Can I do anything to upgrade this?

[skotbites]

My system is about 4years old now and was wondering if there was anything I can do for about £50 to speed it up a bit was thinking of getting some more memory but was a little confused when I visited the crucial site as I believed my motherboard would only accept ddr2100 but is advises on there site that the perfomance option is ddr400 would this work.

I currently have 2 x 256mb is it worth upgrading to 1gig and if so what type of memory do I need.

Is there anything else I can do cheaply to improve my pc's performance as I'm not planning to build another for at least 12months.

Cheers
Scott

[dave87]

DDR-3200 (400) will work fine in your system, it just wont run at 400mhz, it will work at 266 or 333 mhz depending on the fsb - front side bus - of your processor. If you've got reasonably good cooling this could be the first step to a good overclock - as you can increase the fsb, and therefore clock speed of your processor - though you'd have to have a look around in the bios to find out whether this is possible.

So my advice would be, go for the 1gig, of ddr-400 as that will be a performance bonus as it is. Then have a look around at the overclocking options available in the bios, to see if you can get a performance boost from increasing the speed of the processor.

Dave

[teachmech]

Get which ever is the cheapest 1gig of memory you can find would be my suggestion.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...Thumbnails=yes
check scan out on the above link as you qualify for free delivery.

[directhex]

I'd say the best bet for upgrading your system is the graphics card - you've almost maxed out your board's CPU and RAM potential, but you could go all the way up to a 7000-series nvidia AGP card. of course, an investment in AGP now may cause issues for later (PCIe-based) expansion, so a more modest 6600gt might be a better pairing

[dureth]

It would be easier to reccomend an upgrade if you tell us your main use for the machine? If its gaming then a new graphics card, otherwise I'd say 1GB of DDR 400 RAM (that can be carried over in an upgrade). It might also just be wiser to save your £50 towards a full upgrade (CPU/Mobo/RAM etc).

So, what are you using it for?

[skotbites]

I use my pc for mainly surfin the net, ripping music, editing photos, and the odd game of Far Cry, XIII, Sims2 and Football Manager but I don't really play these oftern enough to warrant a new graphics card.

Would I get a noticable increase by upgrading the mnemory or am I better off just waiting?

Cheers

[kalniel]

To be honest, no, you won't see a large increase going to 1gb. I used to run far cry etc. all fine on 512mb. You will see just as much increase by making sure your system is clean and you don't have useless programs running in the background.

[MSIC]

I vote for saving your money on a new system.
The rationale for that is you have a half-way decent setup at the moment, and in order to get a really measurable improvement in most situations you are going to need something like an Athlon64 3200, a Gig of RAM and a half-decent modern graphics card. The other big improvement you will notice, compared to a machine of 4 years ago, will be in the hard drive.

An example spec would be this:
Motherboard: Asus Nforce 4
CPU: A64 3200 OEM
CPU fan: Arctic Cooler
Hard Drive: Samsung 250GB
Graphics Card: GeForce 6800 PCI-E
RAM: 2 x 512MB Corsair Value Select

Total = just over £400 (inc free delivery from Scan)

Now, this is clearly way over your initial £50 budget, but then you could consider ebaying your current system, which would give you perhaps £150 to £200??

Just a thought....

As an afterthought, you could also buy the RAM now (as was suggested above), and then put it to use in a future system too.

[skotbites]

thanks for the advice, I can't believe that my current pc cost me about £1300 from Mesh 5 years ago!!!!!

I want to keep my current modded lian li case for my new set up and no longer have the old one so not sure what the resale value would be as would probably keep the soundcard and harddrives anyway. The graphics card, motherboard,processor and memory could go but may be better put to use in another way to compliment my new system.

Cheers

[dureth]

It's not really worth selling your old stuff as the value isn't great these days. It would be put to far better use as a file server or some such. Maybe a relative could do with a system?