What to upgrade next?

[Deleted]

Hey guys,

I recently bought a Pre built gaming system from overclockers.co.uk. I was wondering what would be the best part to upgrade or get next.

Here are the specs:

- Case: Coolermaster Elite 335 - Black
- Power Supply: OCZ 500w StealthXStream II
- CPU: Intel Core i3 550 3.20GHz Clarkdale
- Motherboard: Intel H55 (Socket 1156) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
- Cooler: Xigmatek Dark Knight CPU Cooler
- RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
- Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6GB/s
- Graphics Card: OcUK GeForce GTS 450 1024MB
- Sound: Realtek 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)
- Optical Drive: LG DVD+/-RW SATA Drive

I was thinking about upgrading to 8GB ram and getting an SSD but i thought i would post here to see what people thought seeing as i'm not the most computer literate person when it comes to hardware.

Thanks

[OhpUldum]

Well the i3 550 is an outdated chipset now but if you want to know what to upgrade we need to know what the use of the computer is. We can assume games but we need to know what games.

I run an OC'd i3 550 with 8GB DDR3 and dual HD5770's. You could look at overclocking your CPU for a "free" upgrade since you already have an upgrade cooler. If the board supports it you could pick up a second GTS450 for an SLi system. Or you could scrap the board/cpu and pick up the current generation LGA1155 sandybridge i3/i5.

[Deleted]

You could overclock and then upgrade your GPU to http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/...roductId=45610 or http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/...roductId=45722. Both those will give you a significant performance boost over the GTS 450. And your power supply is more than enough for both.

Just remember before you spend a penny to have a go at overclocking that little i3 as they love it and it gives you a nice free boost

[Deleted]

I probably should have mentioned this before but my i3 is already overclocked to 4.6.So the best way forward is ram upgrades and updated graphics card?

[OhpUldum]

So what do you do with the computer outside of WoW?

[Deleted]

sorry for the oldschool bump. Im using my pc for gaming only really. I have no idea what to upgrade next. All my parts are still the same as listed. I am thinking about getting an extra 4GB ram but apart from that i don't know what the best upgrade route is for me to go.

[c0rnel]

sorry for the oldschool bump. Im using my pc for gaming only really. I have no idea what to upgrade next. All my parts are still the same as listed. I am thinking about getting an extra 4GB ram but apart from that i don't know what the best upgrade route is for me to go.

With that setup i'd get a ssd first and use that 500Gb drive as a backup drive. Put your OS and games (wow) on the ssd.

Then i'd upgrade the cpu, add 4 more GB of ram and finally a better card.

Won't be cheap but it will run Wow and anything else you're running a lot faster.

[Lemmiwink]

I would definitely upgrade CPU and MB and the GPU. No matter what you change, you will either have the gpu or the cpu bottlenecking you. Get 8GB ram, thats cheap enough and a 128GB Samsung 830 and you will be flying.

Get a Z77 MB like the ASRock Z77 extreme4 and a i5 3570k and you're good for the next 3-4 years. The HD7850 is a good, cheap card and definitely best bang for bucks atm.

edit: Noticed it was from 2011 and had to remove comments on tech...