AMD budget gaming upgrade

[snowpuppy]

A month or so ago it seem like a great time to upgrade with all the price drops and all. Now it seem like nothing is for sure as there is new stuff on the horizon. I originally wanted to go C2D and 8800 GTS. But many in the forums feels that this is a bad time to blow money on a video card as the whole DX 10 deal is surrounded by uncertainty. So I have decided to have a cheap upgrade and wait until DX 10 games are actually in the market and benchmarks are available.

Heres my setup:
SAPPHIRE 100176L Radeon X1950PRO 256MB 256-bit GDDR3
(Because it look so amazingn the "Performance Value For DX10" article)

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+
(Heard good things about the overclocking abilities)

BIOSTAR TFORCE 550 NVIDIA nForce 550
(Claimed to be a good overclocker with the 3600+)

G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800

And that is all I am really upgrading now. I have a Antec NeoHE 550W power supply so that should be covering the power department. As you can see I am going for the bang for the buck here. Please add your opinion.

Almost forgot, this is mainly for gaming. The games i am planning to run is C&C3 and supreme commanders. Let me know how this will do.

 

[ethel]

Good choices all round, I'd say. Cheap parts, but should overclock nicely and the graphics card is definitely good bang for the buck. You can always drop in a better processor / graphics card later when you need to.

 

[alcattle]

This is a good plan, should be a good system for the money. What are you upgrading from?

 

[chuckshissle]

Why not go for the E4300?

 

[lunyone]

Why not go for the E4300?

Let's see...about $40 more + 775 mobo usually $10-$20 for comparable features. Yes the OC would be better, but budget is the name of the game for this build.

 

[coldmast]

the AM2 boards come with a little extra candy in them. :tongue:

 

[snowpuppy]

I am currently running on a Athlon XP +2500 with ASUS A7N8X with 2 X 512mb of Kingston Value RAM (running underclock because of an issue with the mobo or until i overclock cpu, whatever). My video card is a Radeon 9550 and my main drive is the older raptor drive (with less cache I believe). The worst thing is that my system is AGP. So that definitely needs to go.

I've thought about going with the E4300 (one of my original plan was E4300 and 8800 gts build) But with the cpu and a comparable motherboard, I can be looking at almost and extra 100. While the 3600+ is not at the same level in terms of overclocking, I've heard the 65nm core is not too shabby at it.

Like lunyone said, the theme is budget. It is a low end extreme bang for the buck build that should last me a year until the DX 10 craze really begins. As the site have proved in their "System Builder Marathon: Day 4" article, a system like this with an overpowering video card can match performance with a overall better system but a more mainstream card. I just want to hear opinion on whether my choice of waiting out with this setup is wise.

 

[navarone]

yeah u will feel better just getting an OK cheap GPU now....and hold out till the r650 and g90 variants to launch

crysis and UT07 are the big games that will drive the market soon...until then your proposed rig is great