My budget will be around £450-500 so the lower the price the better. My Current Rig: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 3.2GHZ Gigabyte GA 890GPA UD3H AM3+ motherboard Kingston HyperX 1600mhz 8GB DDR3 (2x4GB) 1TB Hitachi SATA HDD and a 160GB SATA drive(also Hitachi) XFX AMD HD5830 1024MB----Crossfire XFX AMD HD5830 1024MB__/ Xigmatek Midgard case 750w 80plus crt PSU Put this together in 2010 (initially had 4GB OCZ ram but upgraded later when DDR3 was dirt cheap) So basically i want something better than this(obviously) I'll be keeping my Hard drives and adding a SSD later down the line, so all good there I'll be re using my PSU so no need to change that. So what I'm looking to get is new CPU RAM Motherboard Graphics Card and case but i've alread spotted the case i want which should run me about £35-40 so that's about £450-460 budget for CPU, RAM, Motherboard and GFX card I've mostly had AMD systems for the past 10 years and have been out of the PC hardware game really since i put my old rig together in 2010. I'm really not sure what motherboard / cpu combo to go with, AMD APU or 8 Core, or dive into the unknown and go with intel / nvidia Will be mostly a Gaming system, but will also be used to gernal video and audio work, media playing and also running VMs etc no windows license needed as i most likely wont be running it on the system.
Go Intel on the CPU. They're pricey but well worth the money. If you're on a budget, aim for an Ivy Bridge i5 (even the Sandy Bridges are pretty good if you want to go a generation down on price). If you're thinking on going with Nvidia (always preferred them but that's just me) seriously consider checking out the GTX 650Ti, incredible card for the money and one of the quietest out there, don't be fooled by the Boost version. However if you're looking for even more game performance and future proof, consider a step up to the 660 or even a lower spec 7 series with SLi support so you can always double up later. As for the mobo well it doesn't matter so much these days but Gigabyte is always my go to.
You don't have enough money to go down the intel / nVidia route and an AMD new build won't give you much of an improvement but with a few tweaks your existing PC will do just fine for another few years. The R9 280X re-brand of the old HD 7970 should serve you well and at least an 80GB SSD will do you for OS + updates which should be well within your budget with plenty of change to spare.
Why do you need to build a total new pc? it seems a waste to me... Any reason why you cant just add a new graphics card and an SSD? that would feel like a totally new PC just doing that, you could even double your ram to 16gb in your current motherboard if you really felt the need. Your CPU / Motherboard / Everything else is fine in my opinion.
CPU is ageing a bit i normally do a 5 year build and i'm only 3 years in but it feels time to upgrade. i was initially just going to upgrade the Graphics card but i got the urge while looking at parts to do a whole new build. SSD + 16GB + Graphics card would come in on budget, but then because i'm upgrading early i wanted a better / more up to date motherboard which would allow CPU upgrades down the line along with other benefits over my 3 year old board. either way i'm still undecided about which route to take, then again i may leave it til the new year
Agree with marcus Your CPU will be fine, so you can save money by keeping it for a while longer. 8gb of ram is more than enough at the moment, but if you need more for whatever reason then I guess it wouldn't hurt If you really want a board upgrade I'd go with a second hand Giabyte GA-990FXA-UD3, they can be had for cheap and you can overclock with ease if you want Graphics card can do with an upgrade, but again you can grab second hand 7950's and 7970's for pretty cheap at the moment. As far as case goes, I recommend the BitFenix Shinobi, built a few rigs in those now and for the price you really cannot complain.
You can get a lot of CPU for cheap with the hexacore FX-6300, but if you want power and only care about games then intel all the way: get an i5K, I would recommend haswell if you want to save energy while idle since Iris is as good as IGPs get. With the GPU is simple: do you use linux? do you want hassle-free drivers? get nvidia, else go with AMD
