Upgrade Path Assistance Needed

[Finnatic]

Oh mighty Gods of tech hardware, please hear my plea:

I would like your recommendations as to the best upgrade to my current system:

I currently have the following:

Asus P4T533
Pentium 4 2.53ghz
512mb PC1066 RDRAM (2x256)
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
Xtasy Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti4600 128mb
120gb 7200 rpm 8mb harddrive
180gb 7200 rpm 8mb harddrive
Sony DRU500A 4x DVD+-R/RW Rewriter
Creative Encore 6x DVD-Rom
Lian-Li PC62 or 68 case (silver aluminum with filter at bottom front)
Samsung 19" LCD 1280x1024 native resolution
Antec 350 or 400 Watt Power Supply (don't remember which it is.. but this PC is a couple years old now)

I play a lot of City of Heroes and just purchased Doom 3. I do a lot of hard drive intensive stuff and feel like the drive is sluggish at times. Then again, both my drives are almost full! I often have two or three programs running simultaneously as I like to surf the net and download demos off Gamespot while I'm encoding MP3s and stuff like that. I've had to drop City of Heroes to 1024x768 because I like to play with more effects enabled. When I'm playing games, I don't run any other processes.

Please give me your suggestions as to how I should proceed with an upgrade. I'd like to keep my case, my monitor, and my sound card and start anew with the rest.

Thank you for your treasure trove of advice!

F.

 

[Delorian]

For a small upgrade, get another 512mb ram

For a medium upgrade get the ram and a 9800 pro

For a large upgrade get an A64, 1GB ram and a Geforce 6800 GT


If you don't upgrade the CPU, OC it like crazy

 

[magomago]

And ifyou wanna splure and go crazy, Go Dual Processor and scsci ;0

But I notice you have a DVD Burner--Start Backing up. Toss what you don't acceess a lot (or whatever just sits there) onto DVDrs to clear up space. That should be a good start. Also, I would see where another 512 megs of ram would take you before you do any upgrading, but now that I noticed you have RDRAM....well if you can find another 512 of RDRAM for Cheap try that option first, and I would thik you would feel a difference


IF you plan to go on a new system totally~ But you won't pay for dual processor and SCSI...Id' start by looking at the Athlon64 since they are clearly the leaders at the moment (even Video Encoding- Intel's area where it has traditionally done better due to programs heavily optimized for the P4 have fallen behind the A64), 1 gig of ram (doesn't have to extremely expensive if you dno't plan on overclocking), and a Vanilla6800 or 6800GT. For motherboards, differences these days are getting minor because of the onboard memory controller on the A64, so it comes down to the features offered by the board~ so take a look at VIA as well as the NF250s. For harddrives you may want to consoder a raptor as your boot drive ~since some people swear the difference is night and day (Although on the same note I've noticed people saying it was a total waste)


But the first thing I would try is tossing another 512 in there and doing some overclocking~ Maybe you can hit around 2.8/2.9 and with another 512 megs of ram it may be a big enough of a difference to where you can save more money so you can get an even better computer than what you maybe thinking of now (Maybe an Operton Setup..ooh yeahhh)