Hello All,
I'm new here so please be gentle with me.
I'm in the market for upgrading my PC, but not in the orthodox way as I don't have alot of money. Plus I've not built a PC since 2004, so I am abit out of sorts!
I'll be buying used bits off eBay to keep costs down, I am aware I may get dud parts and am only doing this to keep costs down by paying £20 for CPU etc and it not working is a risk I'll have to take
My current spec'd PC is as follows:
AMD Athlon XP3000+ (Yes its goddamn slow)
1Gb DDR400
Asus A7N8X Mobo
160Gb HDD
Geforce FX5200 256Mb AGP 8x Graphics card.
Now I want to upgrade to an Intel dual core, I am either thinking a Pentium D 820, a Pentium Dual-Core 1.8GHz E2160 or a Core 2 Duo E4400. Now which is the fastest out of those in terms of usability, I'll be using older games. One of which has minimum requirements of a 1.7GHz CPU (its from 2006) and this is where I get confused as the Dual-Core and C2D are only 1.8GHz, will it run these games ok??
I've already selected a motherboard with is an ASrock 775Dual-VSTA, which allows me to 'upgrade' it in increments as it supports both PCIe and AGP aswell as DDR and DDRII.
In addition I am confused with all these new fangled (well new to me) graphics cards. When I left the PC world the fastest and greatest cards were ATi Radeon 9700/9800 Pros and Geforce FX5950s! Now I am looking at a used PCIe card and don't have a clue which to go for.
My motherboard only supports PCIe 4x so does this limit me in cards? or can I run a 16x card albeit slower?
Like above I am mainly running older games and would like to watch iPlayer in HD, most of which run alright on the FX5200 at lower resolutions/frame rates etc. I want to be able to run them at full speed. So was looking at ATi X700Pros and HD2400s.
Can anyone help me with this? I understand most of the above kit I am mention is from 2007/2008 but will be fast enough for me I think.
Cheers
Craig


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right sure, the fact that you cannot pull 700w from that number of connectors without going wildly over ATX spec should be a big hint to how reliable that 700w number is.

