Upgrading PC for a Friend... (On the cheap)

[deathman20]

Ok... Last year I sold my friend a older XP 2500+ with 1.5Gig of ram and a 9600XT card in it. He's been looking at upgrading it with something a little newer to play games with friend and I. Thing is it definably needs to be cheap/cost effective upgrade. OCing really doesn't matter IMO with his setup sure a little would be nice but worrying about that later would be ideal.

Weather its Intel or AMD I could care less, weather its nVidia or ATI... well I prefer ATI since I have an ATI system and my other friend does as well we can easily help in trouble shooting the issues, especially if one has it in a game we probably all have the same issue. Its not nessiary but keep that in mind.

He has a 17" LCD 1280x1024 if not mistaken nothing supper high res, but not a POS at the same time. He doesn't mind running his games at low res. Most of the time he plays at either 800x600 or 1024x768. So visual quality doesn't matter as much but at the same time, we'd like to help him out with something a little nicer where he can play games maybe at screen res with all low settings at a semi reasonable frame rate (25-35FPS). Hes not picky hes played on many slow machines and for it I give him props since he quiet well at doing it.

Alright if anyone made any sense out of my ramblings up there, here's what I'd like to keep from his old system.

Hes got a DVD and CD drive if not mistaken, if we could use the old 1.5Gigs of ram (4 slots) that would be GREAT!!!, its PC-3200 for all of it if not mistaken otherwise 1 set is PC-2700. The case can be reused so thats not an issue, the PSU should be good enough to continue on, if not I got my OCZ520W PSU that would do just fine unless I find a better deal. HDD he'd probably just use the old one maybe convince him to get a newer one since the other drive is getting old.

So in other words more or less a mobo that accepts DDR-1, with going to DDR-2 maybe (not a necessity), a CPU and a GPU. Something thats on the cheap but half way decent, OCing options can be limited for all I care, as well Dual Core CPU would be nice. Looking for it to last a little while at least.

Help suggestions just maybe something to get him a heads up of what it will cost. I've really mainly dealt with high end hardware/setups so doing a cheaper solution is not my cup of tea.

Thanks.

 

[JamesXP]

Maybe a Celly-L or an E21x0?

There's a board I think its an Asrock which support C2D and DDR Ram, I can't recall the model of it either way,

If he wants it to last getting a 8600GT/S would be good DX10 and Good DX9 Performance.

 

[White_Pawn]

CPU: E2140
Mobo: Abit IP35, gigabyte ds3r, asus p5k
Ram: Your choice of ram, i'd stick with a 2 x 1gig kit of pc6400 tho. It is already pretty cheap.
Videocard: DX10: 8600GTS DX9: 7900GS
If you have extra cash, the 8800GTS 320mb is an awesome card.
PSU: your choice here, but choose a good brand. EX. Corsair HX, Antec, Silverstone, OCZ
HDD: seagate 7900.10 HDDs are pretty cheap and real nice.
CASE: Once again, your choice.
CPU HSF: cheaper: Ultra-90, More expensive: ultra120-ex or Tuniq Tower 120

IMO; the mobos that have ddr aren't very good. It's better to sell it all and get a decent mobo. The conroe mobos with DDR only have 2 ddr slots.