PC time Options

[Qrbrrbl]

So ive been thinking of replacing my PC for a while, and now I dont have a choice. My GFX card is kaput. I know the problem, a couple of capacitors have come off, so I now get the long beep - 3 short beeps when trying to start up. Long story short, it would be better value to replace the whole lot than buy a new gfx for my old PC.

Heres what I can butcher from the old:
PSU - 500W Thermaltake number, see no reason to change it.
Monitor - nothing wrong with this
Keyboard/mouse
DVD RW
HDDs
Potentially the case, depending how I feel

SO im looking for the following:
MOBO
GFX
RAM
CASE
CPU

I dont mind spending a bit more for a mobo just to try and futureproof a bit, but apart from that I just want something that will be able to play things at the top end of the games market at the moment.

Ideally i would like to pay sub-£500 (inc. case)

Any recommendations? Im thinking about £100 each for the mobo/cpu, £150 GFX, maybe another £40 RAM with a little leeway for the components and case.

[Qrbrrbl]

So which AMD chip would offer similar performance? Any money savings to be made there? And is the 470 a significant upgrade over the card there?

[MonkeyFiend]

So which AMD chip would offer similar performance? Any money savings to be made there? And is the 470 a significant upgrade over the card there?

On second thought's I retract that about the Thuban, I was basing that more on multi-threaded operations, which is more business processing. If you're setting up a gaming platform primarily then the i5 will be better and they're both around the same price.

As for the 470, there are some 460's that have been obscenely overclocked to be comparable to the 470, such as the Palit one, but these are also obsenely expensive. The performance on a stock 470 over the Gigabyte 460 should be around 20%, based on the benchmarks on the link I posted further up this thread

[Pandora92]

On second thought's I retract that about the Thuban, I was basing that more on multi-threaded operations, which is more business processing. If you're setting up a gaming platform primarily then the i5 will be better and they're both around the same price.

As for the 470, there are some 460's that have been obscenely overclocked to be comparable to the 470, such as the Palit one, but these are also obsenely expensive. The performance on a stock 470 over the Gigabyte 460 should be around 20%, based on the benchmarks on the link I posted further up this thread

You're ignoring the fact though that a 470 is obscenely loud (with the stock cooler), hot, and power hungry, which is why both the 470 and 480 were pretty much a laughing stock when they first came out, whereas the 460 runs reasonably cool and quiet while offering good performance.

If you're looking for everything for under £500 I would go for:

Case - Antec 300 - Ridiculously reliable and solid case for the price that's also fairly easy to build in as well as having decent cooling and looking nice. - £50

Mobo - Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 - The one you were already going for, a solid motherboard (Gigabyte always is IMO with a neat and convenient layout and a fair amount of features and overclocking potential for it's price, ideally I would rather recommend a Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2, but they're becoming somewhat impossible to find at the minute so don't bother, there's not much difference anyway. - £85

CPU - Core i5 760 - The obvious choice really, at stock speed the equivalently priced AMD looks pretty equal, but unless you plan on running heavily multi-threaded programs or if you're doing any overclocking at all then the i5 is vastly superior, you'll also have an easier time fitting heatsinks for an LGA 1156 socket the right way up on your motherboard, since AM3 sockets tend to clip most heatsinks facing the ground, which doesn't work well with the airflow in 95% of cases (this may seem like a small consideration but it's a consideration nonetheless). - £135

Graphics - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SUPER OC - There's a LOT of choice out there at the minute in the GPU market, there's everything from the ATI 5750 to the GTX 470 within the £100 - £200 price point, but really the 5770's aren't powerful enough for your money so that's them out, and most 470's (all the ones under £200 anyway) run extremely hot and loud, so for my recommendation that's them out (unless that doesn't bother you I guess, but it bothers me), the GTX 460 768mb is a good card but for the little more it costs for a 1gb model you may as well buy yourself a bit of leeway for the future and the extra headroom the memory gives you. This leaves you with the GTX 460 1GB, and the 6850 and 6870, all 3 are really excellent cards and any one of them would be good, but my personal favourite has to be this card from Gigabyte (not a fanboy, honest lol), not only does it have a smorgasbord of extra circuitry and suchlike built in at no extra premium to other cards, but it also runs something like 10-20% more efficiently than stock cards (due to Gigabyte's more efficient components), and extremely cool and quiet. On top of that it's overclocked from 675MHz stock core to 815MHz and the memory is clocked up from 3,600MHz to 4,000MHz effective, which means it has 6870 level performance (even close to GTX 470 level at times) with less power usage, heat, and noise, than even a stock card, there's also a LOT of overclocking headroom if you ever decide to push it further in the future, which makes the £20-£30 premium over a stock card worth it IMO, I'm not even in the market for a new card at the minute and I still find this extremely tempting. If you do want to go for a different GTX 460 1GB or an ATI 6870 then that would be totally your choice and would still almost certainly be a good buy anyway. - £170

RAM - Patriot Viper 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz - Really any good brand DDR3 dual channel 1600MHz RAM is acceptable here since the memory market is pretty much interchangeable nowadays apart from heatsinks and latency timings (given the negligable price difference you should go for 1600MHz rather than 1333MHz for the extra speed it gives you and for the headroom when overclocking), that specific set has impressively low latency for such a decent price, although the voltage is a little high if that bothers you. You could always shop around and find what you think looks best for you, as long as it's a decent brand with decent latency you can't really go wrong, but like I said above I would spring for the little extra for 1600MHz. - £60

Heatsink - Gelid Tranquillo - This will put you over your £500 budget but really really getting an aftermarket heatsink is worth it entirely IMO, not only will it let your CPU run cooler allowing for more overclocking potential, but even if you don't overclock your CPU at all (which would be a shamegiven the overclockability of that mobo and CPU) it will help your system run a lot quieter than with a stock heatsink (and who doesn't like a quiet PC?), and will probably extend the overall life of the CPU from running at a cooler temperature. The heatsink I've chosen there is one that I'm using myself after spending a long time looking and carefully deciding what to buy, it works extremely well with LGA 1156 processors to keep them extremely cool (one of the best air coolers currently on the market for a reasonable price temperature wise), despite being designed more for low noise level than full on cooling, and it also comes with a tube of excellent CG-2 thermal paste that's on-par/better than even Arctic Silver 5, which means you save a few quid from having to buy separate TMI, it's also non-bleeding and non-corrosive. I can pretty much vouch for this cooler since my CPU sits around 22C idle and has never gotten hotter than 40C even after gaming for 10+ hours, and it's also barely audible even though my PC is sat on the desk next to me.
- £25

Total Cost - £525

Obviously I haven't linked all of these parts to one specific retailer, I just did a quick Google to find the cheapest reputable dealer for each (I got lazy at the end rofl), which would understandably cost you a lot more overall in delivery, so if you're gonna go for this then take the list of parts and have a look around for the cheapest overall retailer you want to buy from.

However it's not gonna be "future proof" on the mobo since Intel have an annoying habit of totally replacing the socket and chipset used for every new architecture they release, and the "Sandy Bridge" architecture is coming some time in January. The new architecture is based on a smaller manufacturing process than the current older Nehalems (the 760 being one of them) so should run cooler at comparable speeds, and they're also said to be able to offer 20% more performance clock for clock on "equivalent" current gen models, so it might be worth just replacing the graphics cards now and waiting a little bit for the rest until those are released (AMD are also bringing out bulldozer and llano, but that's a whole other story).

Also if you're looking to spend a bit more for some graphics card oomph, waiting a few weeks would be beneficial if at all possible, since the 6900 series from AMD are coming out this month, which should comfortably best the GTX 470 and GTX 480 if the rumours are anything to go by, and at any rate this should push the overall price of the NVIDIA models down even further (which is incredible, since the GTX 470 originally retailed at £300). Really it's an excellent time to be looking to buy a graphics card.

So that's pretty much my recommendations, feel free to tell me I'm talking shit and totally ignore what I think, since I don't really know all that much, it's just what I would go for given the choice if I was you.

**EDIT** I could also go get benchmarks and reviews if you wanted, I was just too lazy to post them all the first time around, especially since I never really trust reviews from just one site, and always read 3 or 4 at least to get an overall verdict.