Buying new hardware

[m16si]

I will soon buy new components for my computer. Currently i have:

Core 2 duo E8200

4Gig of RAM

Gigabyte ep35c-ds3r motherboard

Radeon 6850 1GB

650W chieftec PSU

And i will swap RAM,CPU and MB.

Which components should i buy for about 300-350€ ?

I mainly use my computer for gaming and i would like to play upcoming games like: Max payne 3, Mass effect 3, Diablo 3, . . .

I don't know which cpu to buy (i3, i5 or Phenom II X6 T1055 for example?)

Please help me taking this hard choice and compiling my new rig.

Many thanks, M16si from Slovenia Greeeetzzzz

[CoffeeFiend]

Which components should i buy for about 300-350€ ?

I'll make that a $450 budget then (about 340€).

I don't know which cpu to buy (i3, i5 or Phenom II X6 T1055 for example?)

The i3 is a fantastic CPU for a lot of basic tasks, but heavy games are starting to make use of more cores. AMD's offerings give you lots of core/$ but their cores are slow and single-threaded perf suffers. So I'd go for an i5, and that should fit in your budget easily.

Since I don't know stores around Slovenia, nor do I speak the language, I'll stick to newegg's prices.

If I pick:

Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor

Almost any 4x4GB kit of decent DDR3.

we're at $310 or so. That leaves $140 for a motherboard which is plenty for something quite nice, with a Z68 chipset. There's many boards from different quality manufacturers (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI) that fit in that price range, with more than one PCI-e x16 slot, USB 3, SATA 6Gbps ports and all.

[pointertovoid]

Your first check should be: how many cores do your applications use?

Because, sadly enough, Intel has made little progress per core since the Core 2 duo: at identical clock frequency, the socket 1155 processors gain only 20% over the socket 775 ones, and the maximum available frequency is similar (3.4GHz instead of 3.3GHz) - as well as the maximum overclock frequency.

You can check it from SuperPi benchmarks for instance: it's single-tasked, and many users share their figures - heavily overclocked of course.

So if your applications are single tasked like mines are, a more recent processor would improve at most 20% over an E8600 in socket 775, which I hope fits on your mobo and your good chipset, and is affordable if used.

If your games are multitasked, more cores would improve, and a socket 1155 would leave more room for future improvements, at lower cost than a luxury old Quad for your socket 775.

I like competition and challengers... but AMD is behind Intel right now. 6 of their cores do as much as 4 Intel cores. Hope this improves.

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More than 3GB only if your OS is 64 bits.