Going to upgrade, thoughts anyone?

[Thorsson]

GPU & CPU are major factors in the gaming performance - stretch your budget on the GPU is always worthwhile imo. Grab a 2nd best card @ £200-250 is usually a great start. Buy the CPU that is sitting below the big price jump ie currently Q6600 or E6750 as it stands at the moment. You now have a reasonable balanced combination and good value.

Worth quoting this again, because it's absolutely true. With XP-32 the 8800GT or similar, Q6600 and 2Gb DDR2 gives you a very good system. Certainly if you can wait then the sweet spot for CPU/Mobo/RAM might change. But it's never worthwhile buying at the bleeding edge on the basis of not upgrading for longer. You are far better off buying at the sweet spot and upgrading more often.

My last system lasted me just over 3 years (and is now being used by my son, so it could easily have been stretched to 4), but with an intermediate increase in GPU, CPU & RAM. I probably paid no more in that time than the OP did for his 4 year machine, and I bet I had a better overall experience.

[tickleonthetum]

Right we've pretty much made a decision, but not what we thought we'd do. After reading all your comments it seems that at the moment it's not worth us upgrading. Mainly because all our software is single core optimised and wouldn't gain much advantage from going multicore. The Sims 2 and Sim City 4 do not use multicores at all, so there will be no advantage to upgrading untill The Sims 3 comes out in 2009, by which time multicore support will be the norm. Also XP is limited in it's multicore supprt, and as we are skipping Vista, 2009 should see a new MS OS.

If we were buying soon however we would have got the Q9450, Asus Maximus Formula X38 M/B, 4Gb or DDR2 RAM, and an ATi HD3870 PCIe 2.0 graphics card. oh and an 800W power supply.

What we are going to do is replace our useless nVidia 6800 GT 256Mb AGP, with an ATi 2600XT 256Mb AGP, and get 2Gb of DDR333 (PC2700) RAM. This is the very best our system can take, and will cost us about £150. Then in 12 months time we will go for the big upgrade, worth about £1,000, of M/B, RAM, Graphics, CPU, PSU.

Thank you all for your help and we have learnt a lot, we'll be reading the forums here in the meantime to try and get completely on the ball with all the new Tech.

Give yourselves a big hand for the help...

PS. Some reasons behind our decisions:

ATi only - We have had 3 nVidia graphics cards and all of them became useless due to driver bugs causing incompatibility with the games we play. We've had 1 ATi card in the past and that just got too old, oh how we wish we had stayed with them. The nVidia's were MX440, FX5200 & 6800GT. The ATi card was a All-In-Wonder Pro 64Mb PCI.

Intel only - We have had 3 AMD CPUs and had one overheat and go pop, on just died for no reason, and one just wouldn't work from new.

[Thorsson]

You seem to be pretty unlucky. I've been building my own systems, and not a few for other people, since 1986, and I've only ever seen one CPU fail, and that not from new.

The FX5200 was a dog, but I had both the MX440 and 6800GT without any problems. But then my one experience with ATi was marred by driver issues, so I guess these experiences are just largely the luck of the draw. IMO both manufacturers and, possibly more importantly, the community, are better these days. I wouldn't not buy an ATi because of driver problems in the past. I would, however, research to see if there were any problems with my games and the current drivers. I'd be very surprised if the 6800GT problem wasn't fixable.

I think you made a good decision just upgrading the GFX and memory, although I'd not have picked the 2600XT - better to get an X1950 IMO, if you want to stick with ATi - it plays DX9 faster and the 2600XT is too slow on DX10 to be worth buying for that reason.

[acrobat]

For what its worth, I've been using PC's since about 1986 or so too, and I've never seen a single CPU fail. I've seen pretty much every component fail, but not a CPU.

As for nVidia, my first nVidia card was a Geforce Ti4200. It was fantastic, and it was actually so good... that I bought it around 2001/2, something like that, and I used it right up until this last Christmas. So it served me well for about 5 years or so, and then I upgraded because I wanted something faster - not because it died or anything. It is STILL going strong now. And in all that time, I never had any problems with it at all. I installed the latest drivers and off it went.

But the choice is there anyway, so you can pick whichever you prefer.

[tickleonthetum]

It looks like our new idea is out the window as our PSU (JeanTech JPN-500-AP) is only rated at +12V at 18A and the X1650XT, X1950XT or HD2600XT that we would have got need 30A. Also it only appears to have one 12V rail.

Does the confusion never end!!!

Back to the drawing board.

Oh to win the lottery!!!!