upgrade old machine or replace?

[speedydave]

I have a pretty decent machine right now, but as I upgrade old software or buy new programs, it has an increasingly difficult time handling the load. I do mostly Photoshop work, school stuff, some video editing (with Premiere), and a small bit of gaming (BFVietnam, MOH:AA, NFSU2, etc). Current specs are:

Dell 8200 series
WinXP Pro
unknown mobo
P4 2.4ghz
512mb PC800 RDRAM
WD 80gb 7200rpm
Maxtor 200gb 7200rpm
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128mb
Turtle Beach SantaCruz sound card
Samsung (?) DVD-ROM
Plextor 12x DVD-RW
2-Wire net card
other misc. crap

I have been thinking about upgrading the case/PS, mother board and RAM (to at least 1GB of PC3200), but the reply I've gotten from most people when I say that is "That's pretty much the whole machine. Why don't you just build a new one?" I don't really see it as being the "whole machine," as there's still stuff like the processor, HD's, CD/DVD drives, video card, etc that I'm taking from my old machine.

Does it make sense to upgrade my current machine in this situation, or should I just buy/build a new machine (I will most likely be building the new machine myself..no more pre-built stuff)? Also, any good hardware recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Gerbil333]

With RAM prices as low as they are these days, you might as well go for 2GBs if you do heavy "Photoshop work".

There's nothing wrong with keeping all of the drives. Upgrading the motherboard and RAM is generally considered the entire system because it's the basis of a machine. And since you have Dell, as you already seem to know, a new case and PSU are required when upgrading the mobo.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

If you replace the case, powersupply, motherboard, and ram, you might as well get an A64 while you're at it.... or if you want to stay P4 you can too. A64 excels at gaming, but if you're more into the stuff that P4 is great at, then get a faster P4.

By all means keep the harddrives, soundcard, optical drives and such.

I'm kind of on my "4th computer", but I still have the same case I started with.

EDIT: oh, and if you get an A64 and want 2 gigs of ram, get 2x1gb vs 4x512mb to avoid any performance issues with 4 dimms.

 

[stevty2889]

With what you are doing, 2 gig of ram would probably be benificial, and I'd even stick with a P4, but a 2.4 that runs on an RDRAM based chipset is at most a 533fsb chip, with no hyperthreading, so just upgrading the MOBO ram, case, and PSU, the 2.4 will still bottleneck you, so you might as well uprgade the CPU as well. How much are you looking to spend?

 

[airfoil]

I'd say you could probably make do with additional RAM, but since it is RDRAM we are talking about, it would be cheaper to buy a new mobo and a gig of DDR - which is all you need to do if an upgrade path is what you're looking for.

On the other hand, you could sell those parts as a bundle or separately here on FS/FT, and get some money to apply towards a new AMD64 rig.