£100 upgrade possible?

howthe

howthe

howthe

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Joined
27 Nov 2008
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328
Hi all,

I am looking at getting a couple of the Samsung 20" monitors to replace my old 17" CRT & 17" LCD but my PC is now a couple of years old.

Got an AMD X2 64 4400+ (2.21 ghz no overclocking) on a ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo with 2ghz RAM & a 7800GTX.

Now, my mum has decided to just give me cash for xmas so I've a spare £100 going and thinking of a CPU/Mobo upgrade. Obviously the GFX card needs doing too but I'll look at getting one later one.

Any suggestions for a decent package that wont need upgrading for at least a year?

PC used for gaming & work stuff.

Thanks :D
 
hi mate, thought I would reply because my spec is almost identical to yours and I was also looking to upgrade!

Last month my spec was:

Asus A8N SLI Premium
Athlon X2 3800 (@2.2Ghz)
256MB 7800GT
2GB DDR OCZ Gold
74Gb Raptor
24" Dell
Win XP Pro SP2


I didn't have much money to spare but wanted to upgrade because even though the PC does pretty much everything I need it to reasonably well, it was beginning to struggle with some games.

I saw someone selling an Athlon X2 4400 second hand which I bought, I managed to sell my X2 3800 for the same amount so that cost me nothing. I then saw an Athlon X2 4600 and thought why not again, I'm now using that and I sold the X2 4400 for more so the upgrade made me money! :)

Since the CPU upgrade didn't cost me anything I had abit there for a decent gfx card and I've got a 768MB 8800GTX on the way, I picked it up second hand from MM. It cost me £75, I should be able to sell my 7800GT for about £25 so overall its cost me under £50 and its a reasonable upgrade.

The CPU clocked very easily to 2.8Ghz, the 2GB ram is enough for me to run Vista 64 Ultimate with no problems, and the 8800GTX should see me get a big improvement in games, so overall its not bad for less then £50 total spent.

You could go for a new mobo/cpu its upto you, but I'm not sure if theres anything decent out there to be had for that price. You could try overclocking the CPU abit see how much you can get out of it, and sell your gfx card and buy something a lot better, that will definately give you the biggest improvement in games, and you will still have plenty of change left over. :)
 
Personally I would just swap in a Radeon 4830. It's able to handle pretty much any game comfortably at 1680x1050 and costs around ~£95-100, compared to the £120+ of the 4850.

Alternatively you could go down the cpu+motherboard route but I don't think it would be worth getting anything below a P43-based board and c2d e7300 (for ~£155). You'd also need to be sure your power supply would work with the new board to avoid having to spend even more.
 
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