Cheapest way of improving?

Soldato
Joined
7 Feb 2004
Posts
9,511
I am looking to improve my computer. All my current games run fine on the system but I would like to improve it but dont have the money for a full upgrade which I would like.

My current setup is:

Asus deluxe 754 (Cant remember the model)
AMD 64 3400+
9800XT radeon
Corsair Memory 512 MB PC4400 DDR RAM (cmx512 4400pt) x 2

Any suggestions?
 
What do you do with your PC mainly?? If you only play games and if they run fine with you then you can still keep it for a while.

Otherwise looks like it's time for a rebuild tbh, although you still have options of getting a 1950pro AGP and another gig of memory.
 
Mainly play games on it.

Another gig of memory was my first consideration. But I am not sure what is compatiable with the memory that I currently use.

Any suggestions?

With the 1950, would my system hinder its performance if I were to get that?
 
Could the motherboard be an Asus K8V SE Deluxe? If so you have one memory slot left since it only has 3 and you can get a single stick of 1gb Ram of any PC3200 if you want. The motherboard doesn't have working PCI/AGP locks so you can't overclock very well either which means that you don't really have to match up PC4400 with it plus it won't matter about matching sticks of Ram since it doesn't support dual channel. I've got this motherboard myself so that is how I know. :)

You could get the X1950pro but that is about £150 and you can't take it to your next PC so I might suggest having a look around for something like an X800series card or a 6800series card as you should be able to pick one up for ~£50ish and save the rest of the cash for a full upgrade.
 
Check that I'm right on the motherboard though, I'm pretty sure I am but it never hurts to be 100%. :)

You don't really have a choice on OcUK about the Ram, they have only the Crucial Ram in 1gb form which ought to be absolutely fine working with the rest as they will all be operating at PC3200 speeds.
 
bloodline76 said:
With the 1950, would my system hinder its performance if I were to get that?

Not so much in graphic intensive games where the performance is limited by the graphics card.

Another alternative is to get a PCI-E with 1950pro PCI-E version which together cost about as much as a single 1950pro AGP card.
 
Upgrade the RAM

My five year old computer was strugling to run programs on it's measly (don't laugh) 256mb of RAM and giving it another stick of 512mb made a ridiculous improvement in performance, it actually felt like a new computer albeit the RAM did treble so a vast improvement was not to be unexpected.

Best upgrade I ever did though and for well under €100.
 
Ok thanks. So does it not really matter which kind I get then? If you had the choice which would you get?

Back to the pci+mobo being the same as the AGP.

What do you think I would be looking at to upgrade to PCI. As i would need a new CPU as well.

I want to go PCi but dont want to spend too much at the moment.
 
Probably the cheapest way to upgrade to PCI-E would be a simple motherboard replacement, there have been socket 754 PCI-E motherboards made although I can't remember model numbers off the top of my head - you are looking for Nforce4 based socket 754 motherboards though.

However that would limit you to an old and now unsupported platform so you might be better to take the option of an ASRock Dual-VSTA motherboard which supports Conroe, DDR + DDR2 and AGP + PCI-E, the motherboard costs about £40ish and the Conroe chip itself will cost around £130 including a heatsink and fan. You then still have to buy a graphics card and the motherboard isn't particularly great for overclocking but you can build the system in stages.
 
I'd really suggest either another 512MB or 1GB of RAM. A 2nd hand x800 based graphics card would also be worth while. Any more than that and your best suited to saving up for a whole system.
 
Antar Boaleisk said:
Upgrade the RAM

My five year old computer was strugling to run programs on it's measly (don't laugh) 256mb of RAM and giving it another stick of 512mb made a ridiculous improvement in performance, it actually felt like a new computer albeit the RAM did treble so a vast improvement was not to be unexpected.

Best upgrade I ever did though and for well under €100.

In your case additional RAM would be a huge improvement. However upgrading from 1Gb to 2Gb doesn't nearly have the same level of performance increase; in fact you can hardly notice the difference in normal windows works unless you have lots of intensive programmes running in the background plus lots of windows opened at the same time.

The benefit of 2Gb is noticeable in games, but only when you have all the graphic settings on high @ 1280*1024+ resolutions.
 
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