Cheap Upgrade Question

strudey · 5 Mar 2006 at 00:14

I need some advice - I'm trying to upgrade my rig on a very tight budget, for gaming; my specs are - socket 478 P4 2.8Ghz , gigabyte mobo, 2x512mb sticks of generic ddr, a 6800GS that I just bought :cool:

, cheap 80Gb HD, onboard sound.

I've got about £100 left to spend, and my question is, would i be better off buying two 1Gb sticks of ram, a 10000rpm raptor hd, or a sound card? Or maybe just save up for a 478 3.4Ghz P4... which would give the biggest boost to gaming? Any advice much appreciated

ACESHIGH · 5 Mar 2006 at 00:18

i would go for the 2x 1Gb sticks of ram.

Explicit · 5 Mar 2006 at 00:34

I think it boils down to a raptor or the 2GB ram. Any of them two would be a good upgrade. But a sound card, in comparison to the raptor/ram, doesn't seem to be worthwhile.

A raptor/more ram would give you a great boost in gaming, whereas a sound card wont.

stvmor · 5 Mar 2006 at 01:41

Check if you realy need a Raptor? It is still very expensive and noisy and doesn't seem to be 'that' much faster than a good sata like the se16 W/D's (I am very pleased with my se16 250Gig). The memory will make a lot of difference and you may be able to get more memory and a 'decent' hard drive for £100?

Just checked and you can get 1Gig memory and a 250Gig Samsung for £110 in 'This week' offers. :eek:

strudey · 5 Mar 2006 at 10:58

Thanks for the thoughts, guys; guess I'll steer clear of the sound card. Stvmor, your plan sounds pretty good (and pretty cheap

), and I probably don't need the raptor. My only problem with it is, with 4 sticks of 512Mb, will I not lose ddr400? Or is that only on certain motherboards :confused:

semi-pro waster · 5 Mar 2006 at 11:37

As far as I am aware with Intel motherboards you can have 4 sticks of Ram without it being a problem but it may be best to check on the Gigabyte website to see if there are any known issues. You may be thinking of the inability of some A64 motherboards to run with 4 sticks of Ram at 1T but they do run at 2T?

strudey · 5 Mar 2006 at 11:52

Yeah, maybe. I'm not brilliant with this stuff

Anyway, I dug out my motherboard manual, and it looks like 4 sticks should be fine. Thanks for the help people

quadboi · 5 Mar 2006 at 13:24

Yes, BUT if you can get 2x1gb

stvmor · 5 Mar 2006 at 15:03

sjohal2006 said:
Yes, BUT if you can get 2x1gb

Let us know how you get on. As far as I know you will have no problems at all running 4 sticks as long as they are reasonably matched pairs (all four don't have to match) but don't buy 'top' performance stuff as your old RAM will hold it back. Also, don't worry about 1T unless your into the arguably 'silly' pursuit of a few benchmarks (we all succomb at some time I'm afraid

). I honestly havn't been able to observe a difference in real world gaming yet