£200 to spend on upgrade?

[Hicks12]

Well my friend wants to upgrade his rig and hes looking to upgrade these parts:

CPU- Has Intel dual core needs upgrading
Motherboard- Just to overclock etc
Case- Just good cooling, nothing special like the antec 300?

Mobo needs to support intel cpu and have sata ports, nothing special though(No SLI/Crossfire needed). I looked at the DFI but they are a bit expensive for him.

Any suggestions to fit this? Its a gaming rig so a dual core is good but prices gone up now lol.

[Webby]

What are they upgrading from? If it is for gaming then a GPU upgrade will make a much bigger difference difference especially if they already have a duel core.

[Hicks12]

its a 2.8ghz dual core intel, no idea on the board but its a cheap gigabyte one. He has a 9600GT atm but i doubt he will notice a difference in an upgrade, my other mate has similar rig(they both built same time) and he bought my 880)GTS g92 and still lags on games so its his CPU bottling.

[Webby]

What resolution are they gaming at? A 2.8GHz duel core should not be bottlenecking games played at any reasonable resolution and you will not get anything faster for the £200 that will make any difference.

Games are almost always GPU bound. Have you checked to make sure they have enough memory, and that the virtual memory allocation is sufficient also check to see if the hard drives are full or in dire need of a defrag. They are much more likely reasons for lag than a 2.8GHz Duel core being a bottle neck (unless your playing supreme commander).

Oh and check for spyware/malware as well it all slows down the system and make sure they are using the latest drivers.

[Hicks12]

They play at like 1200x1000(something like that) so maybe not worth upgrading GPU, hes planning on getting a new HArd drive soon and ill get him to check memory allocation is ok. He has 2gb of ram and runs XP so shouldnt be running out.