Current system is an ageing Phenom II X6 and the mobo is on its last legs. Several USB headers are dead on the back panel and it has the occasional hiccup recognising harddrives/cd drives memory etc. Time to put the old girl out to pasture me thinks...

I'm an old school PC user so I do like to fettle but I also have a mortgage so I can't afford to get silly £500 overclocker special motherboards. For now I will hang on to my existing graphics card (7770) but obviously I'll look to replace that some time later in the year. I've also become enamoured with the AIO watercooling setups so my P180 case will have to be passed on and get a case that can accommodate a 240mm rad or two (without surgery). I recently bought more DDR3 memory so that will just be shifted across too (yes it was overspecced at the time of purchase and will be fine for OC).

With that in mind I'm looking at getting:
i5 4670k
Gigabyte Z87-HD3
Antec Kuhler 1220 (would really appreciate feedback from folk that have an AIO 240mm cooler)
Antec Neo Eco 620w (seems to be the same as the HCG but cheaper...?)
Antec P100 case (Corsair Carbide 330R seems a worthy competitor)

As you can tell I'm an Antec fan but in no way have any loyalty to them other than knowing that the case and PSU I got 5 years ago are still great products and going strong so I'm favouring them initially.

That all comes to about £500 in most shops and that is pretty much what I'm aiming on spending. As I said it's about 5 years since my last full build so if anyone has any insight into why this is a good/bad build I'd really like to know. Alternatives to the case and PSU are most pressing as they seem to be the hardest to get any solid review information on. Any review I read is more like a marketing brochure than an actual review.

As a secondary part to this upgrade I'm toying with the idea of getting the new Creative Sound Blaster "Z". The last discrete card I got was an ancient SB Live! but I've noticed that a couple of recent friends builds have noticeably better audio than mine and they have the generation prior. Does the Z represent good value for money or should I look at something else?

And the final part of the upgrade would be a new monitor. My 24" Dell panel is seriously long in the tooth. The BenQ XL2411T seems like a good option and having seen one recently seems to match the claims. Any counter offers?

Cheers

TL;DR?
Getting a new rig, £500, MOBO, CPU, COOLER, CASE and PSU.
Might get a new soundcard and monitor, thoughts?

Thanks

That's about a grand nz sooooo,

If your not overclocking, why bother with liquid cooling ?

You've got a case and power supply, ram and a video card.

Why not just the i5 you quoted, $ 324 NZ, stock cooling, suitable motherboard, ( the one you quoted ) $ 213 NZ, and something like an ASUS r9 270X $374 NZ, free copy of BF4, and I do believe I'm still under budget !

You can save a lot if you want a different processor.

If you really want watercooling, the solo is about $100 NZ less than what your looking at.

Thanks, appreciate the comments, not sure how the currency translation works is 1k NZ considered a lot for an upgrade?

I do plan on overclocking but I'm not going to silly degrees. The K series processor and Z87 chipset meet my requirements for fettling but don't break the bank. The high end Z87 boards with LN2 switches and OC panels and breakout boards are ridiculous IMO and that is what I was trying to say I was avoiding. I agree that the processor is probably the part that can save the most money without compromising performance too badly but I really, really want to have the option to sit and play with timings and speeds to get the performance/noise balance I want.

The old rig is the new housing for my server as the mid tower it currently runs in is getting too cramped for all the HDDs.

The AMD cards are great but supply is pretty bad right now as they are good for bitcoin miners (apparently this has also bumped the price up beyond release price) so I want to hold off getting graphics till 2 things happen:

Valve prove that the home game streaming works on both nvidia and AMD cards. (then pick which ever does it best)

AMD and Nvidia do the next energy efficiency respin of current parts (later part of this year)

You might also want to wait and see if Mantle offers any significant increase in performance in the supported titles. As far as I know it was supposed to have been released for Battlefield 4 in the beginning of January, but due to all the issues with the game, it has been pushed back a while, most likely till February.

It was due on December and delayed to January. But we'll see if it arrives on time hehe.

I'm not sure Mantle is really a good selling point unless all the games I want take advantage of it. The newly announced Freesync, however, is quite appealing.

I'm convinced I read that there was a demo of BF4 on mantle showing a 45% frame rate increase but I can't find the article.

Quote from yegadoyai :

Thanks, appreciate the comments, not sure how the currency translation works is 1k NZ considered a lot for an upgrade

About 2/1, 500 quid = 1000NZ. Is that alot, yes & no ! Do you want a great gaming box or do you want an expensive desktop pc ?

The prices I quoted are the buy now in NZ, that includes the video card...... ( And BF4 )

Well I have found one thing that is wrong with that spec, it turns out that the recommended PSU for the top flight graphics cards are 750W. While I suspect this 620W would get by in a single card configuration with few harddrives I don't see the point in spending all this money only to find that I can't get the graphics I want later... Back to the drawing board for 750W PSU's.

Quote from yegadoyai :

Well I have found one thing that is wrong with that spec, it turns out that the recommended PSU for the top flight graphics cards are 750W. While I suspect this 620W would get by in a single card configuration with few harddrives I don't see the point in spending all this money only to find that I can't get the graphics I want later... Back to the drawing board for 750W PSU's.

Actually, looking at the current trends for power consumption of modern GPUs, you can expect it to offer the same performance using less power OR more perf out of the same power. And the current gen ones don't even use any power close to what is efficient for your PSU (if you do settle for 750W, including the rest of your rig). It would be advisable to stay within 550-650W given your single GPU set-up with slight CPU overclock when you're most likely be using only about 60-75% max of what the PSU can provide.