Upgrade or New

[slowman]

Hi everyone,
Been a while since here. I build a system a few years ago which is outdated. Used mostly for gaming. Do not want to o/c. I'm getting older and easily confused. System has,
Abit IP35 pro m/b
Nvidia 8800gt card
Vista 64
G-Skill f2-8000cl5-2gbpq mem
Corsair 620 p/s
E2140 cpu
Am thinking a upgrade of cpu and video card? Haven't worked in a year. Don't mind spending the money, just looking for the best bang for the buck. Thanks

 

[Wolfshadw]

Assuming that this is your motherboard, here is your list of supported CPUs. Based on the latest Gaming CPU hierarchy chart, I'd probably look at either the Intel Core2Quad Q9550 or the Intel Core2Duo E8400, depending on your budget.

I'd probably recommend doing the CPU upgrade first and then checking your performance BEFORE upgrading the graphics card. If you feel you still need more performance out of your system, then I'd probably look at the HD 5770 or better graphics card.

-Wolf sends

 

[Lmeow]

Well, in terms of gaming performance, upgrade your CPU to a Core 2 Duo E7300 or E8500, or even a Q9550, although you may need to flash your motherboard BIOS to version 17. Then, I would increase the RAM to 4GB, after which, I would upgrade the 8800GT to a Radeon HD 5770 or something similar.

 

[slowman]

Lmeow & Wolfshadow thanks for the input. I've got a new q9550 on the table. Tried to update bios and after many failures I'm going nuts. Maybe someone can shed some light?

1) Put settings back to stock. Now that the e2140 is not overclocked this is really slow.

2) Reset cmos

3) a) Tried to make a boot disk on floppy. Failed. Says not enough space.
b) Reformat floppy. Some where I read to remove extra data from floppy after format. ??? How do I do this on vista?
c) Made boot able thumb drive. How do I make it boot from a usb drive in vista ???

4) As you can tell I"m not that savvy at computers. If someone could talk me through this I'd be most thankful. Do not want to open new cpu until I get the bios update.

5) Or should I buy a new chip with update on it, $13.00 ?

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

Unless your BIOS simply unplugs that would be a soldering job to get the new one on there. See if they have a BIOS flashing utility in windows, that's usually the easiest way to get that to happen.

Setting the USB drive as a (first?) boot device in your BIOS list would be the way to boot from that.