Advice on upgrade

Hi there, im looking to hopefully upgrade my comp after the mobo fried on my current comp.I have a £250-300 budget.Iv been out of the loop with whats good and bad and any help would be greatly appreciated.My comp is predominatly for gaming, the only work I do on it is writing.

Current Specs:
Athlon 64 FX 3200
A8V Deluxe mobo(dead)
2 X 512mb 3200 ram
9800 pro ICEQ 128mb AGP

The rest of my comp Im keeping as I have a good thermaltake psu and case.Happy with my hard drive and sound card.At first I thought I could just get a replacement mobo but Im seeing a lot of info in regards to futureproofing and DDR and SKT 939 dying.If anyone could help me with some ideas for builds or what I should do, I would greatly appreciate it, the comp is my life as Im housebound and im getting withdrawal already(using a crappy laptop this now).

As I said im mainly wanting it for gaming, but I was wondering with that small budget will it be possible to have better performance than my current spec, which performs well but usually means med settings with some bells and whistles turned on in the likes of Oblivion and BF2 with which I am happy, but it would be cool to get high settings for once.I understand its probably not likely on my budget.

Thanks in advance for any help:bowdown:

Hey

I've just done the spec below for you from www.scan.co.uk, it assumes that you have things like optical drives and operating system in addition to case, hard drives and psu, which you said you have.

Click the thumbnail for a larger image of the spec

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/1...speccf7.th.png

This spec should give you the best performance for the budget you have, plus there is room to upgrade the memory if you have the cash at a later date, as i only selected 1 1gb stick, so you could put another 1gb stick in later. Currently the intel core 2 duo is the best performing cpu, but i have gone for an AMD AM2 cpu as the motherboards are less than half the price of intel core 2 duo motherboards, leaving more cash for cpu, memory and graphics card. The graphics card i have chosen should be more than adequate for current games and will perform better than the 9800 you had/have.

Perhaps if you could sell some of your current components to make a bit extra cash for the budget, i would suggest either getting another Gig of ram or a faster graphics card. Also you maybe able to save a few pounds if you shop around, but personally i like scan, for their customer service.

Anyway hope this helps

Andy

Thank you for taking the time to do that, I like the look of the system and even better its faster than my current system.I should be able to stretch to another 40 making it £340 is there any improvements possible?.Again thanks in advance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cassidythevamp

Thank you for taking the time to do that, I like the look of the system and even better its faster than my current system.I should be able to stretch to another 40 making it £340 is there any improvements possible?.Again thanks in advance.

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the only real improvement would be to get a better graphics card, maybe get the 7600Gt instead of the GS, should provide a little bit of an improvment

Is the amd am2 systems futureproof as they say?.Though I guess it has to be in relation to going skt 939

Im pretty much sold on the build, did a bit of research and im happy with performance boost I will recieve.Read up on the 7600GT and from the reviews and results are glowing in respect to bang for buck.Can you link me to the which one is suitable as I see a few of them on scan.

Also think i made a mistake, my current HD is a seagate 120gb barracuda 7200, which was running on IDE connection.Would I be able to run it off the one IDE slot on the mobo or a pci ide card?.Im sure the HD though had some sort of sata cable with it too, is that possible?.If i can run it off the one IDE slot till i get a new hd Id be happy as everything i need is on it and I dont need access to my dvd drives.Sorry about that, looks like I need more advice.

Or would a converter work?

Hey i've revised the spec as shown below, everything is showing in stock so you should be good to go.

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/9...pec2js2.th.png

With regards to the hard drive being ide, just use the onboard ide connector, and have the hard drive as master and optical drive as slave.

Hope this helps

Andy

Edit: link to graphics card -> http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=370152

Excellent thank you very much!.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cassidythevamp

Is the amd am2 systems futureproof as they say?.Though I guess it has to be in relation to going skt 939

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An AM3 CPU should drop into an AM2 motherboard (I gather DDR3 ram is just a finess on DDR2 specs, in which case that should not be a suprise).

Link to dailytech.

Going to order tomorrow with some sat delivery extra and will hopefully have it running by Saturday night, thanks for the help.

If I could push another 30 quid, would this card make a difference?.

x1900 GT
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=451526

Before you pay extra make sure everything you order is in stock, it would be best to give their customer services a ring just to make sure, then you don't end up paying for saturday delivery when there's no point.

Stick to the 7600GT it's the better card. I think the 1800GT is the same as a 1800GTO and as such the benchmarks i've seen show the 7600GT just beating the 1800GT. Save the money for now and buy an extra Gig of ram when you have the money, this will give you a noticeable decrease in loading times for games like oblivion and bf2

will do, thanks again.

Yap that looks good, 7600gt is a good card, and getting 2Gb of ram when you get the upgrade urge would be good.