We are going to upgrade our sons PC for his birthday but unsure what to get, I was thinking of an AMD FX8320 which is an 8 core chip but then some reviews on the web say that the AMD fx 63 series would be better but this is a 6 core chip.

 

The PC is used for games such as Skyrim and at the moment he is running an AMD athlon quad core chip. Any ideas would be great as there seems to be so much competition in this market - Im happy with my old duel core but that's me.

 

Thanks everyone.

I'm sure you will be aware but just in case you are not remember that you will have to buy a CPU that matches the socket on your motherboard.

I'm sure you will be aware but just in case you are not remember that you will have to buy a CPU that matches the socket on your motherboard.

 

Cheers - I forgot to mention that there will be the need to buy a new motherboard to go with whatever cpu we decide to get, Will get some more DDR3 Ram also

A quad core is no slouch, and Sometimes a better upgrade for games can be The graphics card.

Most games are bottle necked by the GPU rather than the CPU.... Take a look on the particular game forum (Skyrim) and ask there... You may find the quad core more than adequate and a graphics boost would pay dividends.

The game has to be written to take advantage of all those cores before it actually has any effect. Might be worth looking into the details of the some of the games. You might find any more than 4 is a waste.

Some good points raised - Cheers everyone

If you are going to be upgrading his current rig as in taking out old parts and placing new with new, Take a look over at overclockers as they do bundles that are slightly tweaked to a higher speed. It includes motherboard, chip with a cooler and RAM. The one you will have to spend pennies on would be the gfx card as as posted about it bottle necking the rest of the rig. Although in this day and age sometimes it does work out cheaper to buy a tower than to upgrade (once again check overclockers for the systems)

Thanks for the post LGM - He bought a gaming case before xmas last year and that was £110 without a power supply (stupid money) if you ask me for an empty case and he also purchased  a corsair 1000w gaming supply which cost £90. Would rather get the board and chip as he has not long had the mentioned parts his system currently has 8GB of ddr3 ram (2x4GB modules) 

 

Will have a look at over clockers as mentioned and will let you know what we end up getting.

You dont say what board he currently has, it may be the board will take a much better cpu, without replacing everything (AM3+ will take an FX chip)

 

I bought my current mobo 3 years ago, as an emergency replacement (after the rozzers took my gaming rig and kept it for a year), after investing in a top quality mobo, I could only afford  one of the cheaper Athlon II X2 chips, but I am currently waiting on delivery of a Phenom II X6 Black Edition, a nice fast SSD, and a suitable cooler that will transform it.

 

The board makers should have a list of compatible CPU's on their website, just make sure of any BIOS requirements and check board revision numbers.

Amd chips have not really changed in 3 years and the lower core chips tend to be clocked higher.

I'd look at 8gb ram and a decent GPU. The latest amd r9/s10000 gpu's are stonkingly fast at double precision floating point. An SSD would be good for the os drive and 256gb ish is a good price point.

Edited 27 April, 201412 yr by cheezemonkhai

Budget? Obviously the higher the better...

Go for an intel more powerful and more efficient with the i5 4670k being the sweet point for price vs performance. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-4.html

 

I currently run an amd Phenom II that started life as a dual core but I was one of the lucky one's that was able to unlock the extra cores to turn it in to a quad core, that is still performing rather well ( I purchased 5 years ago) but will upgrading to a 4670k in the near distant future.

 

You won't find them much cheaper than you will through this place. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-472-IN

I personally wouldn't go for an overclocked bundle, you are paying a premium for something that you could do yourself. There is plenty of knowledge on the internet.

 

Always great service with Overclockers.

Edited 27 April, 201412 yr by theezenutz

motherboard bundles from Novatech

TBH id go for a intel chip over AMD - AMD are just not competitive at the moment.

 

As said above, an i5-4670k is the sweetspot. and thats even before overclocking.

Most online vendors will do bundles of cpu/mobo and RAM - Scan usually have something suitable on their today only page.. probably looking early £300.

 

You dont mention what graphics card he is running.... as a 1000w PSU is way way OTT for a system unless hes running at least two top-end gfx cards.

He is currently running with 8GB ddr3 1033mhz ram and wanted to ask if I got another 8GB ddr 3 but with 2133mhz speed would the faster chips clock down to run at 1033mhz to match the older ram? As im thinking it may be wasteful. I am not sure of the Graphics card he is using but know its 1gb amd radeon and is quite big. He bought that around 2 years ago for £140.

I wouldn't bother paying for the extra ram the performance increase would be minimal. Spend the money on the best processor, graphics card you could afford, if you can stretch to it an ssd would give you noticeable increase over a hdd.

I run a 1Gb card, 1Gb isnt much, you can pick up a branded Radeon card with 1GB of DDR5 ram for £60 these days. GPU's have improved enormously over the last few years - far more than cpus have, so I would look at spending your money on a new graphics card.

 

A SSD will make your programs load more quickly, but it WONT make games play any faster, nor will adding more RAM make his system any faster (unless he is a graphics designer); I assume with that much RAM he has switched off the pagefile?? Otherwise that will SLOW down his system.

I'd also recommend Intel over AMD right now unless you're trying to reuse the AMD mobo.

 

I was a bit AMD buyer for years but I think the intel offerings right now are just so solid.

 

Even the basic i3 is very powerful.

If you can get a list of the current CPU, ram, graphics card and disk drives we can probably help more.

His motherboard is an ASROCK N68C-S UCC here is a link; http://www.asrock.com/mb/nvidia/n68c-s%20ucc/

 

His CPU  is a quad core AMD II Athlon running at 3.0 GHZ

 

Graphics are Radeon 1GB DDR5

 

Hard drive is 1TB western digital blue 72000rpm with 64mb cache

 

Cheers

I think you're really looking at a new mobo too. That mobo only takes up to AM2+ and they're now past Am3+ and onto FM2+.

 

You might get away with carrying over the memory and the rest should be fine. Mobo swap without a reformat can be tricky but you might get away with it if you stick with ASRock.

I understand the board needs to be changed like Aspman says - Just hope I can get away with creating an image of his computer and then be able to run it on the new board. I have Acronis true image 2014 which looks like it has the ability to install an image on a different hardware set up as long as you have drivers for the new stuff on hand.

If you uninstall all of the mobo specific drivers before doing a swap, it should be OK, I have done this a few times with no issues.

 

 

ASRock arent my favourite mobo makers, I have had issues with several of their boards over the years, this board is effectively crippled if you fit an AM2+ or AM3 chip, so in this case I would say look at a new mobo.

(My similar era Asus mobo runs AM2/AM2+ and AM3 cpus without crippling the bus speeds, and also isnt limited to 95w like the ASR board)

 

I still think a better gfx card is also required.

Edited 28 April, 201412 yr by GentleGiant

TBH, you wont be able to easily swap the board without reinstalling windows - as a new board will have a UEFI bios.

I agree it's time for a new motherboard and CPU, but also RAM at the same time as 1066 could be DDR2.

 

However the thing I'm noticing with the i5-4670k and i7-4770k, is that neither chip supports 1866MHz DDR3.

Now obviously you can overclock them, but why not have a look at what else is out there.

 

An e5-1620v2 CPU:

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/75779/

 

 - 4 core with hyperthreading

 - 1866Mhz DDR3

 - Much much higher memory bandwidth than the either the i5 or i7. (59.7GB/s vs 25.6 GB/s for the i7-4770k)

 - 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes as opposed to 16 for the i7.

 - Hyperthreaded, unlike the i5.

 

The chip is a little bit more, however something such as the following could work well:

 

 - e5-1620v2 CPU

 - Supermicro X9SRA motherboard (http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9SRA.cfm)

 - 4*4GB 1866MHz ECC Reg DIMMS (http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT4G3ERSDD8186D)

 - Single AMD R7-265 GPU (http://www.ebuyer.com/630241-sapphire-r7-265-2gb-gddr5-dual-dvi-hdmi-displayport-pci-e-graphics-card-11232-00-20g)

 - An SSD for the OS.(Bit of a bargain right now is http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT240M500SSD1)

 - Keep the Hard disk for data, it's just fine.

 

Now bear in mind the above is going to be fast as stock, but that the system isn't one for overclocking.

So it depends on if your son likes to overclock, or if he just likes fast and stable. On top of that it's down to budgets.

 

If you got an SSD then you could reinstall the OS there and then just copy the data over from the Hard drive.

 

Finally, I have some sample DDR4 Dimms on my desk at the moment, so that raises the question is now the time to upgrade?

Edited 29 April, 201412 yr by cheezemonkhai