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Suggestions on upgrade to PCI-E

R

ramj70

Senior member
I have about $500, maybe a little more to upgrade my computer. My current set up is an Athlon XP 2800, Asus A7N8X-E mobo, 120GB seagate HD, 2GB patriot pc3200 ram, 500W fortron PSU, 6800GT AGP video card, audigy sound card.

I was going to keep my hard drive, power supply, audio card and ram to save money since I don't think they really need to be upgraded. So I was looking to upgrade my mobob, video card and CPU. I use my computer mostly for gaming. I do not overclock.

Any suggestions on a good set up would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
Socket 939 3800+ X2
Radeon X1950 Pro
Asus nForce 5 939 motherboard

Cheap, yet very cheerful.

Anything much newer and you'll need to go DDR2.
 
"Keeping the RAM" automatically means you're getting socket 939 (not really, but IMO best).

$41 motherboard

$76 CPU
or
$180 dual core (though OOS)

$22 fan/heatsink

If you go with the cheaper CPU, you can get an 8800GTS 320MB within your budget. IMO that would be the best upgrade for you since you said you use it mostly for gaming as it would (as of right now and the near future) have higher overall gaming performance than a dual core CPU with a lesser video card. If you do decide to go dual core, then any of the cheaper ones like the x2 3800+, 4400+ or a low end Opteron would be good, but you'd have to settle for a lower end video card to keep under $500. You still can do an x1950XT or 7950GT 256MB with a dual core for around your budget.
 
Thanks for the suggestion rogue and zap. I got another $100 out of my wife since I told her I would sell the old parts to make up for it 😉 So that gives me around $600

I think I'm going to go with the 8800gts 320mb video card and dual core processor. That 4400 is out of stock though so I might have to go with something slower.
 
How about a Core2Duo build?

$163 - Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale 1.8GHz 2MB L2 Cache
$57 - ASRock 775Dual-VSTA Socket T (LGA 775) VIA PT880 PRO
=======
$220 + tax and shipping

Anandtech did several reviews on that board:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2810
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2813
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2814

Summary: its a great budget board that supports both AGP and PCI-E, DDR and DDR2, and the new Core2Duo CPUs. DDR400 is still good for today's applications/games, and the 4x speed of the PCI-E 16x-sized slot only hurts performance on high end cards by about 10%.

$150 - SAPPHIRE 100176L Radeon X1950PRO 256MB ($170 - $20MIR)

Check out the review on that CPU:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2903

Don't bother with DX10 for now, since the midrange cards aren't out yet, and neither are the games nor drivers, hehe.
 
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