Out of Pod Experience

The processor is not very great by today's standards, but it will do just fine for most gaming, including EVE as long as you don't get into any huge fleet fights (not even the best processor would help a lot more in such cases though).
I don't think upgrading the CPU is really necessary at this point just yet, but hey, your choice.

Anyway, IF you decide to upgrade the CPU, you'll probably want to keep the motherboard, since if you'd buy a new one, that would be a pretty big hit to the overall budget.
Let's assume you got one that was just barely what you needed, so an AM3 socket one (not an AM3+ one). Could you please also post your actual motherboard model so we can check ?

There's not really a wide selection of more powerful AM3 socket CPUs selling right now, and this one looks like the best current option:
82 GBP -> AMD Phenom II X6 1045T, Sok AM3, 2.7GHz, 6MB Cache, 95W, Retail
(found on http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1045t-sok-am3-27ghz-6mb-cache-95w-retail )
It's not really THAT much faster overall than your current one though - it even has a lower per-core frequency, but 2 extra cores and ever so slightly newer tech, so it's probably on par per core performance, with 50% more oomph for multithreaded stuff only (which EVE's physics engine is not really much a fan of just yet).
Whether that's even worth upgrading is up to you.
Personally, I wouldn't bother.

...

If you feel the need for a significantly more powerful CPU, I'm afraid you might need to go at least to an i5 3570, but that's 165-170 GBP, plus a new mobo to support it, at least another 70-75 GBP, for ~240 GBP total, which sort of exhausts your entire budget.
So, probably not worth it at this time.

...

The RAM amount should be more than sufficient for now. What type of RAM is it (frequency/timings) ? Also, again, knowing the motherboard model would help.
Probably best just leave the RAM as it is.


First off, when you say "on the fritz", what exactly are the symptoms ? What works and what doesn't ? And how exactly does it fail working, is it working oddly or not at all ?

Also, that would either be a 5750 (stock TDP 86W) or a 5770 (stock TDP 108W), there's no 5700.
Neither of those are bad cards at all, you can probably run a single client in FullHD at near-max detail at close to or over 60 FPS, or two clients at a playable 30+ FPS most of the time, if the card worked properly.

Within your selected ~100 GBP budget for the video card, your most reasonable ATI//AMD selection would be either a 1GB Radeon HD 7750 (stock TDP 55W or 75W depending on exact model) or 7770 (stock TDP 80W), which should sound awfully familiar, and also guaranteed to work with the PSU you already have (unless the PSU you have is actually the problem - not very likely but possible, depending on what extra info you give us maybe we can tell.)
That should be up to almost 3 times faster compared to your old card, depending on what you had, what you'll get, and on whether any is/was factory-overclocked or not. Call it, say, up to ~200 FPS for the 7770 vs the ~70 FPS of the assumed 5770 you might have had.
On the NVIDIA side, a GTX 650 also fits that budget (including some 2GB RAM versions), and call that one ~180 FPS for comparison's sake.

...

Personally, I would say screw upgrading the CPU or RAM, and just get a significantly more expensive video card instead (like, say, a 3GB VRAM factory-overclocked GTX 660 Ti, for instance, and call that ~460+ FPS for comparison's sake):
246 GBP -> http://www.scan.co.uk/products/3gb-evga-gtx-660-ti-superclockedplus-28nm-pcie-30-6008mhz-gddr5-gpu-980mhz-boost-1059mhz-cores-1344-
Of course, that one might be a bit overkill though, and you MIGHT also want a new PSU to go with it, since it can draw up to 190W or thereabouts (compared to a stock version TDP of 150W) - theoretically a 500W PSU should more than suffice though (total system power draw should only be somewhere around 360W at peak), but some cheap PSUs that claim they are 500W PSUs can barely safely provide that much when they're brand new, let alone after years of use... so I guess it also really depends on what PSU you have.

Another good buy from my standpoint would be a SSD.
I'm not necessarily talking about the raw transfer speed - while that's a bonus indeed over spinning platter drives, the main draw of the SSD is that it doesn't badly choke when you're trying to do a lot of seemingly simultaneous operations like all spinning platter HDDs do.
And since the OS is frequently doing a lot of smaller file access in the background whenever you tell it to do almost anything, a SSD as an OS drive is almost a must in this day and age.
Personally, I'd go for something like this:
135 GBP -> 180GB Intel 330 series SSD
( found on http://www.scan.co.uk/products/180gb-intel-330-25-ssd-sata-iii-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-25nm-mlc-read-500mb-s-write-450mb-s-52k-iops-ma )
You can go cheaper with a 120 GB one, or even just a 60 GB one, but not installing your games and apps on it (while also leaving the swap file there too) would be a shame (so you kind of need the space), and you want to also leave some decent amount of space free on it so it can remain nearly as fast as it is at the start and allow it to do some proper wear leveling (especially important if you leave the swap file there).

Of course, if you go with that SSD, you'd need to downsize the video card a bit.
I would say that in that case, you might probably want either a 2GB GTX 660 (not a "Ti" version) or a 2GB Radeon HD 7870 (both of which should most likely give you 400+ FPS).
You should be able to find some for 160-170 GBP, which alongside the SSD from above would just about be at the upper limit of your posted budget.

I am voting for power supply going bad.

olhy **** akita I refrained fom this to avoid that

With as little info as we have, it could be anything, including something as trivial as a slightly iffy OS install or corrupt drivers.

I personally live in a pretty poor quality electricity area, and still the PSUs I had seldom created any problems.
In over 20 years of PC ownership, only one machine MIGHT have had problems with the PSU, but the entire PC was so old that I got a brand new one ether way. And we're not talking brand name PSUs, I only ever purchased one "decent" PSU, and that was 2.5 years ago, for this machine I am using now. The rest were the puny type that come pre-installed in affordable cases.
So I guess it's mainly a matter of chance.

I guess we need to wait for the OP to show up again and give us a lot more details than he already had about how his machine doesn't work the way he thinks it should.
Else we might as well end up saying "get a complete new machine" :P

Only posting here for the nostalgia your Thread title and what it implied brought in me ...

Windows 8?

Are you trolling?

The head of Windows 8 development chose the noose.

Your decision though.

before critiquing other people's hardware and software choices, how about disclosing what you're running. all of you.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/CbYr win8 64 pro

the reason 7 has the longevity it does, is because parts of 8 are backported into it. it's really, really ignorant to slam 8.

windows 7 can't even manage my 4x2 core CPU

If that is true about Win 7, then not only would I need to install Win 8 to use that CPU in my computer, but I would have to get a new motherboard, as mine "only" supports 6 core CPUs. Of course, if I were to upgrade the motherboard, I would need a new GPU, I "only" have a GTX 480, new harddrives, yadda yadda.

There is no way I'm getting the wife to approve that budget proposal considering this computer is barely 18 months old.

silicon degrades in processors after a few years, and thermal paste dries out... (imo, thermal paste is annual maintenance, along with blowing dust out of the internals every few months)...

yep. I would say it's -age-