PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

[Kommander]

Well what I have right now is a full tower Alienware case from 2002 with a barely functional optical drive that came with the case. In 2007 I and several friends including John OC gutted the thing, building a machine that was essentially built to play Bioshock on. In 2010 I upgraded the RAM from two to 4 gigs and the GPU to a one gig card. This has served me pretty well, and actually the largest problem with it seems to be the slowly failing HD. Anyway, current specs, best I can figure.

Vintage 2002 Alienware full tower case
Antec TP3-650 650W power Supply
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield Quad-Core 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB Hard Drive
GIGABYTE GA-P35T-DQ6 LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
SPARKLE GeForce GTX 465 1GB 256-Bit GDDR5 Video Card
Mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) RAM
Windows 7
Barely working 12 year old optical drive

As the HD, Processor and MOBO are the oldest components (aside from the optical drive which is a cheap fix and only really used to install windows) those are what I am looking to upgrade first, more to maintain current functionality and have a decent base to upgrade on than to be able to play the latest games at max settings. As I have implied this is a gaming rig, though I don't have any specific games in mind for it at the moment. It's has actually aged quite well, and i was even able to play Alien Isolation with the graphics all the way up and had a blast, at least until the alien showed up and it turned into a hiding in lockers simulator.

[Yogimus]

Antec TP3-650 650W power Supply
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB Hard Drive
Windows 7 (64 bit I hope)

We can go AMD instead of intel for savings
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

A cheap no frills Mobo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

Some 1600 ram
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820233180

THAT should get you set up with a solid base. My concern is that your drives have out-dated connectors that are no longer supported, and your PSU doesn't have the right hook ups for modern builds. These things I can't calculate without being there.

[Yogimus]

Of course that is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I would recommend saving 5-600 bucks and doing it "right". The futureproofing you get from that extra investment in terms of performance and compatibility are more than worth the wait.

[JohnOC]

You've got a few more options than I do for inexpensive, if you want to settle for prolonging the current system vs future-proofing now.

In descending order of bang for buck:

Your hard drive is failing, replace it with an SSD or hybrid. ($60-100)

Add another 2x2GB RAM and go up to the 8GB the board supports. ($41)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 38566&SID=

Upgrade the video card to any PCI-e x16 card. Your board supports them. (many under $100)
All of these are better value for your upgrade dollar than a new processor/ram/mobo. I'm at the point I am because I've already done them all.

I've pretty much settled on a single motherboard that looks like a good value, 16 GB of RAM, and the most processor I can get with my Christmas present budget, probably the i3 or i5 option. A few years down the road, I can buy the i7 and 16 more GB of RAM if I really feel the need for it, and update the video card and/or drives.

[Yogimus]

Outstanding post john

[Kommander]

Thanks for the recommendations Yogi but like you said I think it's best to wait and spend a bit more to get allot more.

John a few points here. First you really don't think that my CPU/mobo is or at least would create a bottleneck if I went with 8 gigs of ram and a new vid card? Second though it was not in the description I posted but according to new eggs product site my current GPUis indeed A PCI Express 2.0 x16 card. From what I can tell a new $100 dollar GBU would be just about the same as what I already have performance wise. I do like the new ram idea, though when I tried to put in my two old one gig sticks the computer failed to get out of BIOS so I just said screw it and left it with the four gigs. Not sure what the issue there was.

Hard drives are a place I have really been hemming and hawing. For $50ish bucks I can get a brand new 1 TB standard HD, while a good SSD is about twice the price for a forth the space. having just 250 gigs ofstorage space would put a bit of a crimp on things. I also don't know if/how a SSD drive would connect with my current computer.

I should also mention that the Ethernet port on the mobo has failed so I am running wifi via USB, but it seems to be working out well, so I am not sure if that is something I should care about or not.

[JohnOC]

John a few points here. First you really don't think that my CPU/mobo is or at least would create a bottleneck if I went with 8 gigs of ram and a new vid card?

It didn't for me. I have a similar CPU, and I believe the same chipset on the motherboard (at least the same generation of product for both.) I upgraded to a one or two generation faster video card a couple years back and I did see an improvement. I think my previous card was worse than your current one, though. I put the video card third because it is probably the smallest improvement you can get from these suggestions.

I wouldn't hesitate to keep your current card if/when you do a bigger, later upgrade of the CPU and board.

Second though it was not in the description I posted but according to new eggs product site my current GPUis indeed A PCI Express 2.0 x16 card. From what I can tell a new $100 dollar GBU would be just about the same as what I already have performance wise.

Its hard to tell, I believe there are one or maybe two generations newer GPUs on $100-ish cards now than your current card. Its probably not going to be a big improvement, but it is lower-hanging fruit than a CPU swap.

I do like the new ram idea, though when I tried to put in my two old one gig sticks the computer failed to get out of BIOS so I just said screw it and left it with the four gigs. Not sure what the issue there was.

Your board *should* support 8GB of the speed of RAM you have in it, according to the manufacturer specs. For $40, I'd try it again with new RAM, you can return the RAM if it does not work.

Hard drives are a place I have really been hemming and hawing. For $50ish bucks I can get a brand new 1 TB standard HD, while a good SSD is about twice the price for a forth the space. having just 250 gigs of storage space would put a bit of a crimp on things. I also don't know if/how a SSD drive would connect with my current computer.

SSD are a huge performance increase. I have a two-drive setup in my PC now, a 60GB SSD for boot/apps, and a regular drive for everything else. I bought the SSD near 3 years ago, now..

Space is why I suggested a hybrid drive. You can get a terabyte hybrid drive for the same price as a 250GB SSD. Your OS and the stuff you use frequently get premium space on the flash portion of the drive, and everything is kept current on the copper. Its all managed automagically.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EIQTOFY/?tag=pcpapi-20
1TB Hybrid for $70.

Your motherboard can handle any drive with a SATA 3.0Gb/s interface. Drives with SATA6.0Gb/s interfaces are backward-compatible being plugged into the slower ports. Then, down the road when you do upgrade your motherboard, the drive gets more I/O bandwidth with the new board.

I think this option is probably your best bang/buck for an upgrade now, and will hopefully save you time and aggravation if your current drive is failing like you suspect.

I should also mention that the Ethernet port on the mobo has failed so I am running wifi via USB, but it seems to be working out well, so I am not sure if that is something I should care about or not.

I wouldn't, your upstream internet connection is slower than the USB. I don't think you could notice a difference in performance without a benchmark.

[Odahi]

Ah, a gaming rig. I stand corrected. I thought you were just looking for a barebones machine. I'm no expert, I like the suggestions I've seen. Better than anything I could come up with, I think. I wish I'd known about your project a couple of weeks ago. I finally gave away the old video configuration from the "Green Monster." I had upgraded to a single card a while before I sold that machine, but I had kept the previous hardware, just because. Two GTX 550 Ti cards, each with 2GB of GDDR5, which I was running in SLI, nice and stable, and fast as hell. I kept them in a box on the shelf for a long time, and finally gave them to the guy who bought the Monster. He's building a new rig for his son, and they should be of use to him. I agree with keeping the desktop, it's my only regret about the new machine, it's a laptop and thus frozen in its configuration, much more than the Monster was. I call it the Green Monster because the huge, heavy case is OD green. It was also a pretty mean machine. The guy I sold it to is happy, I made him a good deal on it, and it helped pay about a quarter of the price on this laptop. Sometimes I really miss it, though. It had:
AMD 8350 CPU
16GB DDR3 1866 RAM
Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD
2x 2-TB mechanical drives
Blu-Ray reader
GTX 780 with 4 GB
850-w power supply
Some other crap I don't remember now.

It was pretty spendy when I built it, with the original 2x 550Ti cards in SLI, and is still not a bad machine now. Mrs. O convinced me to get the laptop, because it doesn't live in a huge armoire in the living room. Now I have a little desk. It DOES make the room less cramped, but sometimes I miss the Monster. I just liked that I BULT it, from the ground up, with my own hands. Not taking anything away from the laptop, it does everything the Monster did, and is "portable," if you call a 7.7-pound laptop portable. It IS more portable than a 30-pound tower, at any rate.
And now you know more than you ever wanted to know about my old computer. Again, I agree with keeping the tower form factor, especially for a gaming rig. Much more flexible. You're getting good info here, good luck with your upgrade when you do it.

[Yogimus]

Crucial MX 100 SSD is the best gig per dollar, and outstanding in performance

[Kommander]

Well lets focus on the hard drive for a moment, because that is something actually doable. These hybrid drives, do they work as advertised? I don't turn my computer off and on allot so boot speed is rather unimportant. However having the OS on the fast portion of the drive, or at least important parts of it, might make windows go faster in other ways. However I am skeptical that it would boost game performance, as those tend to consist of upwards of 10 gigs of stuff each these days, far to much to load onto the 6GB SSD portion of that HD. Does it use some sort of preloading in the background or something? I think this warrants more research.

Edit: I am seeing that it is possible to transfer the data from your old drive to the new one (to clone it?) rather than load all my vital stuff from my backup thumb drive and re-download all my games from steam like I used to. Is this a good idea or should I go with a fresh start? (I remember backing up 15 gigs of stuff on CDs. Took hours just to preper for a OS wipe, and hours to restore things.)