Help me upgrade my system

[daveman]

I'll put my system specs below. I have about $300 no to do some upgrading. I use this computer for basic stuff and also to play Nascar Racing 2003 quite a bit. I was looking to upgrade the video card only but am open to any suggestions on how to better spend my money.

Specs:
Gigabyte Motherboard GA-6VX7B-4X
P3 1ghz
512 Pc 133 Ram
30 gb Western Digital Hard drive
Hercules Prophet Geforce 2 MX 64mb
300 w power supply
PCI 512 Sound card

Ask if you have anymore questions.

Many thanks for any help.

 

[mjolnir2k]

Take a visit to the FS forum and I bet you can do a major bit of upgrading for $300.

What I would do:
AMD MoBo that would support DDR ~$50
PC2700 (512mb) ~$60
XP1800 CPU ~$50
GF4 ti200 ~$100

Apx. Total spent $260, plus if you get a decent MoBo I would bet the onboard sound chip would be as good or better than your PCI card. Then you could sell the PCI card and old MOBo/CPU Combo for a few $$ and add that money to the remaining $40 you have and buy a +/- 80GB 7200 rpm HDD.

My .02

 

[chizow]

Hmm a $300 video card would be system bottlenecked in that rig, but a faster CPU would require a full system overhaul. If you could go a little bit over $300 and sell off your old parts to recoup some costs you could revamp everything and have a much faster rig:

Epox 8RDA+ ~$110 max
Athlon XP 1700+ T-bred B $51/$61 retail @ Newegg
GF4 Ti4200 or Radeon LE 8500 128MB $90 or less @ Hot Deals, Newegg, respectively
1 x 512MB PC2700 $60-$80??? @ wherever

You'd benefit in daily usage and you'd also have a considerably faster machine for games. And of course, there's always Over-:clock:ing!!!

Chiz

 

[daveman]

I dont wanna sell my old rig. Was planning on letting my son have that one.
If I only upgrades, say the video card or whatever, I was planning on upgrading therest of the machine in the near future.

Thanks

 

[qquizz]

If you just interested in better gaming performance, a GForce4 4200 or Radeon 8500 would match up real good with your system. Possibly get some PC 166 TwinMOS Ram if you want to overclock your memory bus some.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: daveman
I dont wanna sell my old rig. Was planning on letting my son have that one.
If I only upgrades, say the video card or whatever, I was planning on upgrading therest of the machine in the near future.

Thanks

In that case, I would go ahead and get the GPU (R9700pro for that money) and table the rest of the upgrade. I doubt the R9700pro will go down much more in price from $299 MSRP, it'll just get phased out, so your investment should be relatively safe.

When you do upgrade, I'd check out the Canterwood boards as well as the nForce2 (or upgraded 400MHz version) for not only pure performance, but also onboard features (like integrated sound and nic). Its amazing how much onboard components have come along which will save you money in the end.

Chiz