Phenom upgrade

[Freddy Dare]

It may be that time to consider an upgrade for this rather old PC of mine.

Current:
Phenom II x4 965BE
8GB DDR3 Ram
Sapphire R9 280X Toxic 3GB
Gigabyte cheap as chips Mobo.


The above is still performing pretty well considering that's a 7 year old Processor, Ram is minimal and the graphics card is a bit old too.

I can play every game I have at decent settings but with occasional issues caused by ther processor falling behind when things get busy. typically only in Arma tbh.

Well I recently bought a ASUS ROG GL752VW 17.3" Gaming Laptop Intel Core i5-6300HQ, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 2GB Dedicated Graphics.


Damn thing shit's on my pc, it's making me consider buying a mobo/ i5 bundle or something as my budget is minimal. I don't play enough to warrant a £500 upgrade. Maybe £300 ish tops ?


Talk to me. i know fuck all about intel, I have been AMD forever. but it feels so smooth!

[Bombcrater]

Don't bother with an i5, AMD's Ryzen has made them completely pointless.

£300 will (just) get you a Ryzen 5 1400 processor, a reasonable B350 motherboard and 8GB of DDR4-3200. Unfortunately DDR4 is stupid expensive right now, so going up to 16GB would be another £70 or so.

[56k Lagman]

fuck intel

[Lana Torrin]

I for a second thought this was a bot.. Phenom?? Fuck mate I thought my processor was old..

Ryzen is currently awesome. You could wait for threadripper to see if it gives a price drop to the existing stuff, but I don't think it will.

[Freddy Dare]

I for a second thought this was a bot.. Phenom?? Fuck mate I thought my processor was old..

Ryzen is currently awesome. You could wait for threadripper to see if it gives a price drop to the existing stuff, but I don't think it will.

was probably my best purchase, fucking thing won't die, overclocked and run 24h a day for 7 ish years and still gaming nightly.

Needs putting to bed.

[56k Lagman]

Phenom II was the shit especially in a time when intel wanted people to use triple channel memory for i7s

[Malcanis]

I'm still running a phenom 965/8Gb setup I bought 6 years ago and it's been a star, easily the longest lived processer I've had by a margin. I kind of want to replace it, but I just can't justify spending the money on it, because it does everything I need it to and it's rock stable.

Those Ryzens are alluring, tho.

[56k Lagman]

If I were to do a build in the next year or two it would for sure be 100% AMD. I always like supporting them over intel, probably just the underdog factor but I've had no bad experiences with any of the ATi GPUs I've owned. Likewise for intel and nvidia products but I hear too much bad business practice for those two companies to want to support them any more than I have to.

[Daneel Trevize]

Get a Ryzen 5 1600 to get the Wraith Spire cooler, it's significantly better than what came with the Phenom IIs.

Gigabyte GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 is a mATX rather than full ATX, but it has 4 RAM slots and the NVMe M.2 upgrade option, so far more future-proof than many other mATX. Gigabyte's support was fucking abysmal at being any help trying to get Win7 to boot on it though, but MS hasn't complained about migrating my key to Win10 after the supposed closing date.

gl getting 16GB DDR4 to start with, I pounced on a deal for 16GB non-metal-heatsinked single-ranked Crucial for iirc ~£80, which is about what 8GB decent speed stuff is going for, as was predictable back in the Spring & isn't likely to fall this year.
TBH you're almost certainly fine with just 8GB for quite some time, unless you're planning significantly different usage. I would have had to downgrade from 10GB and decided to take that deal & punt the issue for a year or two instead.

Threadripper is another bomb dropped on intel's pricing shitshow, but it and Ryzen 3 aren't what you're after, Ryzen 5 is, and that's mostly matured & stable in the market & support now afaik.