I want to increase the performance....but how?

[redddraggon]

I have e6400 (not currently overclocked)
2 x 1GB Dual Channel Geil Ultra DDR2-800
nVidia 8800GTS 320MB
320GB WD Caviar SATA2
250GB IDE Samsung
FPS 400W PSU

I'm on Vista Home premium 64bit.

I want to improve the performance of my PC on a budget of £100 give or take a few quid. However I'd rather add parts rather than replace them as this setup is only 2 weeks old. ( I misbudgeted giving myself a lower budget than I really had)

What can I do?

another 2GB of dual channel RAM?
Get a better PSU?
decent 3rd party cpu cooler and overclock the e6400 a bit?

[Clunk]

Get a better PSU?
decent 3rd party cpu cooler and overclock the e6400 a bit?

Both of those. the PSU is ok, but if you intend adding more stuff, and overclocking, it will start to strain.

[iamtheoneneo]

ouch your running you 8800 and a c2d on a 400w psu? my god son are you mad??? you could actually save the cash and just overclock your cpu. 1.8ghz is pants , mines currently at 2.8ghz easily. its really not that hard to oc - just do some research.

[redddraggon]

can you recommend any decent cooling fans for the 775 socket?

[Sprite]

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro.

Buy a 2GB USB Stick for the memory thing Vista uses (the name currently escapes me)

[redddraggon]

ouch your running you 8800 and a c2d on a 400w psu? my god son are you mad??? you could actually save the cash and just overclock your cpu. 1.8ghz is pants , mines currently at 2.8ghz easily. its really not that hard to oc - just do some research.

My C2D was previously overclocked at 2.8, but I played a bit too much with it this morning and had to reset the CMOS and I'm away from home on my laptop at the moment.

[moogle]

i'd say get a better psu, more ram doesnt necessarily increase performance, unless its better ram, but you can overclock pc2 6400 anyway. also consider getting another 50gb samsung, if its a sp2504c spinpoint then raiding them would increase speeds, the wd can be a backup of some sort. any more performance would require overclocking i guess.

[saltynay]

psu is fine lol mine has been working for 3 months without an issue sure there isn't a lot of upgrade potential but it works well as it is

[arthurleung]

400W FSP PSU is definitely enough. Even give it 130W each for the CPU and GPU he still have 140W left for everything else, which the board and ram will probably take 40 and he got 100W left for 5x HDD

I would suggest you to grab an X-Fi for better sound, if you have not already done so. Alternatively grab a 500G harddrive which will be faster than your 250GB by a small bit.
Otherwise there is nothing much you can upgrade.

8800GTS will push the Acer 20" regardless of what games you run.

[chuckskull]

Overclocking the CPU will give you the biggest noticeable jump. The difference between 2.1 and 3.0 is immense. You should be able to get another 2GB of RAM and a Arctic freezer pro for under £100.

[arthurleung]

Overclocking the CPU will give you the biggest noticeable jump. The difference between 2.1 and 3.0 is immense. You should be able to get another 2GB of RAM and a Arctic freezer pro for under £100.

Do anyone actually need 4G...
Arctic Freezer Pro is probably not good enough, get Scythe Ninja

[chuckskull]

Do anyone actually need 4G...
Arctic Freezer Pro is probably not good enough, get Scythe Ninja

On vista x64 you start feeling the pinch with 2gig. It's much better with 4.

[scrandman]

A good 400W (and I believe FSP are pretty good, although I've no first hand experience) should be adequate:

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp

[Mithrandir]

The specs look nice.

Why exactly do you need to incrase performance if you don't mind me asking?

I would have thought you could easily run games, apps, etc quite well.

I've more or less ungraded parts to a good level for what I wanted to do (gaming mostly) and my specs aren't even as good as yours.

I'd say get some ram while they're cheap. 2gb coupled with the Googlecheckout offer is a no-brainer really. I've read Vista can utilise over 2gigs much better than XP did, I'd also agree with others with trying to overclock the CPU (not had experience but again reading, they generally overclock like crazy)

Oh and I'd agree that the PSU seems under powered. Even Im worried about my 460w Enermax and the parts Im using.

[MSIC]

Oh and I'd agree that the PSU seems under powered. Even Im worried about my 460w Enermax and the parts Im using.

460W, with the specs in your sig? Don't worry about that mate, your PSU is WELL overpowered. The PSU companies have done a very good job in making people think that we have to be using 800W plus PSU's and it's all rubbish.

Now, if Reddragon asked what size PSU to buy beforehand, i might have advised towards a 500W unit, but 400W is fine (remember its a 8800GTS, 320MB, not the big monster), and that Core2Duos are fantastically skimpy on sucking power.

[redddraggon]

Using a few online power calculators, before I built the computer, i found it was going to be needing in the low 300/310/320W range.

So a decent CPU cooler, allowing me to overclock the CPU a bit more than it is now, and another 2GB of RAM both for £100?

Worth it? bearing in mind I am running 64bit Vista and and do a lot of multitasking over two screens (over 10 tabs in firefox, music, p2p, gaming, msn, etc.