Thinking of a motherboard, processor & RAM upgrade

[hellknight]

Hey guys, my neighbour, who is in 10th standard wants to buy my config which is :-

AMD Athlon II X4 640
Biostar TA 790 GX BE motherboard
2x2 GB Kingston DDR2 RAM @ 800 MHz
Samsung 500 GB HDD
Cooler Master Extreme Plus 500 W PSU

I'll be left with

CM Elite 430 cabinet
CM Hyper TX3 CPU Cooler
Samsung 1 TB HDD
Palit GTX 260 Sonic Core 216
Altec Lansing MX 5021
AOC F22 full HD monitor

Now I'm thinking about this rig :-

Intel Core i5 2400
MSI H67MA-E35
Corsair 4 GB RAM

So, is their any real benefit in selling this rig? What will I gain if I go for the new config? Also, if I may sell this rig, what PSU should I get?

 

[Cilus]

Yes, i5 2400 is a very very good processor and you will get huge performance boost. But I have some suggestion for you:

1. If possible, try to sell the graphics card. It is now old and far better Graphics cards are available in less price. Also it is missing DirectX 11 featureset.

2. The MSI mobo is only having 2 Ram slots which may hamper your future upgradability options. So try to get INTEL DH67BL-B3 @ 5.1K or DH67VR-B3 @ 4.5K. Both of them come with 4 Ram slot with 32 GB ram support. They are also having SATA 3 6 Gbps and USB 3.0 (2 ports) support.

 

[hellknight]

Actually, I'll be installing a single module of 4 GB DDR3 & another one in the future. 8 GB DDR3 is more than enough for me. Heck, even 4 GB is more than enough. Also, this board has support for SATA 6 Gb/s & USB 3.0. Here, see this MSI Global – Mainboard - H67MA-E35 (B3)

Secondly, GTX 260 maxed out Crysis 2 at full HD. Moreover, I will decide to invest in a better card in the future after looking at the requirements of Battlefield 3. If it plays at 720p in my rig, then it is fine..

 

[Jaskanwar Singh]

what about waiting for bulldozer?

 

[hellknight]

^^Actually, the thing is that my cousin got himself Sony VAIO YB Series with AMD E-350 APU. It is an awesome product, no doubt about that. But when we tried to install Linux on it we were faced with many problems. Although official support for these APUs were added in the 2.6.38 update, but still they caused many problems.

For eg :- ATI graphics only work properly under Ubuntu & its derivatives. I'm on Arch Linux & Fedora most of the time. Both of them aren't supported by AMD.

Moreover, I'm not sure about Bulldozer supporting AES encryption instruction set which is already present in Core i5 & above..

 

[Cilus]

Ya, bulldozer is going to have AES instruction set...confirmed by AMD. And GTX 260 is slightly better than HD 4870 and there is no chance that it can maxed out Crysis in Full HD. Then you will get unplayable FPS. Crysis is even heavy on today's hardware. At 1080P with 4X AA setting, GTX 260 Core 216 FPS is below 30.

 

[hellknight]

^ Holy crap.. I mean Crysis 2

I know the rest. So, Bulldozer supports AES. Damn, so should I wait or should I go for this config.. Besides, how long will it take for Bulldozer to get launched?