Upgrade Challenge

Hi all,

a bit of a difficult one for you old school teks. A friend of mine wants to upgrade of few components of his old PC (478 socket). He has a VERY tight budget of £100. He only wants to upgrade his graphics card (AGP obviously), RAM to 2G, and mobo. Needless to say it isn’t easy to locate these components and even harder to be within £100. He is an occasional gamer who wants to play C&C3!

ANY help will be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance

Best place to do this is in the For Sale section here (although you need 100 posts to access it) or on an online auction.

If you don't want to go second hand I had an idea, probably about £120 unless you can find real bargains or again go second hand (you won't find this mobo and it does need to be this one or the gigabyte alternative - same price) but how about this.

Asus M3A78-EMH
AMD Dual core - you can find second hand 3800+'s for around £30 i would think
Corsair 2GB RAM

I know there is no graphics card there, but the integrated graphics on this board is essentially a srunk ATi HD3450pro and as such gives amazing performance given that it is integrated. It will easily meet the requirements for C and C 3 and any basic gaming for that matter (half life 2 etc..) I mean the resolutions will have to be quite low for first person shooters but it really does perform better than anyone would expect.

Also, once the drivers have been written by ATi you will be able to buy an actual HD3450pro (£27) and use the two in a hybrid crossfire which is a decent way to improve graphics performce.

Thanks for the suggestions...... any others???? Cant JUST be Mike & Blitzen who could help out!! :juggle:


And thank you BOTH for the advice on building my OWN system. Its up and running and its... SOOOO sweet. Have been playing Crysis, COD4 and Bioshock constantly, infact I've not not really gone to bed before 3am since I had the system built. So long PhD!!

Any advice on bench marking the system to ensure everythings OK? And values to should be getting and be abe to reach?

I think Mike and Blitzen have it about covered those are really the only options and Mikes would provide the greatest boost to overall performance.

£100 is very tight and I like mike's idea of the AMD board with the new 780G chipset. :)
It's probably the most cost efficient way of getting what you want.

Chimp