Looking to upgrade my PC

Tusky

and I need advice. My specs are as follows.

-Athlon 2300+ 2ghz
-1 gig ram
-radeon 9600 256mb
-160 gb hd.

Any idea what I should upgrade ? All suggestions welcome! Im mainly looking to play recent games. Dont have a budget a such but dont want to get carried away!

Dooom

Well if you give some idea of what you want to spend it'd be a lot easier. Aswell as that, do you want a new monitor, speakers etc.?

Ruu_Old

Are you a gamer, OP?

Tusky

Ruu wrote:

Are you a gamer, OP?

yup, think I mentioned that in the post. I have a nice surround sound system and a 19inch flatscreen monitor so should be fine in regard to that. Also have dvd drive & fast burner so thats now needed.

All replies appreciated!

Could spend somewhere between 200-500 I suppose. but Im not on any strict budget really.

Dooom

I'd suggest you upgrade the CPU, mobo and graphics card. The RAM should be alright, but considering it's DDR, it'd mean you'd be stuck with Socket 939 as opposed to AM2 or Conroe.
The hard drive won't really need upgrading, unless you're running out of space.

For ~€700 you could go for an Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard (bottom of the page), a Connect 3D X1900XT graphics card and an AMD X2 4400+ CPU.

That may be a bit over budget, so you could downgrade the motherboard to a less high-spec one, and maybe drop the CPU down to a 4200+ or 3800+ or even go for a single core AMD 4000+ which have gotten dirt cheap recently. The graphics could also be downgraded to an X1800 series card aswell.

That aside, there's the Conroe route you can go, but that would mean switching your RAM to DDR2, which could mount the price up a bit.

Tusky

Spike wrote:

I'd suggest you upgrade the CPU, mobo and graphics card. The RAM should be alright, but considering it's DDR, it'd mean you'd be stuck with Socket 939 as opposed to AM2 or Conroe.
The hard drive won't really need upgrading, unless you're running out of space.

For ~€700 you could go for an Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard (bottom of the page), a Connect 3D X1900XT graphics card and an AMD X2 4400+ CPU.

That may be a bit over budget, so you could downgrade the motherboard to a less high-spec one, and maybe drop the CPU down to a 4200+ or 3800+ or even go for a single core AMD 4000+ which have gotten dirt cheap recently. The graphics could also be downgraded to an X1800 series card aswell.

That aside, there's the Conroe route you can go, but that would mean switching your RAM to DDR2, which could mount the price up a bit.

Hmm. Sounds interesting, although I wouldnt be too keen on 700. I could always sell my old parts though I suppose. Is that graphics card reasonably good ?

Dooom

The X1900 series are ATI's top of the range cards at the moment (DX10 is due out at the end of the year, but it'd be a bit silly to upgrade to a DX10 card as soon as they're released). The X1800 series are the next step down, but they'll still eat pretty much anything you throw at them.

If you're just gaming, then an X2 is probably overkill, so a 4000+ would suit you just fine.
I didn't factor in a case or anything else because I'm assuming you don't want to go and build a new system, and partly because I haven't slept since Tuesday night.

Tusky

Spike wrote:

The X1900 series are ATI's top of the range cards at the moment (DX10 is due out at the end of the year, but it'd be a bit silly to upgrade to a DX10 card as soon as they're released). The X1800 series are the next step down, but they'll still eat pretty much anything you throw at them.

If you're just gaming, then an X2 is probably overkill, so a 4000+ would suit you just fine.
I didn't factor in a case or anything else because I'm assuming you don't want to go and build a new system, and partly because I haven't slept since Tuesday night.

Nah, not into building a new system, have a lovely thermaltake case and cba building a system from scratch. Although new card, processor and motherboard is pretty much halfway there I suppose.

I'll look into the x1900, 4000+ & motherboard. Cheers.

Dooom

One last thing to consider - you can save a few extra bucks by going for a non-SLI/Crossfire motherboard. Unless you want to add a second card somewhere down the line.
A possible route that you could do, is go for a single card setup (and a single card motherboard), wait for DX10 to come into it's own and then splurge on a Crossfire/SLI motherboard and a new DX10 card or two.

Tusky

Spike wrote:

One last thing to consider - you can save a few extra bucks by going for a non-SLI/Crossfire motherboard. Unless you want to add a second card somewhere down the line.
A possible route that you could do, is go for a single card setup (and a single card motherboard), wait for DX10 to come into it's own and then splurge on a Crossfire/SLI motherboard and a new DX10 card or two.

I dont think I would be looking to add another card.

Would that be considerabley cheaper ?

Dooom

It would be a decent bit cheaper yeah, have a look at Overclockers.co.uk and Komplett.ie to get an idea on prices.

Tusky

Spike wrote:

It would be a decent bit cheaper yeah, have a look at Overclockers.co.uk and Komplett.ie to get an idea on prices.

Cheers Spike, I'll report back on which I will purchase!

L31mr0d

Sli works out cheaper because you can buy a top of the range card now, and then maybe a year later when newer cards have come out and better games are being made, you won't have to pay full whack again for the latest card, you can just buy the same one again, which will now have reduced in price, add it to your system to give you the boost the newer cards would of. SLi is more of an investment that will pay off down the line.

My advice would be to look up about OC'in, which is a great way of saving money and getting better performance. Read up about different processors and cards and see which ones will OC the best, i'd of recommended the 3700+ as its a great little OC'er, but Komplett seem to have discontinued it

My recommendations from the Nvidia camp would be:
Asus A8N-SLI Premium = €169
AMD Athlon 64 3800+ = €115
Club3D GeForce 7900GT 256MB = €309

P.S: Tusky, your sig actually made me vomit a little, wtf is that???

SeanW

I'm going to disagree there about SLi, unless you're planning to do something totally insane like running two Radeon X1900XTXs together, there's not much point initially in getting an SLi/Crossfire board.

AMD Socket 939 kit is going for a steal these days. So (assuming you're using Socket A/745 or something) I'd reccomend getting a new board, processor and video card. Might also need new RAM unless you're using PC3200 in your existing setup.

For mainboards, I'd reccomend Sapphire. Komplett has plenty of Crossfire (Radeon's version of SLi) boards. If you don't want Crossfire, I'd suggest you look for a Sapphire Pure Performance board. Got a cheapo watered down version in my build and it kicks ass but Komplett doesn't sell that one anymore. Or, on Komplett, one of the MSI K8N NEO4-F or NEO-F1.

As for processors ... lots of bargains. A processor I paid €245 for in May, sold for €105 a month ago before it was discontinued.

Like L31mr0d I have to ask, WTF is with that sick siggie?

Dooom

Yeah I'm going to disagree with SLI there again, considering Tusky's only using a 19" monitor, SLI/Crossfire really isn't worth it. A single card solution would be far more effective.

Btw, his sig always gets a giggle from me.

Tusky

In work so I'll keep my this brief. Thanks for the replies, I'll take a look into your suggestions.

p.s I made a mistake in the op, I actually have a 21 inch monitor, dont know if that makes a difference ?

p.p.s I think the sig is funny!

Naikon

A monitor that size has a native resolution of 1600x1200 which SLI is ideal for such high resolution gaming as my 19" lcd for instance has a resolution of 1280x1024 max which would not take full advantage of sli , hence my single 7600gt does the job well.
Actually the processing overhead used for SLI to keep the cards in sync would reduce performance slightly but i think with that monitor you should go down the sli or crossfire route as your monitor has more pixels to be processed at any givin time therefore in your case SLI
would be ideal in terms of performance and cost effectivness with your monitor.

Also the sig isnt THAT offensive:)