Upgrade Advice Requested

[WireWalker]

Hello all,

I built my system in early 2006 and it's a little dated now. These are the specifications:

AMD Athlon 3700+
1GB Crucial Balistix RAM
Epox 9NPA+ Ultra Motherboard (PCI-E 1.0a)
Gigabyte Radeon X800 Graphics card
Corsair 850w PSU

I am looking to upgrade the graphics card as this one does not support Shader Model 3.0. I tried upgrading to a Radeon 5850 but apparently it is not compatible with PCI-E 1.0a. I would normally step down to a Palit GTX 275 but this card is very hard to find now. Therefore I would appreciate any advice as to what is the most advanced card my system can handle. Or if I should wait for the new nVidia cards. I realize that my options are limited by my system specs but I am not ready to rebuild at this point.

 

[toyota]

well you need to get ready to build a new pc because that one is hopeless for modern games and no video card will change that. a single core cpu and 1gb of system ram wont even meet the requirements just to play newer games. btw your power supply is worth twice as much as your whole system and completely unnecessary for that level of computer. your current pc would not even pull 200 watts.

 

[WireWalker]

Well that kinda depends on what particular games we're talking about. Secondly, I'm pretty sure my PC pulls more than 200 Watts . The reason I have this PSU is because my old one came to the end of its life.

 

[toyota]

Well that kinda depends on what particular games we're talking about. Secondly, I'm pretty sure my PC pulls more than 200 Watts . The reason I have this PSU is because my old one came to the end of its life.

actually your pc likely doesnt pull 200 watts ever. that cpu and gpu would not use more than 140-160 watts combined at 100% and even with the other parts you still likely would never hit 200 watts total. you could have bought a much cheaper psu and applied some money towards a modern build.

you are 100% wasting your time and money buying a modern higher end gpu with your current pc.

EDIT: wow I cant believe that you actually tried to put a 5850 in that system. you would literally throw about 75% of what the card could do right down the drain with your single core cpu and 1gb of system ram.

 

[NoQuarter]

You would end up with a cheaper solution and faster PC if you just picked up a Phenom II X3 720, mobo, 2-4gb RAM and Radeon 5770 instead of 1 top end video card. Unless you plan on buying a new CPU and mobo in the next few months I would just rebuild instead of picking up single high performance parts that don't do anything on their own.

 

[happy medium]

You would end up with a cheaper solution and faster PC if you just picked up a Phenom II X3 720, mobo, 2-4gb RAM and Radeon 5770 instead of 1 top end video card. Unless you plan on buying a new CPU and mobo in the next few months I would just rebuild instead of picking up single high performance parts that don't do anything on their own.

You can get a good Amd motherboard for 80$, quad core cpu for 100$ and ram for 80$. It would be 4x faster. I agree totally