Advise on upgrading.

[watforddude]

My friend has recently given me his old system which is as follows

Intel Celeron E1200 at 2.0Ghz
1GB Kingston HyperX Ram I think 1066Mhz
9500GT 1GB (only baught that last week so dont want to upgrade that)
HEC 300Watt PSU


What would you advise i upgrade (only one of them) with a budget of £100 in terms of preformance.

and i would overclock the CPU but i dont know how to do that safely unless anyone has an decent well informed websites that advises you what to do.

cheers

Tom

[Queelis]

Since the Celeron is based (I suppose) on Core architecture, Clunk's
http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...beginners.html should be sufficient.

I think even the stock heatsink should do well with cooling that, if not, try picking up something cheap and cheerful - an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 or Coolermaster Hyper TX2; or Akasa coolers, though I've no idea what the model would be.

The first thing to upgrade I was going to say the graphics card, but since you won't be upgrading that, I think you should add some RAM (at least a gig more; or 4 gigs all the same, it's terribly cheap); if there's not enough storage - that; or, if you are planning on putting something more powerful into the system in the future - why not change the PSU?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My friend has recently given me his old system which is as follows

Intel Celeron E1200 at 2.0Ghz
1GB Kingston HyperX Ram I think 1066Mhz
9500GT 1GB (only baught that last week so dont want to upgrade that)
HEC 300Watt PSU


What would you advise i upgrade (only one of them) with a budget of £100 in terms of preformance.

and i would overclock the CPU but i dont know how to do that safely unless anyone has an decent well informed websites that advises you what to do.

cheers

Tom

Wow! That is not an old system!!

What are you using the system for??

Are you sure that it is an E1200?? It runs at 1.6ghz whereas the E1400 runs at 2ghz. What motherboard does the system have?? This will the key to whether you can overclock or not.`

What OS are you using?? Buying a 1gb 9500GT will limit the amount of system RAM you can use if you have a 32 bit OS. TBH why did you go for a 1gb 9500GT as there is virtually no difference from the 256mb or 512mb version?

Is the RAM in the form of 2 sticks and how many RAM slots does the motherboard have??

I would go for 2gb of extra RAM.This should cost you well under £30.

HEC make competent but not brilliant PSUs. I would go for a Silverpower 400w PSU:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/400w-...2V-6Serial-ATA

It is reviewed here:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16073/11

[watforddude]

Is it not, i thought it wasnt a very good system but maybe not?

It has two memory slot's and im using 1x1GB stick.

well its deffently running at 2.0Ghz so it must be a E1400 which i plan to overclock.

its Windows XP 32Bit i can get vista if needed

Is the CPU worth upgrading?

and like both of you have said RAM is deffenetly one of the upgrades im going for but isnt XP limited at 3.5 or something like that?

cheers

Tom

[CK_1985]

As CAT said, the mobo will probably be the deciding factor in how much you can overclock your CPU, which in turn will determine whether it's worth buying a new one. What is the mobo? I'd stick with XP though, you don't need to go 64-bit which would be the only benefit to getting a new O/S.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You bought a graphics card with 1gb of RAM so you can "only" use 3gb or maybe less. However 4gb of DDR2 is around £30 to £35 so if you want to upgrade the OS at a later date to a 64 bit or it would be useful.

Also you do need know what model your motherboard is. Many OEM and el cheapo motherboards have NO overclocking options at all!!

Why do you need to overclock BTW?? I assume that you are not doing much gaming as the 9500GT is a very weak card TBH and the sort of games you could play on it won't be limited IMHO by a 2ghz E1400.

I think more RAM would be useful. A PSU upgrade would be good as the one I specified has high efficiency meaning lower overall power consumption.

What is the model of the hard drive which you are using??

[watforddude]

Well i know the make is MSI, when i get home later i will open it up and take down the details.

and the only reason i would overclock it a little bit is for that added boost of speed, the 9500GT is a dream for me compeard to the old 6200AGP i used to have

it plays call of duty 2 (only game i have at the minute for the PC) at 1080 res at around anything to 70-200fps which is nice for me.

what RAM would you reccomend i get at the minute its a 1GB stick of Kingston hyperX DDR2

and yeah the main reason i baught it off him (80 pounds, dont know if that was a good deal) was the intention to start gaming on the computer again and get rid of the xbox.
and the hardrive is a 80Gb maxtor.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You should have gone for an HD4650 or a HD4670 as these would have been much faster for similar money. The 9500GT won't be that good with newer games at all.

I would first get a newer hard drive as these will be much faster.

I would go either of the following:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158688

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/320-G...MB-Cache-89-ms

I would then clone your XP partition using the folloing software:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/downloa...isk-manager-se

I would get the following RAM:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/4GB-(...d-CAS-5-5-5-18

I would go for the following PSU:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/400w-...2V-6Serial-ATA

Remember as a Hexus member you can free Scan postage and Ebuyer has free postage for orders over £49.99!

[watforddude]

The only reason i got the 9500GT and nothing higher was mainly due to the PSU and i doubt that it a HEC 300W PSU would fry with anything better.

Is Silverstone a good PSU you make becuase there is a 400W on there for around 30 pounds i think it was.

[watforddude]

And also cant i save money getting 2GB not 4GB seeing as im with XP can only have a max of 3GB RAM?

but i will post my MOBO specs on here later.

[watforddude]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/2GB-(...d-CAS-7-7-7-20

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Get this instead:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/114728

With Supersaver postage it comes to £20.57!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The only reason i got the 9500GT and nothing higher was mainly due to the PSU and i doubt that it a HEC 300W PSU would fry with anything better.

Is Silverstone a good PSU you make becuase there is a 400W on there for around 30 pounds i think it was.

Here is a review:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16073/11

[watforddude]

Sorry Post Deleted

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

im a ****** !!!! and **** off u pricks

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[watforddude]

Sorry im at college, i went off for a ciggerette and obviously some idoit did that. sorry.