PSU's and upgrades.

[noidly1]

The last time I upgraded my system was when socket 7's came out and I bought an a7n8x-e, 6800 agp, 2 20gigs and a 600w PSU,

This time, 5 months ago, I asked a local shop what was the latest amd platform that has peaked out, cpu wise, and was told the 939s. So I got an a8n32sli, an amd 4800+ dual-core cpu, 2 sticks patriot 1gig ddr400 2-3-2-5's, 2 xfx 8800gtx-xxx's, 3 160 giger's. I could have gotten the FX60 cpu but the shop said not to bother if I'm not an OCer..

Now; time to find a PSU...

Do I get one for what I have now or do I try to find, or wait for, one that is suitable for the future?

I don't like playing the "catch-up" game, so what I am trying to do is get the best that I can that is future capable like the 8800 gtx's. I know the am2's are out but from what I can tell, they are not that much better than what I have now. Now the socket F's are out, dual cpu's? NOT.... stupid way to keep-up with intel's quad... intel has anounced future 80 cores. Where is all this going???

So what to do? Things are really going wild in the advancement of PC's, hopefully my setup will last a good while, 4-5 years, till things start to taper off and then, maybe, if I need to, I'll upgrade then.

Any suggestions?

 

[insightdriver]

For a power supply, make sure it's ATX 2.2 version. At least two rails with a 4pin/8pin 12 V connector and some SATA power connectors.

I've used the same computer for ten years. It was an Apple IIC. When did get a Wintel box it was a 486DX33 processor machine. Multimedia upgrade kits were just coming out that had sound card, X1 CD-ROM, cheap speakers, microphone and headophones and a whole bunch of shovelware on CD-ROMS. I got one of those kits and started playing Windows 3.1 games. I upgraded from Windows 3.1 up to Windows 98 on that machine.

My next machine was a Pentium 450 Mhz machine. I began playing more graphic's intensive games as I had an Nvidia TI4200 video card.

That machine is still being used by my son. That computer is around 7 years old now.

My current machine is an Athlon XP 2700+ Computer with a GEforce 6800 Ultra 256Mb video card, 2Gigs of ram and a 200G hard drive, dual booting XP Pro, Vista. I play more graphically intensive games with it.

Since PCIe has become a standard I am waiting before I build a new box because that will require a lot of changes in hardware. This computer I'm using will still be plenty useful even though it's about 3 years old now.

Upgrade? Only if something you want to do won't work on your current machine. For me, going from 512Mb of ram to 2gig did not make an appreciable improvement in my machine. I do end up leaving a lot more programs open now than I used to.

For me the best upgrade I did was to go to a 19inch LCD from 15 inch CRT monitor.