Please help with upgrade

[shadowsofdusk]

I have an ASUS P5B motherboard with a C2D E4500 CPU, 2G gskill low latency RAM, 7600GT video card running on a 450w PSU.

Thinking about upgrading my OS to 64bit and buying more RAM as well as upgrading my video card to a ATI 4870.

1. Will this grant me acceptable improvements or should I look at upgrading my CPU as well (E7200 C2D, if I can find one that is)?

2. Will I get by with my current PSU or will the ATI's load be too high to run off my current one?

 

[rwayne]

I have a Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic 512MB video card and per the box the minimum power requirement is 500 Watts.

 

[HelloStranger]

For the psu, try to steal a nuclear powerplant's energy and put it in the pc. If you need an OS, id highly reccomend a Windows 98.

 

[HelloStranger]

You can pirate a 98 os, fyi.

 

[andrewcarr]

Sorry please ignore the troll above me.^

A 450W should be fine as long as it has the necessarily PCI-E connectors of the GPU.
http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

 

[shadowsofdusk]

Sorry please ignore the troll above me.^

A 450W should be fine as long as it has the necessarily PCI-E connectors of the GPU.
http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Ok thanks for your reply. It does have PCI-E plugs so I'll buy a card and see how we go.

One more question:

My current RAM is a matched pair 800mhz 4-4-4-12. If I buy another matched pair, will it matter if I use standard 800mhz 5-5-5-18?

 

[andrewcarr]

I believe it all has to be the same timings. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[shadowsofdusk]

ok. Thanks for all your help Andrew. I have looked around and decided on the following system. I'm going to hang on to the current mboard (P5B) and RAM and upgrade pretty much everything else. Do you think I will be able to make it work without any compatibility issues?

Base System (retaining these):

ASUS P5B
2x1G 800mhz 4-4-4-12 G.Skill RAM


Upgrades:

Antec 620w ATX PSU
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 2.83GHz L846C 1.175V SLB8V LGA775 CPU
2x2g 800mhz 4-4-4-12 Gskill RAM -To add to the current 2x1G. (So 6G total)
ATI Radeon 6870

 

[shadowsofdusk]

Best answer selected by shadowsofdusk.

 

[andrewcarr]

Nope I think everything should would fine. As long as you know to do a fresh install of windows.