Upgrading old Athlon 64 Rig
 

I've been kinda out of the loop on PC hardware lately, but I'm upgrading my brother's PC. He's currently running a Athlon 64 on a DFI Ultra-D motherboard with 4GB of Ram and a Geforce GTX 250. Looking at upgrading the CPU, RAM, and motherboard. Looking at about $500 budget.

So far I've decided on the Intel Core i5 2500K. Looking for a good P67 motherboard and what 8GB Ram kit you would recommend to be able to overclock the 2500K well. I've been looking at the Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte P67 boards, and not really sure which to go with.

I was thinking of this Gigabyte P67 board because of the features and price point:
GIGABYTE GA-P67X-UD3-B3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6G...

Not really sure about RAM, considering this just not sure if its worth the extra money:
CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM...

The components look fine, but his GPU sure is going to show its age when combined with them. ASRock and Biostar also have some great boards at that price point, as well.

Having built systems in the mid 2000s I don't have good impressions of either ASRock or Biostar but I've heard they have come a long way.

I'm a Gigabyte fanboy, myself, but jumped ship for my current ASRock Extreme4 Gen3 board. I wouldn't go Biostar, simply for the red color scheme( :laugh: ), but cadaveca found his review boards very solid.

I am Gigabyte board fan too , second one best i like is Asus & nothing else as a board...

Anyhow now is really a bad time to upgrade just wait about 3 weeks when Bulldozer be out & then decided which way to go AMD or Intel there is a good chance that Intel will lower there prices on most of they CPU's , you may safe lots of money by waiting only just a few weeks ;)

ASrock is now it's own company and has made great boards since the tail end of S775, I had one with my Q6600 that ran much better than the ASUS it repplaced. BioStar has some ofthe best P67/Z68 mobos on the market in terms of performance. I reccomend the TZ68A+ since for $100, you can't beat it.

For RAM, I reccomend G.Skill Ripjaw's since they are just as good as that Corsair Vengence (maybe better) and are usually the cheapest kits as well (fantastic value).

Wow, didn't realize they got rid of IDE on these P67 boards. Seems only the Asus has an IDE controller. He still has 2 great working IDE optical drives.

Edit: Would this system have any trouble running off of an older Cooler Master eXtreme Power 600W PSU? My concern about it is that it only has a 4-pin motherboard/CPU power connector, though I would imagine a 4 pin to 8 pin adapter should work fine. Correct?

EDIT: Never mind about the IDE part... miss reading the optical part of it...:rolleyes:

As for your PSU having only 4 pins for the motherboard 12v it will work still , i had an old 500w PSU with only 4 pins also & a motherboard AM2+ with 2x4 pins connector & it worked fine with only the 4 pins in even with an overclock CPU (800+)

I do suggest again , to wait a few weeks (~3) before buying...

His hard drives are SATA. It's the optical drives that are IDE. And yes I know a SATA DVD-RW drive is like $20 so its not a big deal really.

Sorry! i miss the optical part of it lol! :o

I wasn't too aware of bulldozer, there isn't any benchmarks out yet is there?

Nothing official but we should know in about 2-3 weeks

If Bulldozer is as cheap as we heard to be , it may force Intel to lower they prices too on CPU's so just sit on it & wait a little , just a few weeks is not that long of a wait ;)

Other than age, what else are you looking to get out of the upgrade?

EDIT:
Saw that you will be overclock. Want to add he may have better luck overclocking with 4x2 vs 2x4 when it comes to memory.

ASrock boards are amazing. No matter if you're going for an AMD or Intel chip, you won't be dissapointed.

P.S.

I'm using a ASRock board atm ^^

+1 for the ASRock! my asrock is rock solid

You may want to consider some lower profile ram (traditional ram heatspreaders) if you plan to get a monster air heatsink to overclock.
Get ddr3 1600 or 1866 - not much benefit other than AIDA64 benchmarks above that...

It's for my brother who is looking to play BF3, and yes he will be upgrading the videocard soon too, but probably a few months down the road. So yes, it's mostly an upgrade for gaming.

In terms of overclocking, why would it be better to go with 4x2 Ram? I've always overclocked PCs with 2 sticks of Ram no problem. Not looking for a huge overclock, but just a nice solid overclock to maybe 4Ghz or so on air cooling.

High density IC's. From what I know by hear-say, Sandy bridge IMC, doesn't particularly care for them. Think you can wait to build this for about another 2 weeks and wait for AMD FX lineup?

If not:
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