Help upgarding

[Guest]

Hi,

My computer is running a little slow running games cod5. I was looking for some suggestions in terms of upgrading my pc but not costing an arm and a leg.

I'm running xp home with

AMD X2 4800

Motherboard Name ASRock 939Dual-SATA2

Video Adapter nVIDIA GeForce 6600 PCI-E 512

Memory
Total 2047 MB

Any help is appreciated. I'm fairly IT literate but other than changing my sound card I have never upgarded a pc

 

[boulard83]

U should first of all get a decent GPU, if you stay Nvidia, at least a 9600gt or a better 9800gtx+
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127382
or +
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150314

If you go ATI, 4850 can be find quite cheap.
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102770


maybe just this can help you ALOT, but your CPU gonna bottleneck soon

and your memory ? what you have ? 2x 1g ?

 

[dirtmountain]

^ agreed, an upgrade to your graphic card would be your best bang for the buck. If you have a 300w or less power supply go with a HD4670. 400w or above you can go with the 9600GT, HD3870, 9800GT, HD4830. 450w or above go with the HD4850. Prices range from $65 after rebates to $130 after rebates.

 

[boulard83]

yeah nice call, i forgot the 3000 series !

 

[geofelt]

^ agreed, an upgrade to your graphic card would be your best bang for the buck. If you have a 300w or less power supply go with a HD4670. 400w or above you can go with the 9600GT, HD3870, 9800GT, HD4830. 450w or above go with the HD4850. Prices range from $65 after rebates to $130 after rebates.

Good advice.
Adding 2gb would help and is cheap

 

[megamanx00]

First, upgrade your GPU since that looks like it would be the major bottleneck. As for what you should get it depends on your budget. That board has the ability to use AM2 CPUs by using a special daughter board, but of course the board itself is a significant expense and then you will need a new CPU and memory. If you consider it make sure your case is wide enough to accomidate it.

Without upgrading your CPU I'd say you should go with a Radeon 4830 or an nVidia 9800GT. If you are considering upgrading that CPU in a few months then you may want to consider a more powerful GPU like a 4850 1GB or an nVidia 9800GTX+. You can then go online to buy the daughter board, an Athlon 6000+, and 4GB of RAM. If you ebay that 4800 you can recover some of the cost. Socket 939 4800+ CPUs are in demand since that's a fast CPU for that socket and it's very hard to get.