$500 to upgrade my current rig...suggestions please?

[Lucky]

I have an Athlon xp 2500 running on old pc3200 ram. I use it for photo processing and RAID storage. Lately, I'm finding that not only is it sluggish, but it's a bit unreliable. The mobo's onboard fan no longer works, and my old radeon 8500 video card runs too hot because of a broken fan too.

I'm looking for:

A CPU that will somewhat future-proof me. I'm leaning towards the intel dual core's, but AMD is OK too. I don't need crazy speed, but a nice boost over my athlon would be nice. Stability is the number one thing factor.

The motherboard, should it accept pc3200 ram (is that possible?) would be a plus, but I plan on buying newer ram anyways. A good built in RAID 1 solution would be a very nice plus. I'd like it be be able to accept older PCI cards (I don't know if that's an issue with the newer PCI-E boards). Again, reliablity is a must. I'll pay $50 extra for a stable brand over a generic if it's a proven board.

The graphics card doesn't need to be able to play games, but i'd like a decent one. Needs to support high rez on big monitors.

I've already got a great PSU, case, and plenty of storage and optical drives. Don't need those. Any suggestions, especially from those who read the hot deals forum and know about any current specials, are appreciated.

 

[Nickel020]

I'd get a C2D, which model depends on if you overclock and how much you want to spend. If you overclock then a 4300 is great, if you don't just get the best one you can afford. But I guess you're not overclocking since stability is important. I don't know how much processing power you need, but if you have $500 to spend then I'd definitely get a C2D unless I needed a good video card.

For a mainboard, the Gigagbyte GA-965P-S3 is pretty good and pretty cheap for a C2D board. It also got AT silver award in the 965 roundup. It has 3 PCI slots.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2914&p=4
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot...x?ProductID=2424&ModelName=GA-965P-DS3

RAM again depends on whether you're overclocking or not. I'm not a DDR2 expert, so I'll leave that to others.

Video card depends on if you also play games, and what else you're doing other than photo processing.

 

[f4phantom2500]

I think any modern graphics card will be good, any GeForce 7 series or Radeon X1k series card will be better than your Radeon 8500. Why do you need it to be decent, just to run high res on monitors or for like occasional light gaming or what? If all you need it to do is be able to run high res on a big monitor, you man even be able to get by with a motherboard with some kind of integrated video. I don't know anything about photo processing, is it demanding at all on the video card or is it all about processor? If your 8500 was sufficient then any GF7 or Radeon X1k card will be fine, probably even any GF6 or Radeon X card. As far as RAM is concerned, if you plan on buying new RAM anyway, just get a C2D machine now. Honestly, if your XP 2500 was sufficient, or nearly sufficient, then any C2D will be fine. I think you could get by with a C2D E6300 (probably 4300 too), GF7300/Radeon X1300 (maybe even X300 or 6200), and if the photo processing takes a lot of RAM just put some money into a quality 2GB kit and get a 945P based motherboard from whatever brand you're comfortable with. If you absolutely have to spend the $500 then you might want to get a bit better video card just because, even though any modern card will blow away your 8500, and put the rest onto a better C2D.

 

[NamelessMC]

First thing's first, your $500 budget can easily get you into a completely new system, hassle free, with everything in it. I know because I built mine around the same budget.

Second, you don't need your ram to be compatible, because you can VERY easily sell your PC3200 ram. How much of it do you have anyway? I have 1 GB of PC3200 ram I'm selling and the first time I posted it up, I quickly got PM's with offers for the asking price ($55 shipped). You could easily sell your ram and system and walk into an even bigger budget to get a much better system.

Is the $500 budget you're planning already set aside, or is it factoring your current rig being sold? If I were you, I'd find a junky PC to use for now and part out your current rig. The ram, motherboard, hard-drive and video-card will find homes REALLY fast. Lots of people look for spare parts like that to piece together servers or internet hubs.

Let's say you sell your rig for $200 at the LEAST, combined with your $500 budget, you could get the following:
Core 2 Duo E6300 $180
Corsair XMS2 DDR667 $74 www.mwave.com
Biostar TForce 965PT $100.70 www.mwave.com
EVGA 7600GT $109.99 www.newegg.com

That puts you at $464 and you haven't even factored in selling your old parts yet. (Motherboard, CPU, ram, video-card)
I know you said you have a great PSU, but you might want to check with sites like Tomshardware.com or here or Jonnyguru.com's tiered list to make sure. There's a lot of misconceptions about what a great PSU is and what people THINK is a great PSU.

 

[Lucky]

Originally posted by: NamelessMC
First thing's first, your $500 budget can easily get you into a completely new system, hassle free, with everything in it. I know because I built mine around the same budget.

Second, you don't need your ram to be compatible, because you can VERY easily sell your PC3200 ram. How much of it do you have anyway? I have 1 GB of PC3200 ram I'm selling and the first time I posted it up, I quickly got PM's with offers for the asking price ($55 shipped). You could easily sell your ram and system and walk into an even bigger budget to get a much better system.

Is the $500 budget you're planning already set aside, or is it factoring your current rig being sold? If I were you, I'd find a junky PC to use for now and part out your current rig. The ram, motherboard, hard-drive and video-card will find homes REALLY fast. Lots of people look for spare parts like that to piece together servers or internet hubs.

Let's say you sell your rig for $200 at the LEAST, combined with your $500 budget, you could get the following:
Core 2 Duo E6300 $180
Corsair XMS2 DDR667 $74 www.mwave.com
Biostar TForce 965PT $100.70 www.mwave.com
EVGA 7600GT $109.99 www.newegg.com

That puts you at $464 and you haven't even factored in selling your old parts yet. (Motherboard, CPU, ram, video-card)
I know you said you have a great PSU, but you might want to check with sites like Tomshardware.com or here or Jonnyguru.com's tiered list to make sure. There's a lot of misconceptions about what a great PSU is and what people THINK is a great PSU.

Thanks for the specific examples of components. I don't know a good value-to-performance mobo for the intel core duo's.

I will not be selling my entire rig. It's housed in a nice customized lian-li case, and I'm keeping my raptor startup drive and other HD. Good point on selling the other stuff off, I guess.

I will NOT be overclocking. I'm looking to get decent performance and stability upgrade while being frugal (wife approved $500 in upgrades...heh.)

I don't need a killer graphics card (i.e., no games will be played on it.)...but I'd like it to be pretty modern and capable of playing games reasonably should I want to.

The main use for this machine is excel spreadsheet work (a dual monitor output video card would be a HUGE plus), DVD archiving, and acting as somewhat of a file server as I'll have a redundant RAID setup (RAID 1, I believe? It's been a year or two since )

Yes, I probably want at least 1.5GB or 2GB of RAM. And yes, the PSU is VERY high quality. But I appreciate the newbie warning.


thanks for any further suggestions.