Hi there,

Almost 4 years ago I bought my current PC, high-end system at the time. And I'm still quite surprised with the power it has, I can play C&C at high and Supreme Commander and World in Conflict on medium. But the graphic card and my memory certainly need an upgrade.

The thing is I don't know how much a bottleneck my CPU / mobo will be when I add, let's say, another gig of ram and a radeon 4850. I'm not expecting to run all the latest games on very high settings but I'd like a nice fluid gameplay on medium/high.

Current setup:
PSU: Antec 480W
MOBO: Intel D925XCV 800 FSB
CPU: PIV 3,2 Ghz 800 FSB
RAM: 1024 MB PC4300
HD: Raptor 74Gig
GPU: Radeon X800XT 256 MB DDR3

So do I make a small upgrade now (ram, gpu) and get another year or so out of this build, or would it be better to build a new system to get a greater performance and overall experience. When browsing trough a game magazine recently all recommended / preferred system requirements were still below or equaled my machine so I know it won't last that long anymore.

Thanks!

Whats your budget like?

If you don't have a ton of money, start your upgrading now, with things that will carry over to a new build. Buying 2/4GBs of DDR2-800 would be a great start. (make sure your machine will run it first.) Buy a nice new PSU. Upgrade your video card, but realize it might not carry over so well after a year or two of using it. I would probably buy a new motherboard over the video card actually. I think the P35s will still run a P4.

If done right, you'll be able to upgrade ~$200 now, then drop more latter.

A cost of 200 would be nice, but I'm willing to spend around 500. It's tempting to go higher since for 500 you can already get some nice components.

Isn't choosing DDR2-800 memory a bit conservative? Since when I'll update the motherboard and CPU their FSB will be higher.

Thanks for the help.

If you can swing $500, you can probably do this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131278
Asus P5K SE. $89 counting shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227267
4GBs of OCZ "Reaper" DDR2-800MHz ram. $75 counting shipping and rebate.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819115052
Intel 7200. 2.53GHz with 3MB L2 cache. $130 counting shipping.

This leaves you with $206 for a new video card, so of course you should get the 4850.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814121253
Asus 4850. Need I say more. $200 counting shipping.

This leaves you with $6 left over. See what you can sell your old system for, and use that money plus the $6 to buy a new PSU. Trust me, the difference between these two systems will be night and day.

As for why buy DDR2-800MHz ram is thats all you really need. The CPU I suggested run on a 1066MHz effective FSB, 266MHz actual. 266MHz x 2 = 533, so you really only need DDR2-533 ram to run that CPU. What many people do is set the FSB to 400MHz. In your case, you'd want to set your FSB to 400MHz, the CPU multiplier to 8 or 7 (resulting in a 3.2GHz or 2.8GHz CPU) and your ram will be running at DDR2-800 speed.

A popular misconception is that if your FSB is 1066MHz, you need to buy DDR2-1066 ram. This isn't the case because your FSB is "quad pumped" and DDR is double data rate, meaning 1066MHz FSB != 1066MHz ram.