What to upgrade

[RyanJ]

My girlfriend wants to play The Sims 3 and I am fairly certain I can handle it, but I think it is getting close to the time for an upgrade. So my question is what would be the most beneficial to upgrade.

My Specs:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Antec NeoPower 550 550W ATX12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready Active PFC Power Supply - Retail

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E6750 - Retail

GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail

EVGA 320-P2-N811-AR GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail

SUPER TALENT 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model T8UX2GC5 - Retail




Thank you for your time.

-Ryan

 

[capt_taco]

Looks like everything you have should be fine to play that game. If anything, I'd bump the RAM up to 4GB.

Your system is kind of at a weird point where it's not cutting-edge but it's not that far out of date either ... and a generational change in CPUs/motherboards limits how much you can get out of an upgrade. It'll still do fine for most games. I'd add the RAM and otherwise keep it as-is for a year, maybe a year and a half, at which point you'll get a lot more value by building an i7 or i9 machine.

 

[dndhatcher]

I agree with taco. Your system looks pretty well balanced and any one component upgrade is not going to do you that much good.

DDR2 RAM has become pretty expensive; if you are running XP or a 32bit OS I'm not sure it will be worth it.

If you are dying to buy something then a long term purchase like a new DX11 graphics card (maybe a 5770) which will give you some performance increase now and be useful in your next computer.

 

[RyanJ]

Thanks guys, appreciate the input. I was considering RAM but read somewhere that my XP could only utilize 3 gigs of RAM.

But yeah, I'll probably wait awhile then.

Thanks again.