Room for an upgrade?

[oshta]

Currently i have:

Althon 2600+ (should have been a 2500+ barton, long story)
512mb Twinmoss pc3200 w/winbond chips
Sapphire 9600pro
Epox 8rda+

Is there any point in trying to upgrade any of those components,
our should i just wait till i can affored to replace the lot with a decent 64bit AMD setup. (gaming rig)


Daniel

[Scarlet Infidel]

Theres not a great deal of room within the athlon xp range really, if you game a lot you could put in a better graphics card (i wouldnt bother) and theres no point getting a new cpu but id overclock that as far as it will go. The only thing id change with that is have 1gb of ram instead of 512mb, but this wont be cheap as you already have very good ram in 2 256mb sticks so you have to start again with completely new ram, you could always sell the ram first i guess.

[mike_w]

The first thing I would do would is increase the RAM to 2x512MB, followed by a graphics card upgrade. The thing to remember is that higher end cards (e.g. 6800GT, X800XL) will probably be bottlenecked, particularly at lower resolutions.

[nvening]

I would wait till you can afford a new rig, depending on how long of course.

[iMc]

I have a similer rig, you need 1Gb for games now and a gfx upgrade is to a 6800 or higher would show decent results. It really depends on how long you want to wait until you upgrade.

If you want the rig to last another year I'd say upgrade the above.

[Stigggeh]

Agreed, 1gb is a must, especially at the price or ram at the moment. then save, save save

[iMc]

Yeh you can get a gig for around 80quid. plus you can sell your current RAM to make a bit back...

[johnnr892]

Well there is the geil value dual channel kit for £70 including postage which is suppost to clock quite well for value ram. It's in the bargains forum, check it out.

[prehensile]

Nice to see some more people who are completely miffed about RAM, the only thing that benefits from over 512 MB is doom, twice as much RAM as necessary is a myth spun out by Time computer adverts, have a look at your RAM usage to know what you need to do! 600 MB is enough of doom. that's my two cents anyway. paging file always on another driver as well,

If you are into really high graphics, wait at least until the second revision of the nforce 4 and similar offerings, which is probably around six months and 300 quid later, otherwise, there are lots of agp motherboards that have the potential to invest less than 200 quid with a ceiling of at least x2 3800+

[johnnr892]

I'm not sure I agree with you at all. On all stats I have looked at and through my own experiences and pretty much everyone else here, 1gb ram is so much better than 512, because it eliminates most jittering associated with not enough ram. Studies of games like far cry, show as much increase in gameplayability from 512mb to 1024 as buying a new graphics card. I think 1gb makes a huge difference to games.

[CluelesPasty]

I can't say much on latest games, I'm still stuck with Athlon xp2000, ti 4200 card and old 133 512 Meg but in a similar situation, I have the pennies but trying to decide where to jump. I was going to go down SLI alley with MSI NF4 MoBo and 6600gt & Sli it later. If PCI-E & SLI looks like it's taking off you would be daft to buy an AGP card. I am waiting for the market to sort itself out and also to see what ATI come up with before I jump. If you can sell your ram and buy 1 Gb you can transfer that to your next MoBo. I'm just gonna keep this one as a 2nd machine.

[mike_w]

If PCI-E & SLI looks like it's taking off you would be daft to buy an AGP card.

Not really. PCI Express will ultimately replace AGP, that's as close to certain as you can get in the world of computers. However, plenty of people tend to upgrade everything at once. As such, it doesn't really matter whether you buy AGP or PCI Express since you'd have a different motherboard anyway. As for current performance, PCI Express doesn't make any difference in terms of speed - cards don't even use the full AGP 8x bandwidth.

If you are looking to upgrade your graphics card later, while keeping the motherboard, then PCI Express would be the better choice. However, there's still life in AGP yet.