First parts ordered and my new chair

The first parts have been ordered, and should arrive tomorrow - hurray. Plus, the CPU is on special this week, which brought the total order price down to £96.97 - bargain.

 In other news, I was in Debenhams outlet this weekend, and ran across a very nice leather executive chair for £50, down from £179 - another utter bargain. It’s meant to be faulty, but neither I nor the assistant at the shop could actually find anything wrong with it, and having used it since Saturday, it’s been as solid as a rock, and as comfy as hell.

(This is a pic from the Debenhams website, I will replace it with a pic of my actual chair when I get a chance)

This gave me a good excuse to give my office (Man Cave/Game room) a good clear out, which, once I get the new parts into my PC, will give me that "New PC and New room" feeling, which is always very pleasant.

Looking ahead, the PC parts should arrive tomorrow, but the new version of Win 7 I ordered looks like it will land the day after. I'm not including the OS in my £100 budget by the way, as it’s not an "upgrade" as such, and for many people, it’s not something they would need to buy, as they already have it.

Anyway, the plan for tonight begins with a full backup of all the important files. Once done, I will reinstall Windows, and run a suite of benchmark applications (Details of the benchmark plan in a follow up post). This will give me the starting point, and let me see how much bang I am getting for my buck each month.

For now, I am off to figure out what benchmarks to use.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the main obstacles to overcome is that almost nothing in my existing PC is compatible with current components. The basic run down as it stands is:

Gigabyte Socket 755 motherboard
E7200 Core 2 Duo
2GB DDR2 PC5400
SAPPHIRE HD 4850 512MB PCI-E (ATI)

I can't upgrade to an I5 or I7 without changing the board, and if I change the board, it would be counterproductive to get a DDR2 board, so I need new RAM as well. The problem is that upgrading all of this stuff to an I5 cpu, decent board and 8 gigs is going to cost £350, which my budget doesn’t allow for. So what can I do for me £100? Well, this:

YOUR BASKET

1 x MSI H61M-E33 Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard **B3 REVISION** £46.99

1 x Intel Celeron G530 2.40GHz Socket LGA 1155 Processor - Retail £35.99

1 x Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1333C9D3B1K2/4G) £19.99

Total : £113.47 (includes shipping : £8.75).







Ok, so, 2 things. Yes, it’s over £100, but I'm not including shipping in my budget so its only a couple of quid, and I'm not being uber strict on the £100 thing - I can sacrifice the odd beer here and there for the sake of a decent upgrade, but unless it’s something special, I'll aim for £100 or less :)

Next question - what the hell is this crap? A Celeron?
Well, there’s a good reason for that - the Celeron is a 1155 socket, so it will fit on a board that can also take an I5 or I7. This means that my next upgrade could be a banging CPU, if I want it to be. Plus, this Celeron is a good chunk more powerful that my ageing Core 2 Duo, so it’s still an upgrade, and at £36, it’s worth it.

Once this upgrade is complete, the PC will then be in a position that any 1 component can be upgraded without having to replace other components along with it. This means getting the maximum bang for my monthly budget buck.

Welcome to The Hundred Pound Games Machine

Welcome everyone to post number one of hpgm. Let me tell you what this is about. I've been a PC gamer for as long as I can remember. It’s a great hobby, but it’s not cheap. Normally for me, I upgrade rarely and then only when I have a boost in funds (Bonus at work, sell a car etc etc). This has worked, but of course I can never afford a killer PC, which means my PC spends far more time obsolete than it does as cutting edge.

This has gotten especially bad as about a year ago, just as my PC was getting to the 'kinda needs an upgrade' point, I bought a house, and discovered league of legends. So I had no money, and an addictive game that ran just fine on my aging PC. Fast forward to today and I have a PC that won't run BF3 (I was a huge BF2 and 2142 player, and was really looking forward to these games), and no chance to save the kind of money I need for a full upgrade. I can spare about £100 a month.

Now, my issue is that my system is so old, I needed to replace the Mother board, CPU and Ram all at once, which on its own would be £350 - so that’s 4 months of saving before I get any kind of performance increase.

So I sat down and had a think, and I realised that while I couldn't buy nice shiny kit for a few months, I could buy a very simple upgrade for about £100 (More details in the next post), and that this would allow me to start upgrading a bit at a time. This blog tracks that idea - I will go from zero to, well, fairly respectable, on a budget of £100 a month. Check back in later for more details.