Upgrade or New 600>

[Sheeblasta]

I bought this computer for my kid many Christmas' ago and is due some kind of improvement. He has played games nonstop from the beginning. The computer was fully upgradeable, has a huge alienware tower, problem is we never upraded it. These specs are from the receipt from alienware. My question is, would it be better to upgrade or to buy a entire new pc, the goal is to be able to play new computer games with decent performance.

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Processor Hyperthreading
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz
x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9
Address Width: 32Bits
Data Width: 32Bits
Socket Designation: CPU 1

Memory
Capacity: 512MB
Data Width: 64Bits
Socket Designation: DIMM0

BIOS Date: 02/23/04 15:42:57 Ver: 08.00.09
Version: 1016.001
Version: A M I - 2000423


MotherBoard
P4C800-E (DELUX?)
Version Rev 1.xx


Video Card
RADEON X800 Pro Series

Hard Drive
ST380013AS
Model: ST380013AS
Size: 80GB
Total Heads: 255
Total Cylinders: 9729
Total Tracks: 2480895
Tracks Per Cylinder: 255

DVD Player / CD writer
LITE-ON COMBO SOHC-5232K

Sound Card
SND-SBAUDIGY2



Power Supply
500 watts
_______________________________________
Test with SiSoft Sandra
CPU Benchmark
Dhrystone ALU: 9960 MIPS
Whetstone FPU: 2753 MFLOPS

CPU Multi-Media Benchmark
Integer: 14783 it/s

Floating-Point: 23407 it/s

Drives Benchmark
HD 1 - Buffered Read: 84 MB/s

HD 1 - Avg. Access Time: 8 ms

Memory Benchmark
Int ALU/RAM Bandwidth: 4557 MB/s

Float FPU/RAM Bandwidth: 4561 MB/s

 

[C00lIT]

The Asus P4C Motherboard is a socket 478 therefor it is already maxed out on CPU and cannot be upgraded.
The same goes for the videocard, it is already a pretty good one and hard to beat on AGP Models.
Adding more ram would speed up the machine quite a bit as it is the only thing that is lacking.

So New System would be the solution.

Considering the cost of Pre-Built New Alienware systems, you could save over 25% if you buy it by part and build it up with the kids...

If they played many videogames from a pc bought a while ago, they maybe old enough to be able to build

Many would consider it as advanced Lego and it the learning experience would be worth wilde.

I am sure many here will gladly suggest parts for a cost effective 700$ to 900$ AMD Quad Core that will be future proof.


My personal recommendation.

AthlonII X4 630 @ 2.8Ghz
2x2 Gigs ram
Asus M4A785 Motherboard
MSI 4770 Videocard or better ( Radeon 4850, 4870 or 5770...)
500 Gig Drive
DVD Burner
Antec Sonata III case with 500W Psu
Windows 7 Home Premium

Not sure if I left something out...