cost effective uprgrades for a 3 year old system

fritzo

fritzo

fritzo

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Joined
16 Nov 2005
Posts
111
hi all

i brought an alienware desktop 3 years ago to replace my old rig which I built and overclocked myself with some help from here (which was quite an enjoyable experience, given that i cannabilised an old dell) and i think its getting a little long in the tooth, however I dont really want to scrap it and build a new rig.

So with that in mind i was wondereing what would be the best way forward to get a little more use out of the thing. Its primarily used for gaming on a 1680x1050 display and everything is at stock speeds, spec is as follows:-

core 2 duo E8400 3ghz
nforce 680i mb
4 gig ram
and a gtx 260
currently its running vista 32 :rolleyes:

my thoughts were windows 7 64, new graphics card and maybe overclock the cpu and increase the ram but i dont know if I'll gain anything meaningfull from that

all in i dont really wanna spend more than 300quid,

anyone got any ideas?

thanks in advance
 
By running Vista 32-bit you're only making use of about 3.5GB of your RAM anyway so Windows 7 64bit would be a good idea if you wanted to make use of all your available RAM. If gaming is your main use then I'd agree with you - drop a new graphics card in and try to overclock the processor. I'm not sure if you mean add more memory or just overclock it. I wouldn't add anymore personally, since DDR2 is a lot more expensive than DDR3 and you probably won't notice a huge difference between 4GB and 8GB for gaming. I've heard the E8400's overclock quite well so overclocking your CPU might just give a little extra performance in some games that you may be struggling with etc. but really speaking games are only going to become more and more multithreaded so you'll only get so far with a dual-core processor. A new i5 2500k setup would probably be over your budget though. A graphics card upgrade would be worthwhile since you can always keep the card through later upgrades etc. since it's not really tied in with the rest of the system as much as CPU and RAM are.

Really I'd say you have two choices. Either a complete overhaul to an i5 2500k system, DDR3 memory, new motherboard etc. that would put you over budget but would be a huge performance increase. Or the alternative is to spend a little bit of money now (new graphics card, overclock etc.) just to keep your system ticking over until you can save enough money for a completely new setup in the future.

At the very least I'd say overclock your CPU and see how far that gets you - it's free performance after all. The only thing you may need is a decent cooler if you don't already have one.

Almost forgot, but before upgrading anything make sure your PSU is up to scratch and can cope with the extra power etc.
 
apologies for not responding sooner. Thanks for the advice in the end i just decided to bite the bullet and go for a full overhaul, mainly as i wanted to take advantage of a SSD as a boot disk and after some research discovered that my mother board wasnt capable of handling sata 3 and trim.

I'm planning on retaining my hideous alienware case, powersupply, optical drive and 250gb hard disk ( I need to have something to show for a 1500quid 3 year old system :)) and supplementing it with a 2500k pre overclocked bundle I saw on overclockers with 8gb of ram which seemed like a decent deal.

The one question I do have is the power supply is rated at 750W and I'm planning on using a pair of gtx 560ti's in SLI is this going to be sufficent with the 2500k o/c'd at 4.6ghz?

Cheers
 
cheers for the quick response

the PSU looked like a decent unit from what I could see, I'll guess I'll see the exact model when I strip it down
 
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