Hi guys, Ive not visited here for a good while so thought i'd say hello. Don't know how many of you will remember me but I was an admin here back in the day. I recognise a few of the names from my day, Serious, Matt5cott, Bear and a few more. I need to upgrade my aging desctop with more ram and a better graphhics card to be able to play the upcoming No Mans Sky so will be making a posting looking for advice. My overclocking and keeping up with all the latest specs days are long behind me and my needs are pretty basic these days, so just looking for best bang for minmum buck really. Hope you are all well, 

  Good to see you poking your nose in again after so long - its a lot quieter these days but don't be a stranger, its great to see part of the old gang posting from time to time!

Also, let us know what your current spec is so we can better assess what your options are for upgrading.

Hello Berkswolf, another blast from the past, Please leave any artic chill you have brought with you at my PC, I might want to use it later

As has been said previously CPUs haven't moved much in the last 5 years, if you have an overclocked I5 2500k or more modern CPU then it should still be OK. Consider getting more memory if you have less than 8GB and an SSD with good capacity - I have a 960GB on the main while secondary computer has a 250GB. These really do speed loading times.

Two GPUs rule the midrange, Last year's Nvidea Gforce GTX 970 is still damn good - I have one - and can propel lesser 3D games like Guild wars 2 to 4K @ 60hz. A single should be more than enough for 1080p with all the bells and whistles selected. We're expecting a replacement in the future as Nvidea has already launched a high end 14NM based gpu.

AMD Radeon RX480 is new out, it's much better than their previous offerings, up to the 970 at least but should be a little cheaper and less energy hungry. Based on new 14NM tech.

Which to go for depends on what motherboard you have, single slot doesn't matter, double graphics slot go with one that matches so you have the option of adding a second card. It shouldn't really be needed unless you have a massive screen resolution. A single one of these cards should be able to do very decent 2560x1440 (1440p) so you might want to think about a monitor upgrade.

What games are you interested in playing? If so the memory upgrade and a graphics upgrade might make all the difference. If you are only playing at 1080p most midrange cards will play today's games comfortably on high settings. The memory upgrade will make a lot of difference on perceived speed as there will be less writing to disk, which will be night and day if you don't have SSDs in your machine. I'd suggest springing for 16GB DDR3-1333 (PC3-10600) at about £60-70, sell your old RAM and then bung the rest on a graphics card upgrade, something like the GTX480 or AMD Radeon R7 360 or 370 would be plenty.

something like the GTX480 or AMD Radeon R7 360 or 370 would be plenty.

The RX460 is AMD's new "cheap" card, it looks pretty good http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-amd-radeon-rx-460-4gb-review though the RX470 looks better "bang for buck"

I don't do that much gaming and the sort of stuff I play tends to be strategy stuff rather than FPS shooters. Civilisation and total war is my sort of stuff, or anything in the red alert mold.

You may be interested in these then,


https://wl.widelands.org/

http://www.openra.net/



Both free and "up to date" OpenRA is Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn or Dune 2000 (they're working on Tiberian Sun also) Widelands is "The Settlers 2" with some tweaks.

bit late to this one,

But hi Dick, hope your well and long time no see!nearly 20 years if i recall!