Help with upgrading a few parts please?

[cphantom]

Hello, I've been falling behind the times in the PC world and am looking to upgrade once again. My specs:


Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-790XTA-UD4 AM3 AMD 790X SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
(Processor: AMD Phenom II X2 550)
6GB DDR3 (3 sticks of 2GB) PC3-10700 (667 MHz)
NVidia GeForce GTS 250


The main peaces I'm concerned about are the motherboard and/or the graphics card. If anyone could help with some recommendations for some nicer parts that'd be great.

[Nellah]

Your motherboard seems fine, is there some feature it doesn't have that you want?

If you're looking for an inexpensive upgrade to that computer, you could look at one of the higher end Phenom II X4 chips and a GTX460 1GB non-SE video card. It helps to list a budget though, you could be looking to spend $200 or $1000.

[cphantom]

Your motherboard seems fine, is there some feature it doesn't have that you want?

If you're looking for an inexpensive upgrade to that computer, you could look at one of the higher end Phenom II X4 chips and a GTX460 1GB non-SE video card. It helps to list a budget though, you could be looking to spend $200 or $1000.

Yeah sorry, a price range would've been good. Maybe something like ~$300 a part give or take? And I'm just looking for an upgrade in general, no particular reason. I may actually be looking into a case now that I think about it as well. Mine is awfully small. Could you recommend something with a lot of breathing room in it?

[Nellah]

Heh, you want roomy? This guy is roomy. I would have a plan if you're gonna spend $280 on a case though... I use the CoolerMaster Storm Scout ($85) for my main PC (I take it to my friends' houses a lot) and the Antec 300 ($59) for my server (has trouble fitting very long video cards, I had to do some gymnastics to get my GTX275 in there.)

$300 will get you a very nice GPU, the XFX HD 6950 2GiB ($259) is what I use, you can also get a MSI GTX560Ti for $245.

Motherboard is fine for what you have, but if you wanted a rather massive performance boost in games and general PC use, you might think about upgrading your CPU and motherboard together:

CPU: i5-2500K $219
Motherboard: You can pick from any number of P67/Z68 boards to work with that CPU, they'll run you $90-120 for the entry level models.


As always, make sure you have a strong enough power supply to run any parts you put in there. I have a 650-watt Corsair that's overkill for my system, I've run it off a four year old 550-watt Rosewill for a while.

[Deleted]

You should try unlocking the the last two cores on your CPU. Go into ET6 (gigabyte software) and go to Tuner tab click on the advance mode button near top right side and then enable core boost and cores 2 and 3. If it fails to boot correctly then you try it with 3 cores switching between cores to get the config that works. It will automatically change back to 2 cores if it fails on reboot by the way.

This is a risk only you can take and although i can tell you i have had allot of success with this i can't guarantee you will so good luck hope it works as it is an awesome free upgrade. Oh and dont forget to monitor Temps in HWMonitor because sometimes after unlocking they run a bit hotter than normal so just make sure it is well in safety zone (max temp of 61c so aim for 50 - 55 tops)