Upgrading 2 PCs

[pantz master]

Me and my bro want to upgrade our machines for the new year. Mine is newer than his, and is still running good. I was wondering if it would be worth it to swap parts between the 2 PCs. Anyway here are the specs of both:

Mine:
Motherboard: ASUS M4A78 PLUS AM3 770/SB700
VGA: SAPPHIRE| 100267L HD4870 1GB
CPU: AMD|PH II X3 720 BK AM3 2.8G
Memory: 2Gx2|OCZ OCZ2P10664GK
HD: 500G|SAMSUNG HD502HJ
PSU: OCZ|OCZ500MXSP 500W

(sorry for the weird formatting, I copied this right out of the old invoice)

My Brother's:
HD: 465gb
CPU: Intel core 2 duo e8400 @ 3.00ghz
Memory: 2.50 gb
GPU: GeForce 8800 gt 512.0 mb
Motherboard: ASUS P5N-D

Anyway, budget= $450 . We use them for gaming. Now do what you do best.

 

[sadams04]

Unfortunately with an AM3 platform and LGA775 platform, about the only thing you will swap between them are the video cards. ...but that won't get you too far.

For your machine, buy a CPU cooler (Hyper 212+ $38) and overclock the X3 720 BE. You should get a healthy bump from 2.8GHz to 3.5+. You can upgrade the GPU, but the HD 4870 is still a solid card...

For your brothers machine first bump the memory to 4GB (2x2gb DDR2). As with your PC, add a CPU cooler (Hyper 212+) and overclock. Add to that a new video card and you are good for a while longer. GPU maybe a HD 5770 or GTX 250 perhaps... This machine could stand a quad core CPU upgrade, but at that point you are pushing the boundaries for just building a new machine (..if you were to buy a CPU, MEM and GPU). What power supply is in this machine?