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General discussion

Upgrading PC

Oct 5, 2004 12:38PM PDT

I have a custom built PC that i put together about 1 year ago and when i built it i put a new motherboard and processor and video card in it. I have an Asus A7n8X-deluxe mobo, 2000XP proc overclcked at 1.97ghz, a stick of Corsair XMS 3200 356mb RAM, and a Saphire ATi 9000 video card. I have a hard drive that is about 2 years old, its an old WD 40 gig 5400RPM IDE hard drive. I know i need an upgrade with many of the parts, but my money is tight so i can only upgrade 1 of them, so my question is, in your opinion what would be the most crucial upgrade i can make to increase windows performance and game performance, the video card, extra memory, bigger proc, or a faster SATA hard drive?

Discussion is locked

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Re: Upgrading PC
Oct 5, 2004 10:12PM PDT

My kid has a P4 1.9GHz CPU and all plays well. But we changed the video card to enable the newer games to run well. In that box it's some fx5600 256M video card. I suggest that or better for today's games.

A bump to 512M system would not be a bad idea.

Bob

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Re: Upgrading PC
Oct 5, 2004 11:47PM PDT

I changed my 5400 RPM HDs to 7200. The results were quite noticable. Staples has a Maxtor 60 Gig for $59.00.

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Re: Upgrading PC
Oct 14, 2004 9:05AM PDT

The 60 gig 7200 rpm Maxtor hard drive at Staples is now only $40. Upgrading to 512 meg of ram is also very worthwhile. The best improvement for gaming would be to upgrade to an Athlon 64 processor. An Athlon 64 3000+ and new motherboard is probably under $250 if you go for the socket 754 version. Here are some benchmarks for Doom 3.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2149&p=7

Of course once you have an Athlon 64, a video card upgrade would also be worthwhile.

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Re: Upgrading PC
Oct 24, 2004 2:42AM PDT

I bought one of the Maxtor 60 gig 7200 rpm drives at Staples for $40(no rebate involved!) I think it was only a one week special though. I really didn't need it, but at that price I couldn't resist. The week after, Staples had the 80 gig 7200 rpm Maxtor drive on sale for $60. Now the prices are back up on the 60 gig and 80 gig drives at Staples. $80 for the 60 gig 7200 rpm, and $100 for the 80 gig. Who will buy the 60 and 80 gig at those prices when they can buy the 160 gig 7200 rpm for only $130, and the 250 gig 7200 rpm at only $180?

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Re: Upgrading PC
Oct 21, 2004 7:06PM PDT

the RAM and go for PC3200, not lower unless you really need to save money. Too many people go for low speed RAMN (PC2000 etc.) not really understanding the performance difference. The bigger the number the better