Of course. Ignore me.

Well if I was in the market, I'd build your suggestion over that Chillblast thingy any day of the week.

Paul?

*edit* excuse my appallingly slack SPAG

okenobi and john...

many thanks for your responses. I'm not ignoring them but am at present supervising young "helsing" as he helps with the decorating in what is effectively our computer room. It seems the computer and router may soon have to be switched off to access skirting boards !

I appreciate your advice and will come back to you asap.

Paul

Btw, you say you've only got 512mb of ram in your present machine I'd get some more ram if you don't intend to replace your computer immediately.

Wow, this PC takes me back.

Just be going through all my stuff in my computer room and my old evesham is still there. XP2200+ and 2x512mb RAM uber glory! Feel the power!

I must admit though that old spec is still functional, 10 years on. Amazing really.

John' spec is a good one., a very capable machine. Personally out of the two I'd go for the 6850 primarily as it's less power hungry than the 460.

My Barton 2500 / 1GB Ram was only retired earlier this year - for an Atom based machine which is probably slower!

To be fair, the graphics card wasn't released when the issue went to bed.

On price/performance, I'd still say 460 1Gb over a 6850. The 6870 is a different story.

Indeed, not sure why I said 6850. The 6870 is between the 5850 and 5870 IIRC and has been selling for £175 which is a pretty good bargain.

I actually haven't looked at the 6850 in all honesty, uber typo.

Yeah, IF you can get a 6870 at £176, but I think eBuyers stock has gone and nobody else has any at that price. For £159 the 1gig Gigabyte OC 460 is ludicrous value for money.

I was a little tempted but what with the 6970 due in November (I think) I thought I'd hang back and see the lie of the land. Got a hold of a 4870x2 anyways so I'm not entirely sure a change is in order, probably be a downgrade aside from DX11 TBH.

Indications are the 6970 will beat your card substantially enough to make it worthwhile. But spare a thought for me with a 4350. Reinstalled CoD2 and NSF:Most Wanted at the weekend and can just about manage these two 5 year old games at 19x10 with everything on it's lowest possible setting!

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you guys.

Tom.... I've no intention of modding my existing machine. I will probably keep it as an emergency backup but won't add anything to it.

John... I'm a little confused as to your choice of processor. I thought the i7 series were a superior (and more expensive) cpu to the i5. Maybe you can educate me... I know nothing about mb chipsets for example. I take your point about adding an SSD btw.

Okenobi... thanks for your nudging John re speccing a machine for me. I already knew he built systems as my youngest, Helsing, has one of John's builds !

All I'm after is a machine that will serve me for the next 5 or so years. I appreciate your input guys.

The i7 (socket 1366 type) would be quicker than the i5 series as they use triple channel ram - however if you intend to use your PC mosly for gaming it is probably a bit OTT as graphics power is more important here than cpu power. The i7 930, for example, would also cost you around £80 more than the i5 760 at £219 as against £141 plus the price difference re. motherboard etc and having triple channel ram.

With the price difference between the i7 930 and i7 950 being only a tenner I would opt for the 950 in any case.

So if you go back to my original suggestion you would substitute the motherboard, cpu and ram and the build would look something like:-


Gigabyte GA-X58 as has Sata 6Gbps and USB 3
Intel i7 950 cpu
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 cpu cooler
6Gb (3 x 2) Corsair Dominator DDR ram (PC3-12800)
1Tb Samsung F3 hard drive
LG Blu-Ray reader and DVD ReWriter combo - if not fussed re. blu-ray then straight dual-layer DVD rewriter
AMD Radeon 6850 graphics card - or possibly nVidia GTX460
620w Seasonic modular PSU
Antec Three-Hundred case
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Price comes to around £990 so £170 dearer than my i5 suggestion.