Would like to upgrade, but can't afford to upgrade my whole system. What would be best to upgrade first, ?cpu, mobo+mem, or gfx card!?? My spec: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 o/c @ 3.2ghz Asus P5W DH Deluxe 2x1024 Corair PC2-6400(400mhz) BFG o/c GeForce 8800 GTS 512 Have 650W Tagen PSU and Centurian Coolmaster case, happy to keep! Core I7 still too expensive for cpu,mem and mobo at one time, happy to get 2nd hand hardware. Mostly want for gaming and video encoding! All help greatly appreciated! Ty Ned
dual core @ 3.2Ghz is fine for most apps. maybe up the RAM to 4GB RAM get a noticeable boost i think in general, apps and games. what resolution do you game @ ?
Try play games 1280x720 on old ILYAMA 19" CRT all with Win XP Pro, games like Fallout 3, Guild Wars, Battleground Europe, COH, CS and DOD, Arma, IL2. More ram would be easy and would be great to get a boost from. Ty Ned
just be careful with filling all 4 slots with RAM, some mobos have issues with this especially since your overclocking. cud be better to get 2x2GB depending on costs rather than risk problems and stability from 4x1GB. i think the 8800GT 512 should be enough for that res. plus with next gen cards almost here its probly best to wait since your card is pretty decent.
I would not think that you need to upgrade your graphics card playing at that resolution. In my opinion, unless you think you really need to upgrade, then don't. Because your running 32 bit xp (im guessing) then upgrading to 4GB is useless, why didn't you go vista? Have you tried 7?
Have looked at Vista but don't like it much, have only just got my head round XP! Would vista make things run that much better or worse? W7 is possible but need to read much more feedback before that! So XP 32 bit with 4Gb Ram would not help from my 2Gb Ram? Cheers all Ned
oh course it would it just means you wont make full use of it thats all. after windows has dished out all it needs for itself + your 8800 you will be left with about 3.2Gb out of your 4GB. this will still be a massive improvement over 2GB. i would however consider win7 as at the moment its free(till march then it starts shutting down every 2 hours) so you can use the 64bit edition and make use of all your 4GB of RAM. Vista is more resource hungry than XP and so 2GB of RAM is not recommended if you intend on gaming. other than that unless your running really old applicaitons it should be fine. i do not recommend you buy vista as win 7 is out in october.
you can use the free release candidate now and its valid until march 2010 if you wanna take a look at it.
Yep, got given some more mem(from friend who upgraded) 2 gb ddr2 pcs-6400...now makes mine up to 4gb..but as u said, now cant oc up to 3.2....can only get stable 2.73 and that with making the ram work slower (4:3 @259 dram freq). Would it be better to take out the extra 4x1gb and get 2 matched 2x2gb matched ddr? Btw Win7 good(not much quicker) but Creative Audigy soundblaster card not supported so my sound is screwed, may still look to change OS and get new sound card when win 7 out! Cheers Ned
