Upgrading Around $300 To Spend

[tljenson]

I have a friend and he is asking me which componets he ought to upgrade to. System specs below.

3700+ 939
Asus SLI Premium
Single 7600 GT e-vga card
1 gig ram.

Said he was thinking of getting a 4800+ X2 CPU. Would that be a mistake? Should he instead double up the 7600 GT card? Or maybe another single card? Or should he invest in 2 gigs of ram? Any advice would be appeciated.

He is mainly a gamer though he converts xvid's from time to time

tljenson

 

[SidVicious]

I second what prozac26 said, it is a decent machine and your friend's 300$ will go a longer way (performance wise) after the next generation of GPU is released, even more so if he can get a beefier budget down the road.

Beside, a 7600GT can be OC'ed like mad with a simple Vmod and a better cooling system, that CPU should also have some headroom to it as well...

 

[jaguarskx]

Yeah, the 7600GT isn't a bad GPU. The A64 3700+ is fine for games. Getting an X2 4800+ will improve gaming performance somewhat, but not as dramatic as replacing the 7600GT with a 7900GT.

However, if your friend can hold out 'til December, then he can probably get more bang for his buck. That's when nVidia's DX10 cards are rumored to be available. ATI GPUs are rumored to be out about 2 months after nVidia's DX10 GPUs.

Sitting and waiting is not easy, the reward can be much better performance than can be had with today's GPUs.

 

[ethel]

Yep, RAM and video card.

The CPU is pretty fast pre-Conroe, which has only been out for a couple of months. And most games don't take huge benefit from multi-core.