regularcat;3119752 said:
looks good make sure you stay away from an ati gfx card, ati sucks.
get a lower power card like a gt 240 if you dont plan on getting a 600+ watt psu.
i prefer amd over intel anyday when it comes to cpu.
The premise of ATi being "the suck" is an old premise which is slowly being changed with the newer range of ATi gpus.
Im not a fanboy I just use logic, information and experience to form fact based decisions on performance.
If you want a low power high performance card go for an ATi 6870. I can run 2x on a 600w psu. I have a gt240 in my office pc and though it is low power and relatively inexpensive its nowhere near the performance of the ATi card and isnt THAT much cheaper. The 6870 is only £140 at the moment.
I would argue that the gt240 would heavily bottleneck the CPU and isnt dx11, so the 240 isnt very "future proof". The 240 also does not support tesselation among many other dx11 effects.
ATi cards only problem were/are the drivers... ignore the ATi ones and get the latest custom drivers from guru3d.com (look for TWL / Von Dach).
My other gaming machine uses a nvidia 560 gtx and its not as quiet,cool,efficient or as fast as the 6870. Additionally I was able to OC the gpu on the 6870 from 900mhz up to 1.1ghz without any noticable heat or stability issues.
If you are unsure about ATi graphics cards and really want an Nvidia then on a budget the gtx560ti is pretty good, just make sure you get a non-referance cooler like on the Asus DirectCU, MSi Frozr or Gigabyte OC series.
In my opinion the ideal setup for an upgrade without blowing the bank on excessive things would be
Intel i5-2500k 3.3ghz - £150
Asus P8Z68-V - £120
8gb Gskill Ripjaw 1600mhz 1.5v - £60
750w Corsair PSU - £60
1x ATi 6870 1gb (Asus directcu for the aftermarket cooler) - £140
OCZ Agility 3 SSD Drive 90/120gb - £100-£120
Corsair h80 Cpu Cooler - £50
Fractal Design R3 Case - £70
Prices are estimates based on ebuyer.com
That spec will hammer the pants out of everything for at least another 2 years. You can also use the corsair h80 cpu cooler to overclock the i5 up to 5ghz without an issue.
Good Luck !
