st 2013 4:20pm by Demoncard
#14 Dec 23 2013 at 2:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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The graphics card works beautifully. I've never used anything higher than a 8800 gs (?), and I've nothing to play that'll need much CPU. Not right now, anyway, so the Pentium D will live a few days longer...

I cut my losses, and after swapping the e6750 for an e4700, I swapped the e4700 for a Samsung 500GB sata hard drive, and used the excess store credit towards the purchase of a shiny 4GB kit of Corsair DDR3 ram for the new board. Now I'm just waiting on a processor for the new board, and I'll be able to do whatever.

Thank you all for your help!

Edited, Dec 23rd 2013 3:42pm by Demoncard
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