Year old pc needing an upgrade, help apreciated

[m0onKniGht]

Hello, well straight to the point, my pc is a year old and has now begun to slightly struggle with tittles like stalker...and thats about it, but still i am looking forward to playing some "next-gen" tittles and i am in need of a serious upgrade, my current setup is:

Mobo - Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G AM2
Processor - AMD AM2 Athlon 64 3800+
Graphics card - Leadtek Nvidia WinFast 7900 GT
RAM - 1gb 533mhz Value select Corsair
HDD's - 80 gig and 150 gig SATA Seagate
OS - Windows Vista Ultimate
Sound Card - ONBOARD
Case - Scan cheap case with 2 fans

i always have the feeling i forgot something...but yea thats it, my budget will be from 200 to 400 pounds i dont want to get a graphics card just yet, since im only waiting for Crysis Unreal Tournament 3 and Bioshock and theres still some time until they are realeased, so my priority is everything but the graphics card. And i am sort of waiting for the new amd quadcore so i dont want to spend too much on the processor.

anyway thank you in advance

 

[uberman]

I'm kind of in the same boat.Here are my suggestions.Another gig of ram,preferably2X1 sticks so you can dual channel.Since you don,t have a DX10 card try running XP instead of vista for some better gaming perf.Also maybe another 7900gt in SLI if your board supports it. My rig plays anything I throw at it with most settings on high and decent frame rates.ie.COD2,oblivion,Prey,total war series.I'm going to wait for DX10,Vista,vid cards,quadcore problems and prices to shake out before I spend for a new rig. Tried STALKER for a couple levels and it played fine in DX9 on my machine.

 

[shambling]

extra gig of ram, and another 80 gig drive to get raid going would improve load times a bit. (I'm assuming the 80 gig is your main drive at this point, since you have both an 80 and a 150) Since you don't want to upgrade processor or gpu at this moment.


Not sure how processor throttled that video card is right now, if you'd gain much of anything from upgrading from a 3800+. Especially with the ram being 533mhz and not 667. Can the higher grade AMD's clock that properly using 533?


Ram prices are pretty cheap again, so you might look into getting a 5600+ and 2 sticks of pc6400 ram.

 

[m0onKniGht]

^Thank you for the replies, i am looking to upgrade my processor, just dont want to spend alot of money on that coz im waiting for the quadcore, what i mean by that is i dont want to spend more than 100-130 on a new one. And if i do buy a new graphics card i want to get a dx10 one.

 

[shambling]

well, unless they come out with a 8900gs thats cheaper than the 8600gts's and faster, I'd say the only dx10 cards you should consider right now are the 8800gts and the 8800gtx.

Considering you can get better framerates (or so I've read) with the old 7600gt's than the 8600gts's, no reason to 'upgrade' to one of those.


I wonder if they'll ever have a 8950gt card... lol. I'm totally lost with nvidia and ati naming conventions

 

[uberman]

In that case the extra gig of ram and maybe an 8800gts 320 will give you much better gaming performance while remaining within your budget.A processor upgrade will help a little but not a lot.

 

[m0onKniGht]

well considering my setup do u think ill need to change my 400w power suply if i buy a 5600+/6000+ ?