Its about time I replaced my aging system that I have now.  It must be 8 years old or more which is crazy and it still runs pretty well, I could live with it but I got the urge.
Its the old pentium dual core that overclocked like mad its running somthing like 3.6ghz.
Anyway that was a great value buy so looking for somthing simlar in todays gen.

What cpu, gpu, chipsets etc should I be looking at to get most for my money.
I dont mind spending a decent amount but wanna get a good few years of it holding its own.

Cheers

i5 2500k + 16gig ram + SSD = win

not much difference between motherboards these days, and all the i5 boards have been out long enough that whatever you buy will be decent

gfx card... I'm a bit out of the loop... do you play games ?

my nephew loves the new AMD chips right now, but I've got no experience with them.... better bang for the buck I think... I'll ask him what he thinks

everything is so fast and so cheap now that there's not that much difference between the different options in the middle or the price range

ram is so cheap you might as well go overboard

and SSD prices have come right down, and upgrading to an SSD is the biggest performance increase I've felt in a long time :-)


EDIT: actually, don't you already have an ssd?

as knighty said, can't really go wrong with the i5 2500k chip (I've got an i7-3770K which is overkill 90% of the time, but that was the next step up) and 2x8GB pair for 16GB RAM minimum I reckon, with any respectable board. If you want specific features look at a review site with a recent motherboard roundup and choose one that has what you want.

If you don't have one see if you can plump for an SSD, can't go wrong with the Crucial M4 or Samsung 840 Pro (the regular 840 isn't so hot). The Crucial M5's are out now but I don't know if they are any better for the outlay. You might think it tempting to get a smaller one and upgrade to a second later but faster ones live longer overall and give better performance, I would aim for a 256GB one (larger capacities are becoming available but I'd not buy one personally as the costs aren't equating the same level  of value).

That's your core system sorted. If you're not a heavy gamer the Radeon 6870 I have used to be the best-bang-for-buck and still plays all the games thrown at it, but there might be better options available now in the 7xxx range.

I'm looking forward to the day that I'm in a new job and have "moved". Second it's all stable I'll be going back to a PC desktop rather than using my laptop. Everything just takes so much longer than it should on the laptop due to different hardware bottlenecks. Processing photos is far from ideal on it, but it's all I have to use, and I have to say it probably saps half the enjoyment out of photography, having to deal with the images on a laptop!

Quote from: knighty on June 26, 2013, 14:45:19 PM
i5 2500k + 16gig ram + SSD = win

not much difference between motherboards these days, and all the i5 boards have been out long enough that whatever you buy will be decent

gfx card... I'm a bit out of the loop... do you play games ?

my nephew loves the new AMD chips right now, but I've got no experience with them.... better bang for the buck I think... I'll ask him what he thinks

everything is so fast and so cheap now that there's not that much difference between the different options in the middle or the price range

ram is so cheap you might as well go overboard

and SSD prices have come right down, and upgrading to an SSD is the biggest performance increase I've felt in a long time :-)


EDIT: actually, don't you already have an ssd?

Yeah ive got early gen ocz ssds in raid0 but never been blown away by their performance might get a sammy or crucial one with this upgrade. I think ill look at that i5 2500k but also tempted hy the chip clocked has after seeing its power on the boink @ home crunching thing.

Quote from: zpyder on June 26, 2013, 16:09:55 PM
I'm looking forward to the day that I'm in a new job and have "moved". Second it's all stable I'll be going back to a PC desktop rather than using my laptop. Everything just takes so much longer than it should on the laptop due to different hardware bottlenecks. Processing photos is far from ideal on it, but it's all I have to use, and I have to say it probably saps half the enjoyment out of photography, having to deal with the images on a laptop!

I took my laptop on holiday with me so I could still do some work, it was a horrible experience even with it all setup exactly the same as my desktop. I honestly don't know how people get anything productive done on laptops.

Quote from: DEViANCE on June 26, 2013, 16:18:26 PM
Yeah ive got early gen ocz ssds in raid0 but never been blown away by their performance might get a sammy or crucial one with this upgrade. I think ill look at that i5 2500k but also tempted hy the chip clocked has after seeing its power on the boink @ home crunching thing.

Hyper-threading to 8x virtual cores is a beautiful thing

is it worth going on to the new 1150 haswell socket?

I've no idea what the new haswell sockets are like, I've not read up on them, I can't imagine there's too much difference. Less power consumption and slightly faster chips? I think Bacon might be on Haswell actually, in which case he's had issues with his onboard GPU. Probably worth looking into them a bit more before springing any extra on Haswell kit.

are the newer i5's much better ?  the benchmarks I saw said there was naff all in it

went for this in the end:
Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz Socket 1150 6MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor
PowerColor HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB GDDR5 1125MHz x 4 DVI HDMI DisplayPort UEFI Ready PCI-E Graphics Card    
G.Skill 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 2400MHz TridentX Memory Kit    
Asus Z87-Pro Socket 1150 HDMI DVI DisplayPort Motherboard ATX Motherboard

Supposed to be the quickest i5 chip, could have got some i7's on Ivybridge for about same cash but this is on the new Haswell socket so maybe a bit more future proof, I don't know tbh, probably not gone for the best choice but will be a good step up from what I have now.

You didn't follow the forum de rigueur of waiting for Bacon to post a comprehensive and excellent hardware write up and then going ahead and buying completely different kit

Should be a nice setup anyway, the 7770's seem to be the best value at the moment?

Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on June 26, 2013, 23:03:26 PM
You didn't follow the forum de rigueur of waiting for Bacon to post a comprehensive and excellent hardware write up and then going ahead and buying completely different kit

Should be a nice setup anyway, the 7770's seem to be the best value at the moment?

Yeah I found a few reviews saying it is the best card for sub £120 and it's less than £90 on ebuyer now so should be fine. A sh*t load better than my current 3800 anyway.

Ordered at about 9pm last night. Its just been delivered. Good service

looks like a nice system

what are you doing HD wise ? sticking with the SSD you already have ?


either way, make sure you enable AHCI mode in the bios before you start the install - saves having to much about later on :-)

Quote from: knighty on June 27, 2013, 12:56:36 PM
looks like a nice system

what are you doing HD wise ? sticking with the SSD you already have ?


either way, make sure you enable AHCI mode in the bios before you start the install - saves having to much about later on :-)

Yeah will stick to what I have at the mo I think. Ive had issues with ahci mode before. I dont think you can have that on when running in raid, at least on my current mobo anyway