Hi guys,
I've never really had too many problems running games on my machine, even though it's a little old now, everything has run smoothly, most noteably I can run Half-Life 2 in maximum detail (although only 4x AA) and at a resolution of 1680 x 1050 so everything seemed fine.
... until I tried running a demo of some new Rally game from Eidos and it bought me back to the old days of when I tried running new games on my P133! This then also bought along the harsh realisation that Half-Life 2 is actually three or four years old, so for me to be using it as a benchmark is pretty ludicrous, regardless of how nice it looks. Anyway, my specs are as follows:
AMD Barton 2500+ (not overclocked)
Crucial 2x512MB DDR400
Asus V9999 GeForce 6800
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Antec Sonata Case and TruePower PSU
40GB Seagate Barracuda IDE HDD
160GB Seagate Barracuda IDE HDD
NEC DVD-RW
Sony DVD-RW
The main things that are bugging me are 1) Should I change now, or wait? and 2) Should I upgrade or get a whole new system?
I was at first considering keeping most of the base parts and just moving the motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics and 40GB hard drive into my parents case (they're using an AMD Thunderbird 1Ghz atm) but then I'm still not 100% sure on my other parts.
The case I'm assuming will be alright, which is good because it looks quite cool, has good mountings and actually does a good job of keeping my uber loud graphics fan under control at least a little, and the case fan is pretty much silent. Likewise with the DVD-RW drives, no problem there. Question is though, will the 160GB IDE drive be suitable for newer boards or would I need to get an improved one? Obviously to run Windows off I'd be looking at SATA or similar anyway, but I only need 40GB or so for that. Also, the PSU, I notice they've upgraded to TruePower 2.0 now but I'm not really aware of the difference between the newer version and my version.
Reading through, I guess it seems like I only want to 'upgrade' so I can keep my current case and PSU, which is maybe a little silly. I'm just not sure what the best thing to do is bah! Any suggestions would be fantastic, thank you!
I've never really had too many problems running games on my machine, even though it's a little old now, everything has run smoothly, most noteably I can run Half-Life 2 in maximum detail (although only 4x AA) and at a resolution of 1680 x 1050 so everything seemed fine.
... until I tried running a demo of some new Rally game from Eidos and it bought me back to the old days of when I tried running new games on my P133! This then also bought along the harsh realisation that Half-Life 2 is actually three or four years old, so for me to be using it as a benchmark is pretty ludicrous, regardless of how nice it looks. Anyway, my specs are as follows:
AMD Barton 2500+ (not overclocked)
Crucial 2x512MB DDR400
Asus V9999 GeForce 6800
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Antec Sonata Case and TruePower PSU
40GB Seagate Barracuda IDE HDD
160GB Seagate Barracuda IDE HDD
NEC DVD-RW
Sony DVD-RW
The main things that are bugging me are 1) Should I change now, or wait? and 2) Should I upgrade or get a whole new system?
I was at first considering keeping most of the base parts and just moving the motherboard, CPU, memory, graphics and 40GB hard drive into my parents case (they're using an AMD Thunderbird 1Ghz atm) but then I'm still not 100% sure on my other parts.
The case I'm assuming will be alright, which is good because it looks quite cool, has good mountings and actually does a good job of keeping my uber loud graphics fan under control at least a little, and the case fan is pretty much silent. Likewise with the DVD-RW drives, no problem there. Question is though, will the 160GB IDE drive be suitable for newer boards or would I need to get an improved one? Obviously to run Windows off I'd be looking at SATA or similar anyway, but I only need 40GB or so for that. Also, the PSU, I notice they've upgraded to TruePower 2.0 now but I'm not really aware of the difference between the newer version and my version.
Reading through, I guess it seems like I only want to 'upgrade' so I can keep my current case and PSU, which is maybe a little silly. I'm just not sure what the best thing to do is bah! Any suggestions would be fantastic, thank you!
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