Options and frustration with upgrades

Hello,

Trying to decide if it is better to take my old rigs and upgrade them or just build a new system with the latest and greatest...

I am finding that prices for AM2 and 939 pieces are comparable if not cheaper than current technology prices.

What do you guys do with old motherboards/processors and other parts? Mine are just collecting dust and I hate to have to throw it away if I can build a rig out of the parts and give it away to family but for the price, it seems like building from scratch versus upgrading older rigs is worth the investment.

Thoughts?

I sell them, depending on if anyone else in the family can use them as an upgrade or not.

Depends on what you can bring to a new system vs doing a full upgrade. I find that I always keep some parts from the system that I am upgrading. Older HDD's are good for storage drives that don't need to be the fastest. Case and PSU, I usually buy good enough that will last me 2-3 upgrades at least.

Know Nuttin said:

Case, I usually buy good enough that will last me 2-3 upgrades at least.

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I want my Case to last for ever

Latest and greatest not usually, last years latest and greatest is usually a great upgrade for me by the time I upgrade. I upgrade because I have a reason, like the old system will not play a game I want, then it's time to upgrade.

Mr.DLucey said:

I want my Case to last for ever

Latest and greatest not usually, last years latest and greatest is usually a great upgrade for me by the time I upgrade. I upgrade because I have a reason, like the old system will not play a game I want, then it's time to upgrade.

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Words to upgrade by
IMO that's the best reasoning there is. If you only play SNES emulators, get a P4 or an Athlon XP. If you want to play Metro 2033, you need more power. It's all what you want your PC to do and how fast you want it to do it.

I have so many p4 and athlon xp mobos with procs but other missing pieces... no one wants these anymore... but I keep it in my storage bin just in case...

Maybe I should get on that show "Hoarders"...

In reality, my current rig will last me for a couple more years... I only play TF2 and video encoding...

I really need to just learn self control and not buy everything just because it's the latest and greatest... I think that's what got me in this predicament...

Well... I mean... BFBC2 is more fun than TF2, in my opinion. You can't fire a rocket launcher while your buddies use a couple of tanks and collapse a building to squish the guys inside or anything... There are certainly incentives.

Thing is, that Q6600 has a lot of balls. Especially if you put it on one of the last gen 775 boards like a P45 with a late bios. Someone did a test in Crysis where they found that if other parameters were equalized, at the same clock speed, a Q6600 held up to a Phenom 2 955 in Crysis. That doesn't mean it's equal at everything, but it does mean if you OC the frig out of your mobo/cpu/RAM and get a newer GPU like an ATI 6000 or a GTX 400/500 you could play a lot of newer stuff.

Here's a bunch of stuff that will run on your current config at 30FPS+ in most cases. Some 60. Some will not run at high/max settings. All fun stuff. All ran nicely on my E6550 (2 core), 8800GTS, 2GB 1066:

My favourites in red:

Batman Arkham Asylum
Fallout 3 or New Vegas- Be aware there may be a frame stutter issue
Oblivion- ditto
Crysis
Ghost Busters 2 or 3 scenes overpower the 8800GTS
Mirror's Edge
Call of duty 2/4/World At War (all will run @ 60 most of the time)
Mass Effect (I think ME2 will run decently as well)
The Sims 3 --I know. Lame, right? Until your Sim becomes an astronaut and his daughter's boyfriend hurts her feelings so you invite him over for dinner and lock him in a closet and delete the door so he can starve to death in his own waste over 3 days. Not so lame now, is it.
Starcraft 2
Flight Simulator X -Flying from A to B to C in poor visibility and dodging other planes can be fun.

Runs nicely on 8800GTS