What Should I Upgrade?

[lilkiller]

I'm gonna have some money to upgrade my system soon but need to know what I should upgrade. My pc is a gaming desktop and will be used to play half life 2. My specs are:

P4 2.26
768MB RAM
9800 PRO

I as thinking that upgrading to a 939 amd 64 would be the best option but then I would have to buy a new motherboard since my current one is for intel CPUs. And my current motherboard uses RDRAM so I would have to buy new ram. Would a cpu upgrade to an am 64 be the best bet?

 

[JohnAn2112]

You'd have to upgrade your mobo and RAM if you go either way...Intel or AMD. Newer Intel boards use DDR RAM now too. For gaming, your best bet would be to go Athlon 64.

 

[o1die]

Go with the athlon 64 3200 ($215 retail boxed) and the chaintech nforce3 250 board ($75 newegg). For memory, crucial or ocz will work fine. ocz comes in pc4000 for overclocking. Socket 939 is still too expensive to spend the extra money on. Not enough performance gain over socket 754.

 

[lilkiller]

How much longer will socket 754 be around for? I want to be future proof.

 

[o1die]

Socket 754 will be around 1-2 more years. Amd will run it's budget cpus on this platform. Socket 939 is just too expensive to justify it's 10% or less performance boost. I just read two more posts that show the athlon 64 3000 hitting 2500 at 250 fsb with stock cooling. Not bad for $169 retail boxed. There's no such thing as "future proof" anymore. By the next upgrade, you'll want to change the board anyway. At $75, the chaintech nforce3 board is a budget no brainer. If you get 2 years out of it, you'll be ahead of the game. I recently got a Fry's combo deal with barton 2600 and nforce2 board for $75. A great deal, even for a cpu that's going out of production soon.

 

[rogue1979]

What about overclocking your cpu? My wife just got a 2.26b that does 3.2GHz.

 

[Appledrop]

Woah, HOW, i have a 2.26b, and i freeze n reboot whenever i set it over 2700mhz.. please help! btw this is at 1.4volts

 

[trexpesto]

Originally posted by: rogue1979
What about overclocking your cpu? My wife just got a 2.26b that does 3.2GHz.

 

[charloscarlies]

Originally posted by: o1die
Go with the athlon 64 3200 ($215 retail boxed) and the chaintech nforce3 250 board ($75 newegg). For memory, crucial or ocz will work fine. ocz comes in pc4000 for overclocking. Socket 939 is still too expensive to spend the extra money on. Not enough performance gain over socket 754.

 

[lilkiller]

I have a Dell 8200.... Does dell lock the cpu and motherboard so that it can't be overclocked?

 

[DaNorthface]

your rig looks pretty good, why are you upgrading already?