New Computer or Upgrade

titan18

Hi,I'm looking for some advice on whether I should get a new computer totally or just upgrade my current one.

The computer is around 3 and a half years old and while it can still play some games, i need to have it on low settings for Company of Heroes and I want to be able to play Dawn of War 2 and Starcraft 2 when they come out.

Specs of the current PC are:

Windows XP
Direct x9
Intel Pentium D 2.8ghz(it says 2 cpus aswell, so i dont know what exactly that means)
1gig ram
Radeon x600 pro(so at least that means it has pci-express)

I dont know what people mean by power supply aswell.It's plugged into the wall which is the best I can do tbh.

If the processor is too old now and ye think it needs replacing,i'll probably buy a new pc, but if it's just the RAM and graphics card,I think it's better to just buy those parts.

Any help is appreciated.

Anti

Personally i woudl think it would be alot most cost effective to just buy a new pc. You will hoever probably be able to scavange a few parts from your current pc like the hard drives, optical drives (cd/dvd) and possibly the psu, case too infact. There is a thread in this forum called "bargin pc build" Its a sticky at the top of the forum. There are lots of builds in there from Terrorfirmer ranging from stupidly cheap to the more pricy end.

leninbenjamin

titan18 wrote: »

I dont know what people mean by power supply aswell.It's plugged into the wall which is the best I can do tbh.

your power supply (PSU) is what the cable from the mains plugs into, it's just a little box within the case itself. It's what converts the AC current from the mains into a DC current for the computer components.

Silenceisbliss

I would recommend going for a fully new computer.

if you wanted to go down that road, would you be interested in building yourself? dont be put off by the fact that you dont know what a PSU is. building a PC from scratch isnt at all as dawnting as it may seem

Anti

Silenceisbliss wrote: »

I would recommend going for a fully new computer.

if you wanted to go down that road, would you be interested in building yourself? dont be put off by the fact that you dont know what a PSU is. building a PC from scratch isnt at all as dawnting as it may seem

Its like Lego these days, anyone can put one together !

RealistSpy

Anti wrote: »

Its like Lego these days, anyone can put one together !

Yeh build a brand new one and you will love putting it together.

Silenceisbliss

Anti wrote: »

Its like Lego these days, anyone can put one together !

...I loike lego....:)

titan18

Nah,I dont think I'd be bothered building it myself atm.I'd have to wait until at least the Summer as I imagine it's time consuming, and when I go back to college,I'll have 3 or four projects to do so that eat up my time.

Is the processor ok in the computer or is it ancient and has no use anymore?

Would getting more ram,my computer has 2 free slots so I can upgrade it, and it's able to have a PCIe card, so would just getting those 2 things be enough to allow my computer to play strategy games?

Solitaire

Time consuming? You're already looking for advice here, and might look for more advice here even if you're getting a built machine (because you don't want to get conned/wallet-raped by those lying feckheads in Dell or wherever, do you?), and that's arguably where the bulk of your time will go anyway. Actually putting together a PC will only take a couple of hours if you check with us on what to get and how to do it just beforehand

Overclocking and more esoteric modding is another case altogether, but I somehow doubt you'd want to go down that road... (if you did know how to do it you would have already upgraded the RAM and graphics and simply overclocked the CPU, avoiding the ol' new build for a good few months yet!)

titan18

Ok,what is esoteric modding, i have never heard of that before.

And it only takes a few hours.Ok, I was expecting it to take a few days or something, so that changes a lot.

And getting wallet raped/conned isn't a problem for me.I see it as i'm paying for the easier,simpler and less hassled way of doing something.

But is it actually easy to make a pc?Is it basically connect the parts to the motherboard, cos if it I already know how to do that?Or is their other stuff involved

Silenceisbliss

Esoteric = obscure, abstruse, superfluous
Modding = modifying , “souping up”

Venom

OP depending on your current overall specs you can probley build a pretty decent PC for about 600-800 notes. Putting it togeather will take around 2 hours with another 2 hours worth of windows/drivers/updates work.

You would probley need the following...

chip
motherboard
heat sink
ram - go for a DDR2 system and this ram is dirt cheep so go for 4gb

and maybe ....
power supply - depends on the output of you old one
graphics card - seeing as you want to play DoW2