I understand UEFI can be disabled on at least some mobos.

Why the heck would you want a Xeon for a gaming PC. Madness.

 

i5 supports whatever memory the motherboard supports, Haswell i5 "Dual channel DDR3 1600/1866/2133/2400/2666+ MHz"

 

Once a PC gets to a certain age/point you end up having to replace a LOT, you are looking at 600 quid now to upgrade it all imo.

Why the heck would you want a Xeon for a gaming PC. Madness.

 

i5 supports whatever memory the motherboard supports, Haswell i5 "Dual channel DDR3 1600/1866/2133/2400/2666+ MHz"

 

Once a PC gets to a certain age/point you end up having to replace a LOT, you are looking at 600 quid now to upgrade it all imo.

 

That Xeon is a cheap one, but I'm used to building supercomputers so maybe I'm bit broken these days.

 

The reason you might want to consider it is that game mentioned likes GPU, but also likes memory bandwidth.

The memory bandwith of the single socket Xeon is twice that of the i7 offering. Therefore a bit more, but a lot more performance.

 

As for supporting the RAM, look at the intel ARK link I posted for the i7 chip.

It supports up to 1600 DDR3. Anything boyond that is not going to be doing a thing as far as the CPU is concerned unless overclocked.

Check your budget first. You might find that AMD is still offering the best bang for your buck.

Make sure your motherboard takes the new FX series CPU's if not make sure you can flash a new Bios on there and double check the board can handle the TDP rating of the 6300/8320 (6300 is 95W TDP, 8320 is 125 TDP .

 

* AMD- FX6300 (Same if a few FPS behind the 8320 in games, not something your going to notice) now you will need a decent cooler (Something like the H80i/H100i is perfect) Get it overclocked as its a champ and will etch ahead in most single core threaded app's.

 

* for a graphics card look out for the AMD ruby rewards on the R9 series cards, i got 1x Powercolour 270x with 5 free games incl BF4, card was £172 but take away the games £25x5 = £125, £172 - £125 = £47 i got a brand new graphics card that plays every game on ultra out to date... Winner winner chicken dinner.

 

* 8Gb DDR3 will do most games to date, however i am running into problems with BF4 as it WILL use 6gb or more which doesnt leave much for anything else running in the background, so id say 12gb is on the money (Whilst its cheap).

 

 

My rig specs.

 

NZXT Phantom 410 Case

Gigabyte 970UD3SP

FX-6300 (Overclocked to 4.5Ghz)

Powercolour 270x 2gb x2 in crossfire

8gb DDR3 TeamGroup Orange 

BeQuiet 650w PSU

H105 CPU cooler

128gb Kingston SSD

1tb WD green HDD

 

Cost £725 Inclu Fans Etc etc.

motherboard bundles from Novatech

 

motherboard bundles from Novatech

There's also Aria (.co.uk) who live in Manchester. Possibly co incidence, but my lad & I have had bad experiences with HDD from there. 

Go for what ever your budget allows.

 

Any processor from intel will be powerful enough for your needs. I run an outdated Phenom II quad core running oc'd at 3.6 ghz and it's still coping I also have a AMD 6870 and to be honest the graphic's card is my bottleneck. If you can get a k series one just so you have the flexibility to overclock and get the most bang for your buck.

 

Go for the best graphic you can afford because that will be most crucial to your gaming performance so spend as much as you can just to future proof your pc as much as you can.

 

The ram will be fine for the meantime and when you can afford it you can just pop some in, a 5 minute job. Don't worry to much about frequency's there is not a lot of real world performance gain to be had between them unless your hell bent on chasing figures.

 

If you can stretch to it get a ssd, trust me you will not regret it especially for boot times and general desktop performance.

 

There are a million different manufacture's and product's so do plenty of research but to be honest theirs not a massive amount of difference between the big boys.

 

Have fun.

Edited 30 April, 201412 yr by theezenutz

Thanks for the tips guys. Found out the model of his graphics card id

Is amd radeon hd6820.

IMHO if you're after a consumer system and want to buy it now purchase something like:

 

 - Intel CPU motherboard.

 - Intel i5 CPU (4670k would do it).

 - 2 * 4GB DDRIII 1866MHz DIMMS.

 - 1 * 240GB Crucial M500 SSD Drive.

 

Keep the existing hard drives for now.

Keep the existing Graphics Card for now.

 

Once he has that up and running and wants another birthday/christmas gift you can give him some money towards a new graphics card

 

However, I'd wait for 3-4 months....

Thanks for the tips guys. Found out the model of his graphics card id

Is amd radeon hd6820.

Anyone remember if the Win7 /Radeon problem was cured ? I remember there was qa problem as my MB has an inbuilt Radeon graphics card, which is he only thing dropping my W7   performance grading below 6.

I dont think it was a Win7 conflict; I had issues with built-in Radeon GFX under WinXP (Gigabyte and Asus mobos); I think it was just a poorly implemented feature.

 

I only use AMD gfx cards and not had an issue with any discrete card under any OS.

TBH, GG,I can only remember a problem,but I know it was on present set up as I 've only had an onboard graphics card since i changed my MB. Last MB had an Nvidia graphics card. I got fed up with overheating problems ( even with a strapped on fan), so this time ,since i don't need high end graphics I opted for an on board one. When i upgraded last time it was because my MB had gone up the swanie. I had a look round and settled for a maplin B grade bundle. Foxxcon A74ML-K with AMD Athlon 7550 Dual core 64bit and 2Gb matched memory. First thing I noticed was how much faster it was, with a decent FSB speed. W7 64bit made it a bit better. £75 for the MB and £20 for the memory . So sometimes it's worth shopping around for a bundle. Son and I built something for my GD .A Novatech bundle. But then A few years ago our residents association wanted a couple of decent PCs. Chairman & I shopped around and found an Aria system that we couldn't spec match at their price. After we got them, we went to a local computer training place and we noticed how slow their PCs were. Horses for courses.

I am sitting here with one mid-range and one top end Asus mobo, both with Radeon gfx (different versions), on the mobo and both disabled because they fail to perform as well as an older - supposedly far lower spec discrete Radeon card (X1950)