Upgrade help please

S

Snowlion

Geek Trainee
Hi, heres my rigs specs:

Pentium D CPU 3.46 GHz
Asus P5VDC-MX motherboard (2 gb ram max)
768 MB DDR 400 (Pc 3200) Ram
Inno3D 7300 gt (ddr 2 AGP version)
30 gb hard drive

I've more or less been upgrading it part by part over the last 2 years so the power supply and the hard drive are a bit old..
I want to further upgrade this pc so that its able to handle most upcoming games at around 1280 x 768 with medium to high settings.

As you can make out I 'm not trying to aim for a 'bleeding edge' rig here lol.

I'm on a bit of a tight budget right now so would an increase in ram to say around 1512 Mb give a significant boost to performance or would something else be better?? Thanks.
 
Hi and welcome to Hardware Forums :)

If your wanting to upgrade your ram, I would either buy another 512mb stick of the same ram and remove the 256mb stick, or but 2GB of ram, Its best to have 2 x 512 or 2x1gb for dual channel, I have heard that if there is 1GB ram in a machine (2x512mb) and 1 of those 512mb sticks are different than the other, this can cause problems, I dont know why, but I think its something to do with different timings, so if the timings are the same on each stick, I dont see why there would be a problem. You will get better performance with the extra ram. The ram would be a boost in performance in terms of how many apps and programs you can load up at once and as long as there is plenty of ram left applications proberbly will run smoothly too and it would give better performance in games, but your graphics card is the main thing for games.

In the name of Future Upgradability, I would go for a DX10 card such as an 8800GTS,GTX or wait for the R600 from ATi, but your on a budget right? what exatly is this budget? Best card you can get for AGP is proberbly X1950Pro or 7900GS that should run most things fine but AGP is now Obsolete so PCI-E really is the way to go.

Your almost certainly going to have to upgrade your PSU though, and 30GB HDD, woah I really dunno how you have managed with that :P
 
:D haha yes the limited hard drive space does mean I have to juggle data around a little bit.
I've got 2 Pci express slots on the mobo, the cards Agp because it was meant for another slightly older pc. Is the Pentium D processor ok for the moment? I read that the core 2 duo 1.66ghz beats the D 3.5 ghz!

Not too sure how much impact the processor has when compared to ram and video card..

My budget for upgrading is around $250-300 US but I'm considering whether its a better option to get a new system altogether instead..
 
$250..., ummm, well, Graphics and Ram would be more than that :\

Your getting PCI and PCI-E mixed up, those 2 PCI slots are not PCI-E, PCI-E uses a different slot and is ALOT faster and designed for graphics cards, AGP is far superior to PCI and PCI-E is far superior to AGP and PCI.

If your wanting a PCI-E card I am afraid your going to have to upgrade your motherboard. The Pentium D CPU should be good enough for now :)
 
oops lol Just checked the motherboard again, make that 1 PCI express slot and 2 PCI slots hehe sorry bout the confusion.

So the motherboard may hang in for a bit longer, its got support for ddr2, though my rams all ddr400 right now

thanks for the help Willz :) I'll upgrade the ram first (might swap the 256 with a 1GB of the exact same type) then go from there.
 
Your motherboard has an AGP slot and 2 PCI slots, it has no PCI-E slots.

**Edit** Oh yea just looked, yea its one PCI-E slot :p, just thought it was AGP because of the brown colour :P


**Edit Again*, Yea its got an AGP slot and a PCI-E X1, PCI-E X1 is no good, graphics cards dont support that interface, PCI-E slots are longer than AGP slots too, so as it stands, your going to want to move to PCI-E if your wanting a decent graphics card and future compatability.

As I said, check that the 512mb of ram is the same type as the 1GB ram you get, I explained in one of my above posts why different sticks of ram shouldent be used, well at least thats what I think, hopefully someone will correct me, but anyway with 1x 1GB stick and 1x 512MB stick you wont get Dual Channel mode enabled, Dual Channel improves performance over single channel but you need 2 sticks of ram of the same size, so 512mb x2 or 1gb x 2.
 
:( guess Agp cards will have to do for the moment, I have another motherboard thats more upgradable with a PCI express x16 (intel d101GCC) but it'll take a while to get it since its in another country lol.

When I play games like COD, if I crank up the graphics settings , the game runs much slower but the details are way better, would this speed be affected by an increase in ram from 769->1512 or would the graphics card be the main thing here?Thanks
 
Well the memory would help to a certain degree, but a better graphics card will proberbly be needed for higher settings, I mean my X800XT PE struggles in some places on highest settings...
 
I just took out my PSU ( I'm pretty sure its more or less the cause of some problems with my pc lately but thats another topic, I guess) and its a Imbp s330, model : SFX-230M2 with a max Load of 230 W, I'm guessing thats just barely meeting my power needs? Its 3 years old now.

What would be a good wattage for my comp nowadays? Thanks :)
 
Depending on what your buying, 600+ watts, but watts are not the main thing, its the build quality, brand and amperage on the rails that is what you should mainly look for, at least 32A on the 12V rails of a PSU would be the best I think.
 
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