Time for an upgrade

[Yogart]

Hey guys! , Firstly i am not a hardcore gamer i only play for 2 to 3 hours a week.

But when i play games i like to play Crysis , Nfs Pro Street mainly the high end games. At the moment i can play them at low settings res about 1680 x 1050 and some of them at medium settings if i put the res to down to 800 x 600 that is.

Now i want to upgrade ! i had enough at medium settings at low res i want high settings and high res!.

how much money do i have? well you can say i got a lot lol, but i do not want to spend all of it on a system which i am only going to play 2 or 3 times a week max. Basicly i need some advise which parts need upgrading and which parts can stay, yes i can buy a quad core and a 4870 x2 but do i realy need that to play crysis on high with 1680 x 1050? i dont know. Please can anyone help and point me to the right direction?

Ok here is my spec:

Intel Pentium 4 D945 3.4GHZ
Fox Conn Intel P945 Mother board
Generic 1 x 4GIG Memmory running at 800mhz
Ati Radeon x1950XT PCI Express
Maxtor 500GIG Sata hard drive

I have vista 64bit installed and when i click on the windows expierence index the lowest score is my cpu.

Thanks for all the help in advance.

[Hawker1986]

Well I would suggest for you needs then you neednt bother getting anything too fancy, get yourself a P43 chipset mobo, E5200 dual core cpu and a semi decent cooler for it, say an akasa 965 and an ATI 4850 graphics card, total your talking is £250, re-use your HDD and RAM as they are still good, you may need a new PSU but if you find out what you have then we can no doubt tell you. That rig should play those games at that res on high without trouble. I would also recommend overclocking the E5200 a little to get the best from it, its very easy and wil see you some good increases in performance.

Hope that helps.

Hawker

[Yogart]

I have a 500W PSU but what i had in mind is 4870 X 2 , New mobo, 4 Gig Pc2-8500 and Q6600 CPU. Is that too much?
Also i want to be able to last me about an year or 2.

[Powderhound]

I think you'd be starting to push a 500W PSU with a 4870X2.

[maxwilson]

Pc2-8500 is a waste of money unless you're doing some serious overclocking, stick with pc2-6400 and save you're self some cash.

The Amd phenom II is coming out soon and may be worth a look in the cpu department.

I would stick with the 4850 for casual gaming, you could always sell on ebay when it was time for an upgrade, theres a good market there for used gpus.

You did mention crysis thought and at you res im not so sure you would be completely satasified with its preformance on high. so maybe 4870 or a gtx260 would be more appropriate.