Upgrade time

[lost eden]

Not sure if this is the right forums, but here goes.

My friend wants to upgrade his Dell machine.

All for the budget of £200 we need to buy him;

A Micro-ATX motherboard to take the existing 1.8GHz socket 478 P4 & existing 512MB of standard DDR RAM
An AGP card capable of running games
An ATX PSU capable of driving the new hardware (we're not trusting the 200W Dell one)

Now I haven't been keeping track of the hardware world as much as I did back when I was actually building my last PC, so I'm a bit behin with the times. So all help appreciated.

[NightshadowUK]

What kinda games we looking at playing here?

[dave87]

To be honest he's best off flogging the 1.8ghz p4/mobo/ram and buying a skt 754 combination, or wait a bit untill m2 comes out and get a cheap socket 939 athlon 64 3200+/1gb Ram & PCI-e gfx card, they can be overclocked like silly even with value ram. Much more performance for a similarly cheap price.

[NightshadowUK]

I have to agree with Dave, S754 setups are great bang for buck.

[nvening]

Bascially Even with a 7800GT AGP that pc probably would bearly play modern games as they would be limited so much by that cpu, aslo 512mb is often a minumum nowdays. However i am jumping to conclutions, does he only want to play football manager and EA sports generic 2006?

He is better off spending £100 more on an xbox 360 or getting a new system.

[lost eden]

Well I believe that he already has an XBox but wanted a PC as well. I told him that I would build him an okay one for the money, but he didn't want to wait & stupidly went out & bought a Dell. When his mate came to install an AGP card, he found that Dell had kindly not soldered the AGP slot to the motherboard & had instead left only the solder points.

I'll get in touch & ask him what kind of games he expects to be playing on the system, from memory he likes world war FPS games, battlefield 2 might be the most demamnding game he would want to run.

[BUFF]

battlefield 2 can benefit from more than 1Gb RAM, 512Mb will struggle