8 Year Old system - Time To Move On?

2L84SLEEP

2L84SLEEP

2L84SLEEP

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Uphall, West Lothian
Hi All

I got a PC 8 years ago which has served my needs extremely well - unfortunately, the time has come where I now think I need to upgrade. The PC I have is an old P3 600mhz with 512mb ram. Now dont worry I got a laptop two years ago which I have mainly used on a day to day basis but my needs have now changed. I want to get into flight sims and also digital photography, not in any professional way but just have a system which will be able to run them without going dead slow and stop.

I am jsut after some advice on what min. requirements you think I need, what cost we are looking at etc. Also, I am not 100% clued up on compatibility, I have bought quite a few PCI cards for the old machine and am not sure if these will now be compatible with todays motherboards. PCI cards included dual head graphics card, as I have three TFTS, a sound card and an additional USB/Firewire card, none of which are PCI Express, think this was just starting to emerge when I had bought the last of them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, please feel free to ask any questions to help :cool:
 
Graphics cards these days are all dual headed. Do you need firewire? USB ports are aplenty on todays motherboards, firewire also comes standard on certain motherboards. Sound is also onboard.

Really need a budget to spec you a system. Have a look in the sticky for rough prices.
 
Yes I think it is time to move on, you are missing a lot.

Graphics cards nowadays come with multiple outputs. I think you would be fine with a low-mid spec for nowadays. PCI cards should work(?)
 
It honestly wont be of benefit to keep anything, it all needs to go if you are building a new system. Every modern day graphics card is dual headed and they are PCI-Express.
 
Ouch, am a gonna cry :( lol

I have a Sony 19" screen and two Samsung 15" screens, one is connected to the motherboard, the other two are connected to the PCI card, one VGA, one DVI I think it was.

The flight sim I was given was Microsoft Flight Simulator X Gold edition.

Also firewire wouldnt be needed, just one of my iPods connects that way.
 
Flight Sim X is incredibly demanding so you will need a very high end rig to get the best out of it. Something like a heavily overclocked Core 2 Quad paired with 4gig DDR2 and an ATI 4870 or better would be a good start.

Porting over the PCI cards shouldn't be an issue although you may find that the usb/fw card isn't needed with modern mobos, and depending on it's age the onboard sound may be as good as the PCI soundcard.
 
You should be able to get the gear you need second hand for very little moolah. An E2140 OC'd and 2GB of RAM (pref 4 for Vista), motherboard and 8800GT will be more than sufficient for a reasonable level of detail in FSX. This could be had for less than £200 if you search the members' market.
 
Moving from a 600mhz 512Mb system to a modern dual/quad core with 2Gb of RAM will be a massive jump up, and really not that expensive.
The CPU in the iphone runs faster than your current CPU, really :D

Even a £300 machine will run photo editing software and games "without going dead slow and stop" but for more serious gaming something nearer the £500 mark would be more realistic. Not played FSX but how much you wanna spend depends on how much you care about the visual quality.
What hard drives do you have? Any external? The main internal one(s) will need to be new really, as you won't have SATA and it's a fair improvement on IDE
 
Thanks for all the responses, hard drives are IDE and I have one external, a My Book, so that is USB anyway.

Could someone point me at a prebuilt one from OCUK, not a 100% confident on building one nowadays :confused:
 
You may as well just scrap it and start again, people that are saying all you need is mainboard, ram and video card must have missed the fact that the psu is also 8 years old and that will need replacing. There's also the fact that your hdd's are ide and you generally only get mainboards with 1 ide port on them nowadays, and I'm presuming you have an ide dvd rom? Time to get real and thank your pc for 8 years of good service as you drop it in the bin. I'd suggest something like this http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-038-OK although a budget to work on would be handy?
 
I always recommend self building as then you can save money and tailor the PC exactly to your needs but if going for pre built i'd personally recommend the following system for your needs:

OCUK Ultima OC HD 4850

Choosing the upgrade of 4GB RAM and Vista 64bit. This system due to the OCd quad core and good gfx will be an unimaginable improvement from your old system and will be future proof for a good while. Not to mention it will make short work of FSX and photoshop.
 
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