Upgrade Advice (2 years old)

[yebornah]

Hi everyone!

Looking through this forum I found a lot of threads offering advice on upgrades, but I guess every case is a little different. So here's mine:

My grandpa just offered me his two year old PC, but my mother could use a new one too. So I only wanna accept, if I can turn it into a decent gaming machine, without spending a lot of money.

I don't play a lot, but I'd like to be able to play some of the current games like Fallout 3 & The Witcher and I'm also looking forward to Starcraft 2 & Risen. So basically I want a system that can run current games (except Crysis maybe) in high quality and in my monitor's native resolution (1440 x 900).

Unfortunately I don't know the exact specs of the PC, but this much I know:

Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Geforce 6200
2 GB ram
Mainboard: Asus M2N
250 GB HDD
DVD Drive

I consider the GPU to be the bottleneck in terms of games performance. But adding a high end GPU without upgrading the CPU probably doesn't make a lot of sense. So I was considering to buy a (current) budget graphics card and 1 or 2 GB of ram.

Do you think that would speed it up enough to run current games with shiny graphics? Which graphics card would you recommend to go with this hardware? Is the CPU still fast enough? Has it potential for overclocking?

Thank you & kind regards!
Janus

 

[ehanger]

Im assuming you cant overclock your CPU since your computer is a prebuilt, so I would recommend getting something better like an athlon x2 6000+ and replace your video card with something like an ati 4830/4850 or if you want an Nvidia gpu you should get a 9600gt/9800GT.

Also if you are running Vista get another 2GB of RAM (if its 32bit you can only use up to 3.5GB but thats still enough)

 

[megamanx00]

First go to the Asus Website and see what CPUs that board can support. You will probably need to upgrade the BIOS as well so download the BIOS for your board while you are there. I say get a 5400BE and overclock it, if you know what you're doing and the board has overclocking options, especially increasing the FSB and essential voltages. You should be able to hit 3.0GHz on the 5400 BE just by increasing the multiplier though. If you're not going to overclock then just get the best CPU that board will support.

As for the video card you should get that's going to depend on your PSU. While a 9800GTX+ or a Radeon 4850 1GB would be a good choice if the PSU is too weak or of poor quality then those video cards wouldn't be a good choice. With a weak PSU (at least a 400W no name unit or 350W good brand unit) then your best choice is a Radeon 4670 as it draws all it's power from the PCI-E slot so it doesn't even need an external connector. If your PSU is less than 400W you may need to get a better one to use a decent video card.

I just want to mention that even a 350/400W PSU would be cutting it pretty close for using a Radeon 4670/4650.

 

[resonance451]

The problem is, if your board doesn't have overclocking options, you don't have good cooling, you need new ram, and your processor is slow, you're going to end up replacing almost everything.

If you want a new video card, most you'll want to get will require a faster processor so as not to bottleneck, or a motherboard to overclock the processor, with appropriate CPU cooling solution, and a PSU that can handle it all. Not worth gutting the system and replacing almost all of it.

Get a 4350 for a video card and an additional 2gb of cheapie RAM with reasonable timings, and leave it at that.

 

[ohiou_grad_06]

How much do you have to spend?

I'm going to recommend on the video card to grab an ATI 4670 which should require no additional power connector, unsure of how powerful your PSU actually is though.

Consider another 2 gb of ram.

Check the exhaust fan in the back, possibly upgrade to a better one(pretty cheap though).

Maybe also pop in a pci slot cooling fan, be happy with the rig for a while.

 

[ehanger]

Get what I said above and a 550w psu or higher (dont cheap out, and check the +12v rails to make sure its enough).

You should have no problem using the athlon 64 x2 6000+ as its socket AM2, same as your current processor. You can find it here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103272

 

[yebornah]

Thanks everyone for your answers!

I decided to pay a visit to my grandfather and have a look at his machine. And I really like what I see. The casing looks really cool, the whole thing appears to be a custom build and the inside is really tidy and clean.

But I'm confused about some of the components:

There is no label at all on the PSU. So I have no idea how many Watts it can deliver. Is there anyway of identifying PSUs?

On the mainboard there is a little printing saying "Socket 940". But the Asus M2N is supposed to have an AM2 socket. CPU-Z recognizes it as "Socket AM2 (940)", which doesn't really help. The CPU is recognized as a Windsor, which is supposed to be AM2 not 940.

But I'm leaning towards overclocking the existing CPU anyway, if possible. The Bios has got some overclocking options: The multiplier is already at max (11X). But I can also set the "CPU frequency", which is currently at 200 Mhz. Is this in fact the FSB? (Haven't gone through Bios settings for years...) If I change this will it also affect other components than the CPU (like ram, pci)? It seems I can set the RAM (533 Mhz) and PCIe frequency (100 Mhz) seperately...

For the graphics card I'm leaning towards the Ati 4670 because of the PSU issues and it seems to be a decent card considering my limited CPU power.

The MB has 4 Ram slots. Currently 2 are in use each with 1 GB, so they work in dual channel mode. If I got another two ram blocks will they also work dual channel? Or should I just buy one 2 GB block?

Do you think with a new graphics card, some more ram and overclocking the CPU I will be able to play current games? I don't really have a cash limit for the upgrade, but I figure if I change more than those components I might as well buy a whole new PC...

Thanks again!
Janus