Any Headroom Here?

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Joined
5 Nov 2004
Posts
1,593
Location
Central UK
Built myself a PC back in 2008 using the following :

Asus P5Q
C2D E5200
WD Velociraptor 74GB
Nvidia 8800GTS 512
2GB RAM
Win XP SP3

The CPU is clocked at 3GHz and everything is super stable but feel I could do with it a little quicker around Windows sometimes, any easy upgrades I can do 2 years on without a motherboard change/big upheaval etc to achieve a moderate gain in performance? Quite fancy an SSD HDD but think it's an uphill struggle with XP. Play the odd game Bioshock, GTA4 etc so maybe a GPU upgrade wouldn't hurt too.

Cheers
 
You should be able to get a much higher overclock out of that processer as long as you've got a fairly reasonable cooler on it. My old one went to 4ghz with a arctic cooler extreme on it. An upgrade to Windows 7 and 4gig of ram would also help.
 
Update your drivers and use system cleaning software like Iobit's Advanced System Care. That should give you a fair boost for free.

As for paid-money-upgrades, Windows 7, 4 gigs of RAM, a Q6600 or a modern graphics card are all solid choices.
 
Cheers for the suggestions, I'll probably try fitting a s/h Q6600 quad core, these were quite expensive 2 years ago, E5200 seemed best bang for buck then. I presume with the quad core I can use my existing RAM? It's OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2.

Will look at this Iobit's Advanced System Care too.
 
PC2-6400 is fine for a Q6600. Make sure it's a G0 stepping (SLACR) and you have a decent heatsink for it. Second hand price is around £70-80. Most will clock to 3.2-3.6Ghz. They are practically bomb proof as well.
 
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