my PC: to pasture or to stud?

[rimscar]

Hi,
your wisdom and experience sought regarding cost/benefit ratios.

I have a 4 year old pc that will be "handed down" to the wife, replacing a 7year old Medion, prior to me spending cash on a new 64bit i7 system in the near future (well it was near future until we booked summer holiday childcare last night....!!).
The specs are:
Matrix Titan Supreme
=====================================================
AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+ with HT Tech.
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
Aluminium ATX Midi Tower(Pratorian) + Muskateer Display + 550W PSU
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe PCI-Express Mainboard-
4GB DDR400 Memory - PC3200
300GB Serial ATA Hard Drive with 16MB Buffer
SONY 16x Dual Layer DVD-Re-Writable +R/-R/RW
16x DVD-ROM Drive (40x CD-ROM)
BFG 9800GT OC Edition 512MB Dual DVI HDTV Out Cuda and PhysX ready
Samsung SM2433BW 24" TFT Monitor 1920x1200 20000:1 300cd/m2 5ms VGA/DVI Glossy Black
Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music Sound Card
Creative Labs Inspire T7900 - 7.1 Surround with Subwoofer [/SIZE]============================================

Essentially the question is whether it is worth keeping this system as is, or whether it is worth spending cash upgrading it prior to the handover, given a wholesale move to a new machine with new OS, architecture etc.

For various reasons, which risk flaming(!), i want to "maximise" the potential of 32bit windows xp without wasting too much cash that could be spent on the new system.

For instance i am under the assumption that the skt 939 board can only be upgraded to a 4800 processor, but they are quite rare and command a premium. Indeed in some cases it seems it would be better ebaying the mobo and processer and getting a new setup given he scarcity of 939 processors.
So would it be a waste of time pursuing this course of action given that this isn't too bad a system in the first place?( it will be used for gaming, photos etc, the usual sort of thing and not anything that requires o\c or too much faffing).

So i could go nuts and get overclocked wolfdales , mobos etc to fully exploit the last hurrah of winxp 32bit, or accept that my machine can join my Amiga500 and Megadrive in the office as legacy machines that are fun to play once in awhile, but pointless in trying to pimp to the nth degree?

I appreciate your thoughts and insight.

 

[Ben M]

Hello and welcome.

For someone who is currently using a 7 year old PC, that spec will be a massive step up. If she's just using it for word processing/ web browsing etc, it'll be more than fine. That's a pretty good PC, the only thing that's noticeably lower than anything else is the processor, but I'm sure that she'll manage just fine.

Good luck with the i7 build

 

[PanchoVilla]

Essentially the question is whether it is worth keeping this system as is, or whether it is worth spending cash upgrading it prior to the handover, given a wholesale move to a new machine with new OS, architecture etc.

Welcome. Here at overclockers, you will get good advice providing you ask the right questions.

Your first post reveals your need for a philosophical answer rather than hardware advice. So, here goes:

People spend on what they "want" or "need", possibly both. "Need" has a justification, "want" does not require any.

Given that your "old" system is highly capable for all but the most demanding games, it seems you have created a "want" to overclock it before handing it down. Even if you handed it down as-is, it would still be more powerful than your wife's current computer. Perhaps this exercise is to satisfy some sense of justice or guilt, but that is another discussion.

Either that or you have way too much time on your hands. I think that any effort you spend will largely benefit your wife only by faster boot up times, by a couple of seconds perhaps.

In any case, I suggest you extend and balance your 'cost/benefit' ratios with an equation that includes time-wasting.

 

[rimscar]

Welcome. Here at overclockers, you will get good advice providing you ask the right questions.

Your first post reveals your need for a philosophical answer rather than hardware advice. So, here goes:

People spend on what they "want" or "need", possibly both. "Need" has a justification, "want" does not require any.

Given that your "old" system is highly capable for all but the most demanding games, it seems you have created a "want" to overclock it before handing it down. Even if you handed it down as-is, it would still be more powerful than your wife's current computer. Perhaps this exercise is to satisfy some sense of justice or guilt, but that is another discussion.

Either that or you have way too much time on your hands. I think that any effort you spend will largely benefit your wife only by faster boot up times, by a couple of seconds perhaps.

In any case, I suggest you extend and balance your 'cost/benefit' ratios with an equation that includes time-wasting.

Thankyou for your welcome. Ben M, I appreciate your thoughts and good luck!

Next respondent: I`m not twelve, and so would appreciate not being given the benefit of your interpretation of existentialism. Wants and needs, indeed; give over.I`ve also read about Maslow's heirarchy of needs, thanks very much.
Perhaps if i said "This is my system: is it worth salvaging/upgrading?" we could have ended up with another set of aggravated misinterpretation.
I suspect that if people spent far less time jumping down the throats of others we would all get along better, given that you have the choice of not posting a response if you've got nothing helpful, nice or beneficial to say.

If on the other hand you can advise on the usefulness of upgrading any of the components to make any attempt a worthwhile exercise, given the change of my main machine i would appreciate your thoughts.
And as i alluded to, although the wife will use it as her main machine (dual core processing will be a new luxury!) i will still game on it if any of my games library do not transfer to the new rig.

I await 3 types of entirely predictible response:
1) intelligent information from those who are mature and reasoned and worthy of listening to
2) flaming condemnation of me, the "Noob", by the vastly superior demigods of human existence
3) ignored.


Peace out

 

[Ben M]

Thanks for glossing over my reply. You're going to get along great here if all you do is focus onthings that you don't like, and ignore people who are trying to be helpful.

 

[PanchoVilla]

....advise on the usefulness of upgrading any of the components to make any attempt a worthwhile exercise.

You are obviously well read. But again given your quote above, I cannot see any usefulness of upgrading any of your components to make any attempt a worthwhile exercise. Unless ofcourse you think it is worthwhile to spend lots of time/money for faster boot/launch times by .... seconds or even milliseconds.

This is a moderated public board, so you can choose 4 actions for any response
1) read and reply
2) read and ignore
3) don't read and reply
4) don't read and ignore

You cannot expect or force responses within your own 3 categories.

Apologies if my post seemed to offend, on re-reading I guess I should have used the term "time-lost" instead of "time-wasting".

Peace out indeed.

 

[rimscar]

Thanks for glossing over my reply. You're going to get along great here if all you do is focus onthings that you don't like, and ignore people who are trying to be helpful.

my apologies, i did say thankyou but meant to put your name in there!
i`ll edit my reply to that effect.

it just gets my goat when people focus on nitpicking or criticism instead of what's being asked, and when it raises hackles, the op is the one ending up apologising!

 

[strumpusplunket]

Similar situation to what I faced not too long ago. I had an old skt939 system that I was planning to upgrade and pass on to my wife to replace her ancient, horribly-specced Tiny PC.

I also had a search around for better processors than the quite heavily-overclocked 3700+I had in there, but gave up having not found anything that seemed to satisfy in terms of cost to performance.

Eventually just upgraded the cooler to a newer one to push the clock a bit higher and quiet the thing down. She was (and still is) absolutely chuffed with it and was amazed by how much faster it was than her old Tiny.

I guess the point of this is that I couldn't find a cost-effective upgrade from a worse CPU that you have and my wife still thought her new PC was the bee's knees.

In fact, unless your wife wants to play 3D games on her machine for the next couple of years I'd say you could even get away with selling off some of the components and buying cheaper replacements (if she doesn't do anything that requires high performance you could probably flog 2GB of RAM and buy a cheaper gfx card without impacting on what she needs from the rig)

 

[rimscar]

You are obviously well read. But again given your quote above, I cannot see any usefulness of upgrading any of your components to make any attempt a worthwhile exercise. Unless ofcourse you think it is worthwhile to spend lots of time/money for faster boot/launch times by .... seconds or even milliseconds.

This is a moderated public board, so you can choose 4 actions for any response
1) read and reply
2) read and ignore
3) don't read and reply
4) don't read and ignore

You cannot expect or force responses within your own 3 categories.

Apologies if my post seemed to offend, on re-reading I guess I should have used the term "time-lost" instead of "time-wasting".

Peace out indeed.

Given your last sentence and my reference to misinterpretation, now you know why i never get on a high horse or leap down throats...!
Perhaps my sarcasm in offering up 3 categories was intentional, although i don't force or expect anything.
Indeed your "I cannot see any usefulness of upgrading any of your components to make any attempt a worthwhile exercise. Unless ofcourse you think it is worthwhile to spend lots of time/money for faster boot/launch times by .... seconds or even milliseconds." was actually what i was looking for!
As i understand it, you are saying that as i'm moving to i7 etc, that system is, as it stands, not worth upgrading and is competant enough to be left as is, without wasting extra cash, resources or time in trying to upgrade it.
Hopefully i`m correct in that interpretation!

Peace, over and out.

 

[rimscar]

Similar situation to what I faced not too long ago. I had an old skt939 system that I was planning to upgrade and pass on to my wife to replace her ancient, horribly-specced Tiny PC.

I also had a search around for better processors than the quite heavily-overclocked 3700+I had in there, but gave up having not found anything that seemed to satisfy in terms of cost to performance.

Eventually just upgraded the cooler to a newer one to push the clock a bit higher and quiet the thing down. She was (and still is) absolutely chuffed with it and was amazed by how much faster it was than her old Tiny.

I guess the point of this is that I couldn't find a cost-effective upgrade from a worse CPU that you have and my wife still thought her new PC was the bee's knees.

In fact, unless your wife wants to play 3D games on her machine for the next couple of years I'd say you could even get away with selling off some of the components and buying cheaper replacements (if she doesn't do anything that requires high performance you could probably flog 2GB of RAM and buy a cheaper gfx card without impacting on what she needs from the rig)

Thanks for that; it's nice see i`m not the only one who has been in the boat!
It's also a very interesting suggestion about a form of "downgrading". I suspect it will be me doing more of the gaming should i purchase an "old" game that doesn't work on vista/7 64bit (given that i know there are a couple of games under the desk still in cellophane!).
Perhaps i will not pursue that route, but leave it "as is". There can't be much out here, other than the oft-quoted Crysis, that will really see much of a step-change benefit from upgrading the current components? Although i could be completely wrong of course!

Thanks for your advice.