ok, i've got $250 to upgrade....please help me decide

[theNEOone]

here's what i have so far that is relevant:

nforce2 board
1x512mb PC2700 Corsair XMS
XP 2200+
gainward ti4600

i have $250 to spend and i need some advice.
i'm looking at a 2800+ barton and a second stick of 512 PC2700 XMS for ~$200 is this a good decision? i heard that 2 memory sticks are necessary to benefit fully from an nforce2 board - how big of a performance jump will this be? worth spending $100? (not only for the increase in performance from the 2 sticks, but also from the fact that now i'll have 1GB of memory). or should i just sell my 512mb and get 2x256 of DDR400 maybe? what about just sticking with my current 512mb stick and picking up a SATA drive instead? i'm pretty flexible here guys.

i'm looking to upgrade my video card only once HL2 and Doom3 are released so right now i'm just looking to jump on UT2004, so i think my 4600 can get the job done in the mean time.

edit: i won't be doing any overclocking because these parts are going in a SFF pc.

 

[mrweirdo]

I would go with the DDR400. SATA wouldnt be worth it unless you were runing multiple raided drives and even then you have to take into consideration that lots of SATA hard drives and controllors arent realy SATA but standard ATA converted to SATA.

 

[theNEOone]

what would be the benefit of getting DDR400 if the cpu runs at 333fsb? (i'm not being confrontational - i've simply been out of the PC-building loop for a while and i have some questions!) thanks

 

[Bonesdad]

That's a pretty nice machine you've got there now. The amount/speed of memory is probably OK, since you are not going to OC. You would get a fair boost by going to the 2800+. You could also step up the video card to an ati 9800 Pro, if it fits in your SFF.

The boost you get from dual DDR memory is on the order of 2%. Not really noticeable.

I guess out of all there, I would do the CPU. You might consider a mobile 2500+, I hear they run cooler than the vanilla Barton. Cool enough to run OC'd in an SFF? Dunno. For $250 get the CPU and another stick of PC2700.

 

[theNEOone]

Originally posted by: Bonesdad
That's a pretty nice machine you've got there now. The amount/speed of memory is probably OK, since you are not going to OC. You would get a fair boost by going to the 2800+. You could also step up the video card to an ati 9800 Pro, if it fits in your SFF.

The boost you get from dual DDR memory is on the order of 2%. Not really noticeable.

I guess out of all there, I would do the CPU. You might consider a mobile 2500+, I hear they run cooler than the vanilla Barton. Cool enough to run OC'd in an SFF? Dunno. For $250 get the CPU and another stick of PC2700.

what about the move from 1 stick of 512mb pc2700 to 2x256mb (or 2x512mb for that matter) of pc3200? also, what about picking up a barton 3000+ that runs at a 400fsb?

remember that i could just pick up 2x512mb of pc3200 and sell my current stick and prob only end up paying about $20 more. so from ~$230 to ~$250-260.

 

[Bonesdad]

You could do that too. Don't think you will see much of a performance boost, even with 2x512 of PC3200, esp if you don't OC.

 

[lavaman]

You don't need faster memory since you will not be overclocking. I would go with the 2800+ and another stick of PC2700. That way you'll be running in dual channel mode and your CPU will be quite a bit faster. Plus 1GB of memory will help when you have numerous applications running at the same time.

 

[theNEOone]

doh! well i ended up picking up a pair of geil sticks. if i can unload my corsair memory for $80 (which is $30 less than newegg), i will only be paying $20 more for pc400 memory.

i ended up sticking to the 2800+ because i was looking at benchmarks and the performance increase was negligable.