Upgrading an older PC.

[reallyfull]

I have a friend with an aging rig that's past it's prime. He's running a 3200+ Athlon XP, 1GB of RAM and a ATI 9600 Pro GPU. He usually plays WoW and some Quake 3 engine games on the side. His PC runs these games reasonably well. Team Fortress 2 has caught his attention and his rig isn't running it very well. He doesn't have a big enough budget to build a new PC.

I was playing with the idea that upgrading his GPU and replacing his two 512MB sticks of RAM with two 1GB sticks would be about the best he could ask for with his current rig. I just don't want him throwing his money into a bad cause.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[InflatableBuddha]

I'm assuming your friend has an AGP video card? Not much selection in terms of new cards. I found this one which should be quite a step up, but there's a price premium for AGP these days. You might try looking for a used card.

Apparently, 1GB is within the recommended spec for TF2, but more wouldn't hurt if you can find a good price.

The video card is the major bottleneck here, and should be the priority upgrade if your friend's budget is really tight.

 

[jkresh]

the gpu is the big issue with games but buying an agp card (or ddr1 ram) now is sort of throwing money away (as it wont be usable in a new system), and with an athlon xp he will probably want a more complete upgrade in the relatively near future. That 7600gt would be a considerable upgrade over his 9600 pro, but its already out of date and wont be able to run crysis or ut2007 all that well. What is your friends budget?

 

[0roo0roo]

its time to jump, its past the point where its reasonable to upgrade that pc. source engine games really like a powerful cpu. that cpu will drag any gpu down to a point where the money is wasted, and once he realizes that he will be saddled with an agp card and old ram that will be worthless in a newer system. do not spend anymore money on that system.

prices on ram tend to favor newer ddr2 anyways, so old ram is no deal. the new core 2 cpu's can be found cheap, and any of them will run circles around his cpu.