I'm planning to upgrade my rig, the specs are pretty much dinosaur age...

Intel C2D E8400 3.0GHz
Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L
Kingston + Mushkin 4x 4GB RAM DDR2

Some china brand 550W PSU
CM690

ATi 4870
120GB Sandisk Extreme SATA 3.0 SSD + several HDD for storage

Okay, my main usage at the moment is targeting at photo editing and also batch encoding... video included too. Currently the system performance is very much bottlenecked by the processor, even when I'm just viewing on LR pic to pic when loading up the preview also will load both cores to 100%

I'm looking to upgrade the processor, motherboard, and RAM and probably the case too since the external USB port does not support USB3.0.

My budget is RM2000, currently looking at the following

Core i5 3550
Motherboard -> open for suggestion since I'm not sure which chipset to go for etc. Budget about RM300-400
DDR3 value ram -> 4GB x3 (DDR3 --> tri channel?)

Plan to maintain for my GC and hard drives. PSU require an upgrade too? Different socket compared to 775 mobo?

Thanks for the input! Will look into them and upgrade my rig accordingly

Main differences between Z77 and H77 is the ability to OC? I don't plan to OC the new rig anyways, retired from these activity... I'll probably just upgrade again when its too slow

Was looking into the recommended mobo, and found out H77 boards (GA-Z77-D3H) from Gigabyte has this feature "Lucid Universal MVP Support" where else I don't see that function on the recommended GA-H77-D3H (or do you mean the GA-H77M-D3H instead?). Question now is does that feature actually work and worth paying the extra bucks for it? Most importantly works with any GPU or only the recent ones as I will be reusing my 4870.

Whops sorry bro, messed up with it. Yeah I was referring to the Z77.

What interest me is this...


http://www.gigabyte.my/products/product-pa...spx?pid=4327#ov

So I was thinking if I got the more expensive board with that virtual mvp, then it would be a 'free' upgrade to my aging 4870? That is provided this actually works?