[SOLVED] Breathing life into old system

[Lief79]

I finished building a system just after my first daughter was born, I now want to spruce it up a bit, give it a bit more juice before giving it to her.

Main things she wants to do are play minecraft (and mods), play apex legends and start her own YouTube channel. Nothing super demanding and I have a large library of games which I may revisit myself also.

Currently it is:
Asus h67 motherboard
I5 2500k, stock cooler, at stock speed
2 x 4gb ddr3 1333mhz ram
Corsair 850w psu
2tb seagate 7200rpm hdd
Radeon hd 6950 gpu
2 ide dvd drives (1 is rw, not sure why I put 2 in lol)
Windows 7 64bit home premium

My current thinking is to put a decent ssd in, probably about 500gb (not sure what's compatible the board only has sata3)

Upgrade to win10 (is this still free, and easy to do on a new drive?)

Switch the gpu for a gtx 970 (will cpu bottleneck this?)

I may need to replace the psu, I cleaned it today, and was difficult to put it back together so I encouraged it with a hammer lol, if so I'd prefer a modular psu for a cleaner build.

Any advice would be appreciated, I believe I can upgrade the cpu, but currently I would just like the 2 components above.

Thanks for any help

 

[helper800]

Upgrading to Win 10 can still be done free. You can get a Samsung 860 SSD for cheap. Your CPU will bottleneck anything you put in there past a gtx 780 or so. Get anything from Seasonic or Corsair that is rated gold or better for a new PSU. What is your total budget?

 

[Lief79]

Upgrading to Win 10 can still be done free. You can get a Samsung 860 SSD for cheap. Your CPU will bottleneck anything you put in there past a gtx 780 or so. Get anything from Seasonic or Corsair that is rated gold or better for a new PSU. What is your total budget?

Bare in mind it won't be used for any super aaa titles, but if a 780 is enough might save a few quid. I tried apex on the current system before stripping down for cleaning and it was.... Not good lol. 40fps and dropping to maybe 10 in combat.

Would like to do for £150 ish, as her own ps4 was the other option a bit more if I broke the psu

 

[Lief79]

Just took a look as didn't consider 780 before. It only goes to dx11 whilst 970 goes to dx12, and only a £10 ish price difference used.

The benchmark difference is fairly small all things considered. In the 970s favour.

Is there something I may of missed? Thank you

 

[helper800]

When I was talking about the 780 I was referring to your cpu's bottleneck. I was saying a 780 or so would max the cpu most of the time with cpu intensive games. Get whatever is the best performance per euro in your area.

 

[mitch074]

Get a tower cooler, overclock a bit, any SATA SSD will work, add RAM now while DDR3 is still cheap, upgrade to win 10, and you might want to consider an AMD RX570 8 Gb - best power/price ratio today.

 

[Lief79]

Thank you, just checked a comparison of 970 and 580, and now I'm stuck between them lol. Apparently 970 runs minecraft alot better and the 580s 8gb will help apex alot better. They are both around the same price too so can't even use that to help decide.

 

[Lief79]

And I put it all back together, and no power... Haven't reset cmos yet... Or tried the paper clip test on psu. I would guess psu is dead though.

 

[Lief79]

Just an update not that anyone cares

Psu is fine, power switch was broken so replaced it.

Upgraded to win 10 and bought a 500gb ssd (amazing difference)

Just bought a rx 580 8gb, waiting for delivery.

Will upgrade ram to 16gb later.

Hopefully it will be good enough for the things my daughter wants to do with minecraft and telling her story on YouTube

 

[mdd1963]

When a rig is for a child, it is nearly always good enough 'as is'!

 

[Ketchup79]

Just saw your thread. Sounds good! Just added an SSD to my old 2500k rig last year for my kids to use. Plays everything they want just fine and frees mine for me when I need it.