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Choose my upgrade path!

A

Astu222

Senior member
hello tech gurus, I need your help. i have about $215 bucks i need to spend on upgrades, now my rig is as follows:

2800+ barton 333mhzFSB
512meg PC3200 (running at 2700 speeds because of FSB limitation)
integrated GeForce4 MX (open AGP 2.0 slot)

ive come up with 2 simple choices, a refurbished 9700 pro from crucial, as well as 1 stick of 512MB pc3200, -OR- one 128MB 9800pro, or 6600GT if I can find one cheap enough, instock, before xmas (which probably wont happen.) the rig i have now "gets the job done" with games like warcraft 3 and counter strike, but i REALY want to play HL2 and other games like joint ops, and farcry. which of those 2 upgrade paths will give me better performance?

thanks a lot my friends!

 
that sempron and 9600 pro idea dont sound that great, and episodic that doesnt help much but thanks for the idea. nick seems to be swaying me in that direction. anyone else comment on what nick said?
 
It's your integrated video that is the bottleneck. Get the best vid card you can afford for the most performance increase.

The RAM and vid card option is also good if you feel that only having 512mb is seriously hurting your performance. How often is your computer paging your HDD to access the swap file?

Something to consider....

I don't know what your cash flow situation looks like but for $500 (maybe less if your current RAM is compatible) you can cannibalize the drives from your old machine and build yourself a pretty nice A64 system. This will get you set up for the next 2 or 3 years of games rather than just the next 12 months or so.

Just an idea.
 
Originally posted by: Druid21
It's your integrated video that is the bottleneck. Get the best vid card you can afford for the most performance increase.

The RAM and vid card option is also good if you feel that only having 512mb is seriously hurting your performance. How often is your computer paging your HDD to access the swap file?

Something to consider....

I don't know what your cash flow situation looks like but for $500 (maybe less if your current RAM is compatible) you can cannibalize the drives from your old machine and build yourself a pretty nice A64 system. This will get you set up for the next 2 or 3 years of games rather than just the next 12 months or so.

Just an idea.
Click to expand...

 
hey druid, i was thinking about taking the parts from this PC now, and using them in my next pc, i can use the optical, HDD, floppy, the 1 stick of ram, and the powersupply (though id want to upgrade) the only problem is, is that this an an OEM built machine, not self built. will that be a problem when using the same HDD?
 
You can certainly use the HDD from the OEM machine with no problem assuming you're going to format it before sticking all these new parts in. Now if you wanted to stick these parts in your OEM case, I'd not suggest trying that, but nothing wrong with a lil cannabalism to build youself a new machine (and having a new case) that will be physically compatible with your mobo and your P/S. You'd probably want to upgrade your P/S depending, most OEM P/S units aren't that great. The new modular P/S units are great for improving airflow (without much work) and tidyness in your case. Hope this helps!
 
You willl need to reformat the drive and reinstall the OS on it but generally HDDs transfer pretty well. What kind of OEM machine do you have? Can you provide some more specifics on the devices you wish to transfer from your old box? Brands, model #'s, etc.
 
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