Out of Pod Experience

My PC is getting very old (AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and ATI X1800 512MB GPU, Hiper 580W Type-R Black PSU). That's about 6 years old and it's time to finally upgrade, albeit a modest one. Given that Eve is one of the games I play most, it would be nice to know what is important when it comes to that.

I'm planing on new Mobo, CPU, Memory, SSD and GPU.

When I play Eve I usually run 2 clients at once, one on each monitor. (Occasionally just the one, but that's more down to the computer is straining under the load of 2!)
Usage-wise I also do some other gaming, CSS, SC2, Starcraft etc, nothing crazy, though I'd probably do a bit more if I upgrade just because I can. :) I also process my RAW photos in Lightroom, as well as programming in Visual Studio.

For running 2 Eve clients, if I went for 6 or 8 cores and a decent clock speed, would that be more suitable than say 4 cores but higher clock speed? I appreciate that Eve is Single threaded, so it can only use 1 core right? But if I ran 2 clients, can I assign them to separate cores?

One of the key things I wondered, in particular with regard to running 2 clients, where is the strain on a system when it comes to Eve, is it RAM, CPU or GPU which gets the most hammer?

Any advice/knowledge greatly appreciated, especially about my last sentence.

Cheers.

What kind of budge are we looking at?

You pretty much replacing all the guts. Might as well buy a new or refurbished comp.

Thanks for your replies, I've had a good read of all the above and the link provided. I can see that for me, higher core speed is more important than having 6 or 8 cores!

When I started looking at this (and got wifey approval!) my Budget was only around £460 based on an initial quick look. That gave me a modest upgrade because as AlleyKat said, even a modest upgrade would still blow my mind, but then I started looking into things more..... I don't want to make a half arsed upgrade, but I want good value for money, and creeping up to a lot more cost (like the i5) needs to be justifiable.


I'd like to think I have enough reusable components to still get better VFM by doing it myself than something comparable ready built.

I can't afford RAID-0 or any second SSD really.

But these look ok for starters right? These are the basics which I was quite hapy with.
Existing:
I have a big old Antec P180 Case which everything will fit in with ease. I'm hoping my Hiper 580W Type-R Black PSU will be powerful enough also. I have 2 x 1TB HDD's which I'll still use as data/media drives.

Then I was looking to buy new:
£60 Memory 16GB RAM (Upped from the initial 8GB I was going to get)
£70 SSD OCZ 120GB Agility 3 SSD - SATA-III - Read 525MB/s Write 500MB/s 85,000 IOPS
£120 GPU AMD 7850
£120 New second monitor Samsung S24b300hl LED LCD Widescreen 23.6" HDMI Monitor
£370 Sub total approx

The things that are constant in my budget above are simple and look to me like sound choices, but the mobo & CPU are where my costs are changing a lot.

My initial budget was based around something like the AMD FX4 3.6GHz (£73), which with a mobo (£50) bought my total in at ~£490

So I looked at the following:
FX-4 4100 Black 3.6GHz Phenom 965 3.4GHz i3 3240 3.4GHz i5 3570 3.4GHz
CPU £73.00 £88.00 £114.00 £164.00
Motherboard £50.00 £50.00 £80.00 £80.00
Total £123.00 £138.00 £194.00 £244.00
Grand Total £493.00 £508.00 £564.00 £614.00

From what I've read, the i5 is easily the best, but the extra cost is significant to me. Are any of the obove choices bad? Are there better options that I've missed? And which above provides the best VFM and suitablility?

Thanks.
CG