£1k to upgrade

[Riley]

Sending laptop back for a refund, so I should hopefully have around £1k to spend upgrading my desktop.

Current Specs:

XP 2000+

Volcano 7+ CPU Cooler

Abit KD7 (Via KT400)

Crucial 512mb 2100 Ram

Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb :-)

Beige Cheiftec Scorpio Case + 4 case fans

Toshiba 16x DVD + Liteon 40X CDRW

Iiyama Vision Master Pro 413 17" CRT

Play alot of games, and hope to continue to for quite some time.
Don't overclock, but I would like it to be quiet as possible.

Any Ideas? Is now a good time to upgrade especially with Athlon 64 just out?

Thanks in advance!

[Planetside]

hi i would get this
ABIT NF7-S V2.0 £79.31
AMD ATHLON XP 3000+ 333FSB SKT-A OEM BARTON £156.27
1Gb kit DDR PC-3500 OCZ Dual Channel EL - £239
Prometeia Mach2 Base Unit £528.75
all comes to
£1003.33

[TooNice]

Personally, I'd get a bigger monitor.. especially if you play games..
(The one you got is quality, but a 17" regardless).

I've been told its not a particularly good time to upgrade (especially since you aren't exactly struggling with a P2 400 )

[Theo]

I'd say the RAM needs an upgrade, and the motherboard if you fancy abit of overclocking.. the rest is pretty good, to be honest (imo!).

Say maybe 2x512MB (2x256MB would be fine, but 1 gig would future proof you a little for HL2 etc) PC3200 TwinMos.
ABIT NF7-S motherboard - the best one on the market atm.
And seeing as HDD prices have come down alot over the past few months (and you didn't specify one!):
2x80GB Maxtor 8MB 7200rpm SATA

I think I remember hearing that XP2000+s don't clock too well? I had mine for a while, but I ran it at 1.2GHz, so maybe a cpu upgrade to a Barton 2500+ would be in order..

From komplett.co.uk, that all comes to:

400.88 inc. VAT

I have no idea on TFT prices, what is good, and where to get them, so I'll leave that to someone else.

Seeing as we now have some decent kit to overclock with - why not go full whack and watercool it all?

CPU Block - Choose CPU Block (inc pair of hoseclips): AMD Maze 4
GPU Block - Choose GPU Block (inc pair of hoseclips): Maze 4 Uni-GPU Block Black
Chipset Block - Choose Chipset Block (inc pair of hoseclips): DangerDen Maze 3 Z-Chipset Block
Reservoir - Choose Reservoir (inc pair of hoseclips): Criticool Waterplant
Pump - Choose Pump (inc pair of hoseclips): Eheim 1250
Radiator - Choose Radiator (inc pair of hoseclips): ThermoChill HE120.2
Tubing - Choose Tubing: DangerDen Clearflex Tubing
Additive - Choose Additive: Water Wetter
Selection of Double Fans - Add 2x Fans & Guards: 2x Panaflo 120mm

£317.91 Including VAT from over-clock.co.uk

That leaves a couple of hundred for anything else you might fancy...

£718 plus delivery isn't bad for all that - if you shop around, you should be able to find things cheaper by a couple of squid, but you'll usually save money on delivery if you buy from one place

By the looks of it, you've got just under £300 to pay delivery, and get a new case and maybe a monitor (if you want one, that is)... why not get one of the huuuuuuge 21" monitors from:

http://www.accomputerwarehouse.com/p...learance+Items

Comes to about £80 including delivery, but read this thread before you decide:

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?threadid=5228

For around £120 you can get yourself a Lian Li PC70 full tower, aluminium case. You've got quite a bit of kit, so you'll need a bit of space for it It'll fit into a normal midi tower, but with the PC 70, you've got that little bit extra room to make everything cleaner...

And I just remembered - powersupply. Thermaltake 430W - about £40 from dabs.com

Hope that steers you in a couple of directions, chap.

[Lexeus]

If it was me i wouldn't bother with ever buying any XP 2800+ or 3000+ CPU's, as the lower ones seem to have no problem at all clocking to the same speeds and are ALOT cheaper. But also I dont think anyone really needs anything more than an Athlon XP 2500+ or 2600+. As you can see I have gone for an XP 2500+, and im not an OC'er either, and I mostly play games like your self.

But apart from that, if i had serious money like that to upgrade I would probably wait a couple of months to see how exactly the Athlon 64 goes. You gain not only the advantage of lower prices, but also, if you do go for an Athlon 64, you give them time to perfect/develope things, and also a larger range.

It does to some extent depend on what your budget is like. Do you have money to spare regularly ? Is this going to be the upgrade to last you a few years, or a few months. As in my case i can't afford to upgrade more than about very 1.5, 2 years.

Oh, and I assume you do have a hard drive in that system somewhere ?

[Riley]

thx for your quick replies!
interested in getting a new monitor would it be better to get a TFT than a CRT?
is water cooling the way to go if I want quietness? (i have no experience with it)
currently have an Maxtor 80GB ATA 133 2mb cache HD which is filling up fast so i might aswell upgrade that.

edit: upgrade has got to last about 18 months.

[Lexeus]

If you want it to last 18 months then I would wait a couple of months just to see if its worth getting an Athlon 64. That way you wont be kicking yourself in January when people suddenly start taking them up .
I just upgraded my system in July/August
I would have probably waited longer if I had your budget, but I only had about £250 to spend MAX, or £350 as i ended up spending ....

[Knoxville]

i'd go for an xp2700, 1gb of Mushkin 3500, Abit NF7-S, wd raptor boot drive and another nice big ide drive (200gb maybe) for storage. If you can get a top of the line tft then yeah they can be better than crt's, but you can get a top spec 21inch flatscreen and still have money to spare rather than a very good 17inch tft

[Theo]

With the thermochill 120.2 radiator, you get 2x120 fan bracket thingies, so you can afford to have the fans at say - 7V without losing as much heat dissipating potential as a single fan radiator at 7V.

If you're after a bargain monitor, seriously go for the 21" - £80 for a monitor that size is blummin triffic! Although, there are some mixed reviews in the thread I linked to. TFT is good if you have lots of money that couldn't go on other things, and if you lack deskspace, but crt monitors are still in their prime imo.

[TiG]

Originally posted by Riley
Sending laptop back for a refund, so I should hopefully have around £1k to spend upgrading my desktop.

Current Specs:

XP 2000+
Volcano 7+ CPU Cooler
Abit KD7 (Via KT400)
Crucial 512mb 2100 Ram
Crucial Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb :-)
Beige Cheiftec Scorpio Case + 4 case fans
Toshiba 16x DVD + Liteon 40X CDRW
Iiyama Vision Master Pro 413 17" CRT
Play alot of games, and hope to continue to for quite some time.
Don't overclock, but I would like it to be quiet as possible.

Any Ideas? Is now a good time to upgrade especially with Athlon 64 just out?

Thanks in advance!

Just a few notes, with a spec that some people would be very happy with, what at present is your system not capable of?.

It looks fairly well spec'd to start with. I'd say spend the cash on stuff that you will be happy with that adds to your system, save the cash for the moment and wait for the high prices of amd64 to subside if you really want more power, get stuff that will benefit you long term, maybe the LG 17" lcd screen, maybe some more hard disk space, or even think about setting up a raid config if you motherboard allows it.

Then when the time comes, you could just jump in, get a decent amd64 motherboard and decent processor, and then definitely some more memory, put you'll have the hard disks, graphics card etc already.

Hope this helps
TiG

[Aaron]

I'd say get a TFT monitor. A 16ms response time 17" one only costs around £350 these days and I'm sure you'll be able to find a similar 19" one for under £500. Run it off your DVI-out on the Radeon 9800 Pro and you'll be laughing.

[TooNice]

Would go for a quality 21" CRT myself.

Since you aren't exactly on a particularly low budget, you can afford a bit more than the £80inc mentioned earlier though (it seemed to take a while for them to get the A grade judging from some of the replies).