New PC Good Choice

[leedbrierley]

It has been sometime since I have given my PC a really good upgrade, about three years to be honest, and I want to know is it really worth the upgrade, which I am contemplating.

The current PC I have at the moment is

Processor:AMD 2800XP+
cooling unit: aracitic cooler
arcitic: MSI KT4AV
Memory: Generic DDR 333 1 gig
graphics card: AGP arctic 256MB Ge-Force FX6600GT
and the rest is aging hardware, ie soundblaster Audigy 2, 4 hard drives that are coming to there sell buy date ranging from 120 - 250 gig

My new PC I am looking at is

Processor:Intel Core 2 Duo conroe 2.4
Motherbaord: Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
Memory: Generic DDR 400 3 gig
graphics card: PCIe NVidia 256MB Ge-Force FX7600GT
Soundcard: Onboard Sound (possiblely stick a soundblaster in at somepoint)
HDD1 + 2: 80GB sata 7200 rpm 8MB cache
HDD3 + 4: 80GB sata 7200 rpm 8MB cache

I dont know if it might be a waste of money, but this is the one I am looking, and the fact is that the machine I am using is going to the missus, it is either get one that will do everything she wants or upgrade mine.

Woth upgrading?

Yay or Nay!

Lee

 

[3line]

It would be good to say what you use your computer for first. Depending on what you run, it may or may not suit your purposes in the near future. If you're into light gaming, a vid card upgrade might be worth it for the next year or so. But if you need the computer to crunch algorithms, you'll need every mhz you can get out of the CPU.

 

[Neuromancer]

My new PC I am looking at is

Processor:Intel Core 2 Duo conroe 2.4
Motherbaord: Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
Memory: Generic DDR 400 3 gig
graphics card: PCIe NVidia 256MB Ge-Force FX7600GT
Soundcard: Onboard Sound (possiblely stick a soundblaster in at somepoint)
HDD1 + 2: 80GB sata 7200 rpm 8MB cache
HDD3 + 4: 80GB sata 7200 rpm 8MB cache

I dont know if it might be a waste of money, but this is the one I am looking, and the fact is that the machine I am using is going to the missus, it is either get one that will do everything she wants or upgrade mine.

Woth upgrading?

Yay or Nay!

Lee

Definitely worth upgrading.

I agree with the above poster about vid card. I am playing nwn2 on my passive cooled 7600GS but some games require even more umph. If you are not doing this before christmas, hold off on your VGA choice and see if post Xmas reveals some cheaper DX10 cards coming out.. like 8600s or something.

Also for your memory...

You need to get DDR2, and mimimum I would get 667MHz, all of it will OC up to 800MHz with no trouble. Some will go further (freeagent is running his at 920MHz).

Also windows really likes having memory in certain quantities. 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 MB (I found this to be true on my old Athlon xp, I had 3x512MB removed one and it ran better, and it was not a DC board)

So stick with a 2GB kit and then later after Vista has been out a while and games and apps get more demanding you can upgrade to 4GB. JMHO

 

[3line]

Yeah, I would also wait at least until some of the cheaper DX10s come out. Also by that time you should get a good idea of what Vista entails.

Me, I'm probably waiting until 2008 when they iron out the kinks with DX10/Vista and also introduce Nehalem and DDR3. Also, I'm waiting to see what they do with the physics APU standards. Damnit, there are so many transitional technologies I don't want to get screwed on.

 

[leedbrierley]

You need to get DDR2, and mimimum I would get 667MHz, all of it will OC up to 800MHz with no trouble. Some will go further (freeagent is running his at 920MHz).

Already getting DDR2 installed into it for starters.

Yeah, I would also wait at least until some of the cheaper DX10s come out. Also by that time you should get a good idea of what Vista entails.

As for Vista, I am one of these people that I have found last time I bought a PC with windows already pre installed on it it was XP, remember how bad XP used to be before you pathced it upto service pack 1?

Remember certain keystrokes used to end up wiping your machine, no thanks leave me with XP Pro for 12 months. But what I do have is the licence to upgrade the OS at any time.