Looking to upgrade machine

[Owain]

Hey,

Im looking to upgrade on my existing system due to my motherboard and graphics card packing in.

I want to change the motherboard, cpu, ram and graphics ive got a budget of about £500 but i have 3 hard drives, a wirless card, sound card and dvd-rw i want to keep.

has anyone got any advice on what sort of spec i should go for...

i tend to use my machine to listen/create music, play the odd game (not a serious gamer) and for web design/grahic design.

Im also concerned that with 3 hard drives installed id need a good psu. any recommendations?

thanks

[Gregoroth]

Processor

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (£210) CPU-I-E6600

Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 (£110) MB7-GIG-GA-DS4
or
Foxconn P9657AA-8EKRS2H (£80) MB7-F-P9657AA8EK

RAM

Corsair 1GB DDR2-667 Value RAM (£81) MEM-CVS-VS1GB667

Graphics

Nvidia GeForce 7600GT 256MB PCI-E (£87) GCX-NVI-7600GT

TOTAL = £488 max excl. PSU

You could always knock the processor down to make way for another 1GB of that Corsair but personally I'd add another 1GB early next year when the prices go down.

As for the PSU, I'd say a good quality 500W is more than enough. You could probably get away with nearer the 450W mark. You should spend at least £45 on getting a good brand like Antec, Enermax etc.

Your 3 HDD's - you may have a problem if going with one of these C2D setups. The 965 chipset boards don't have IDE support/have an added controller for a maximum of 2 IDE devices. If your drives are IDE then you would have to sacrifice 1 and add a SATA DVD-RW to your system. You should have a look at the specs to see details. Otherwise, you're ok.

[Anonymous]

[Removed at the request of the author]

[Owain]

cheers... that looks sweet... i normally get athlon cpus.. do u find there to be much difference between the two manufacturers? (intel v amd)

[Anonymous]

[Removed at the request of the author]