Anonymous said:
The info you asked for is all there in my thread. Funny how the expert geeks complain when there is too little info AND when there is too much. I think I am done with this board. Just rude...
Hi,
You did provide nearly all the information needed. Sorry some people were a bit rude.
I thought I'd give you a bit more info.
1) If you don't play video games, or do something processor intensive like converting video there's little point in building a new PC.
I mention this because your video card appears to be very basic (HD4300/4500 series).
2) If your system just appears "sluggish" then maybe you should consider getting an SSD then clone your drive to that. There are 128GB SSD's for $60 or 250GB for about $120 that may suit your needs if you can move or delete enough data to clone the HDD to the SSD.
3) There's very little worthwhile saving on your existing PC. Basically:
a) Hard Drive
b) Case (if you like it)
4) You can actually play around building a new PC here:
http://pcpartpicker.com/
With help, you can design a much better computer than you could buy (at least a lot cheaper) but again it's a WASTE OF MONEY if you don't do anything that would benefit. So if you do web surfing, watch videos, and use basic programs you are already set.
5) *VIDEO CARD and gaming:
You mention the CPU, but also don't appear to have much PC knowledge or even state the PURPOSE of upgrading. If you just want a little more GAMING performance then you could just buy a better video card. It won't be a top-end gaming system obviously but a lot of games would run pretty well. You could even install Steam and try various DEMOS to see how your system performs. An older game, Half Life 2, is an example of a game that would run really well and there's a lot. Conversely, I don't think Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Metro LL, Starcraft 2 and similar games are worth getting mainly because they are very CPU intensive.
Here's a very good video card for $130 after MIR of $20:
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-video-card-gtx750tioc...
It's also a card that should be fine with most 300Watt power supplies as it's very power efficient (new Maxwell GPU architecture).
Here's how you would install the card:
a) uninstall AMD video drivers (add/remove)
b) shut down and remove video card (or disable video in BIOS if it's on the motherboard)
c) install video card
d) start PC then download and install the drivers (go to NVidia to get them)
Other:
1) You can actually monitor your CPU usage to see if it's even being maxed out. Task Manager (CTRL-ALT-DEL...)-> Performance. You should show BOTH cores (two graphs). If at least one of them isn't 100% usage a new CPU in whatever you are currently doing would make no difference.
(Some programs can only use a single core which is why you need to show both graphs. So you might see 100% usage on the first graph from the single-threaded program being limited by your CPU and 20% usage on the other graph from Windows itself. If you only had a single graph it does an AVERAGE of both cores and would show 60% usage which doesn't tell you if a better CPU would help.
If BOTH cores however showed 60% then there's no bottleneck from the CPU.)
2) For watching VIDEOS if you have any downloaded, I prefer the program K-Lite.
http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm