hi guys it's me again! my friend that doesn't really know about computers is asking me to put together an upgrade for him. his current specs are athlon xp 3200+ on a socket A 400w unknown PSU fx5200 1GB of ram no slots left and CD burner this is what I'm thinking 600w ocz game stream x850xt agp 2 GBs of ram(pc2700) and a DVD burner a x-fi sound card totaling around 600 maybe a 250GB hard drive after thanksgiving, best buy have a door buster for 40-50$ i mean the PC still runs good, cause I'm always over with him doing class projects, he games sometimes, nothing new tho; games like halo and GW, WC3; things like that. he runs dual 17" flat CRTs my question is: is it better to just build another PC or upgrade and use the PC till 2008 or something. thank ya! EDIT: here is the mobo's information and the computer information
The power supply seems a bit excessive for an AGP system. A power supply with less wattage(400s) by a decent manufacturer(Seasonic, Tagan). That would save some money. I think the ram might be a bit much, 1GB seems to be plenty for what he's doing. All that really needs upgrading would be the video card and the power supply. I have an x850xt AGP, and I can power my 19" Flat CRT with a game and my TV with a movie at the same time, so that should be plenty of power. If you want to save some money on the video card, get the x850pro or x800GTO instead, it is probably better for people who do not need gaming performance, since it costs less.
well i was thinking maybe he could carry the PSU over or would 600w be obsolete in 2 yrs? things that also could be reused: the sound card and DVD burner
it's better to go with a new supply. Try a cheap c2d board, e6300, the Enhance ENS-5150, and a 7600gt. that should be pretty good for quite a while. www.ewiz.com for the enhance ens-5150. great power supply. quiet, 80+ efficiency, quality, and cheap.
For want of better words, don't polish a turd.. X850 is going to be bottlenecked to hell by that system, its pointless upgrading it IMO. Build him a new system, low end core2 if you can stretch to it is probably the best bet
Well said. It's a bottlenecked system, and X850's are generally far too expensive. For that kind of budget you'll be able to build him a reasonable AM2 system, or as Highland3r says, a scraping-the-barrel C2D setup.
