Hi guys, I'm running: ABIT Fatality FP-IN9 650i-SLI Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66Mhz, 800FSB (think it might be the E4700, but possibly E6750) PowerColor ATI Radeon X1950XT(PCI-E) [Recently upgraded to Sapphire HD 4870 ] 2 x 1GB GeiL DDR800 Ram 1 x Sata DVD rw | 1 x Sata HD | 1 x IDE HD 700 Watt PSU (branded) Since I've just bought the new Ati Sapphire card I believe my system won't do it any justice in which case I'm trying to measure out my options to make my pc perform better. At present it does seem quite slow (both in terms of gaming at times and loading multiple applications). I have around £300-600 to play around with, obviously I don't have to spend it all with the recession and all that, bla bla . These are the following options I have come up with, please feel free too criticise or add/edit. 1.) Upgrade DDR800 RAM to 8GB - cheapest option 2.) New Quad processor + 8GB ram - intermediate option 3.) New mobo, i7 processor, 2 or 4GB DDR3 Ram - most expensive option Could you suggest any specific CPU, motherboard or Ram that would fit into my tight budget?
I'd hold on till the mainstream Core i5 processors are released. No point spending hundreds now and then wanting to upgrade again in 4-6 months time. Also, that spec should be fine for most games. You could try getting a new HSF and overclocking your processor, if it isn't already. When did you last format and reinstall Windows?
Thanks for the quick response mate. Last format was probably about 3 months ago. Probably due one soon and I might do it before installing my new card.
Looking at that system, i don't think RAM will bottleneck it. The biggest bottleneck you have is probably that IDE HDD you have. Just dump those two drives, and get a Sammy F1 1TB drive, that will give you a nice boost. The next thing you could do is go and overclock. With a little bit of effort (an hour on google and an hour of tinkering) this thing should do 3,4 to 3,6 easily, depending on which CPU you actually have. That will give you a nice boost. If those things dont work, go quad or e8400. You will have to check which will work best for you. Basically, e8400 is faster for single applications or gaming, the quads win at video-editing and multitasking productivity. Seriously though, start with your HDDs.
Small correction to the Ram, just realised I have 2GB in total and not 4GB. Still worthwhile upgrading the Ram? I'm definately looking into the Sammy F1 now, it's got a pretty good price on it!
Yeah, upgrade the RAM to 4GB, upgrade the HDDs to either the Samsung F1 1TB or WD Caviar Blue 640GB (AAKS version) depending how much space you need and whether you trust Samsung or not, and format and install 64bit Vista on there. Should make a bit of difference.
yes, if the current RAM is only 2GB, you could possibly benefit from an upgrade to 4GB. It's relatively cheap too. In your situation, here's what i would do: 1: new harddrive, throw out the old ones! The new drive can be any brand of new drive above 500GB really, most of them have relatively similar performance, not noticable outside of benchmarks. If you do not need the extra space, you can pick up samsung's F1 750Gb very cheap, and it performs idenical to the 1TB, since it is just the same drive with a few bad sectors disabled 2: Get a 4GB kit of RAM. Kingston's ValueRAM series are cheap, but they all are, and there's not much difference for the non-benchmarker between them. Get DDR2-6400 stuff, no need for high-performance gear at all. 3: Overclock that processor. Results may will vary, but you will get result for sure.
