Hey Guys, first post here so i hope its in the right place
 
Just wanting a bit of general advice .. i feel my PC isnt as good as it could be, maybe ive put money in the wrong place.
 
 
Motherboard - Asustek M2A-VM AMD690G Matx
CPU              - AM2 6000+
Video Card   - Nvidia 7800gtx
Ram              - 2gb A-Data ram
 
i know the ram isnt the best, nor the motherboard..
 
how much performance difference would i see from upgrading the ram to say Corsair or something of equivalent .. or is it worthwhile trying to adjust the timings on the budget ram ?
 
also i guess the motherboard will be hindering performance, but by how much ? .. what advantages do you see in buying more expensive motherboards other than Stability, better overclocking support,more features, etc etc - in saying that i have not had any stability issues
 
Thanks in advance
 
Daryl

Upgrading your RAM from one producer to another will insignificantly contribute to your performance... The amount of RAM is more critical for performance as it the time to go fetch data from disk is so dire that a miss is essentially fatal to your performance.

I would also say that the motherboard is also of lesser relevance to performance. What is interesting in my opinion is the CPU, Video card and amount of RAM.

I think it would help if you could tell us in which applications you find your performance lacking.  That way we could get you pointed in the right direction down the upgrade path to get the speed you're looking for.  That, and what your budget would be for an upgrade.  Congrats on your first post, you've come to the right place friend!

If your a gamer, you need a much faster GPU than that.  8800GT or so, maybe a 9600 (cheaper).  Ram would make a tiny tiny diff if it would overclock better.

yeah ive read the boards here for a while ..
 
i guess im a diehard AMD fan, hence why i went for the 6000+ and was on a budget at the time of purchasing.
 
in regards to general slowness i guess im referring to Windows (OS) , wether it be XP or Vista. once ive loaded a few applications after reinstall the pc seems to take a while to boot up.
 
could that just be windows ?
 
my budget for an upgrade ? .. im not too sure .. i dont think id be looking at swapping cpu/motherboard at this stage, not until the end of the year id imagine.
 
but id happily look at new ram or graphics card.
 
I live in New Zealand and hardware is expensive here .. for example a 8800gts (g92) is approx $380USD !!!! but i cant seem to find any retailers in USA that will courier to New Zealand.
 
but our exchange rate to the USD is very good at the moment so if i could find a retailer there id be certainly looking at that.
 
would i see any performance upgrade in going to 4gb ram ? obviously id need to be running a 64bit OS for this to be of advantage right ?
 
I am a bit of a gamer, i realise the 7800gtx isnt the best, but as i mentioned its expensive to upgrade here.
 
i do have a nice 800wrms Klipsch surround system and 22" Asus Widescreen LCD though .. itd be nice to play some flash graphicy game at 1680x1050  
 
Another option i thought about was a 10k or 15k rpm hard-drive ? .. at the moment im running a 320gb 7200rpm sata drive and a 500gb as a dump drive

^Don't bother with 10k and 15k (usually SCSI). Just get a 7200.11 HDD which are almost as fast as the Raptors (not the new VelociRaptor). You get good performance and space with the 7200.11s at a good price.

is there much difference in performance between say the 7200.10 and the 7200.11 ? .. ill check what i have when i get home however i think its about 1 year old, not sure what itll be  
 
are all the 7200.11's 32mb cache ?