Decisions Decisions

DustyMiller

DustyMiller

DustyMiller

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Right my lad who is into games and homework like all kids has an old P4 board with an AGP ATI HD3650 card, now this is fine for gaming as he has a 17" LCD screen. But I feel he needs an upgrade.

Now I already have one of my lads running an ASROCK hybrid 4-Core Dual SATA that lets AGP/PCI-E and DDR / DDR2s work together, but as that board is old, and not available, what is the CHEAPEST upgrade i can get for my lad, this will need new everything i feel, but do not want to have anything negative.

Did i mention that it has to be CHEAP as CHIPS, and all new no Ebay or stuff like that. I also want it to have 2Gb of Ram same as his current setup.

Over to you, do me cheap.

Cheers
 
Cheapest possible, i have a case PSU, and Optical Drive, so dont need a full system, but need if possible to use any or all of my old parts, hence the word CHEAPEST
 
The AM2 5700

The problem is you are going to have to replace that AGP card

Don't see why it can't all be done under £220 inc HD or £190 without.
 
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Your basket
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200 2.70GHz (Socket AM2) - Retail £45.99
(£52.89) £45.99
(£52.89)
Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £42.99
(£49.44) £42.99
(£49.44)
OcUK GeForce 9400 GT 512MB DDR2 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £31.99
(£36.79) £31.99
(£36.79)
Samsung SpinPoint S 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD082GJ) £20.99
(£24.14) £20.99
(£24.14)
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2 (OCZ2P800R22GK) £17.99
(£20.69) £17.99
(£20.69)
Sub Total : £159.95
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DHL @ Home Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.49
VAT is being charged at 15% VAT : £23.99
Total : £183.94


What does that look like ???
 
Looks pretty good, if you can squeeze an extra tenner it may be worth pushing the HD up a size or two.
The graphics card isn't going to get you far in modern games (even at 17") but will be fine for older stuff, you'd need to get up to the, (£11.00 dearer) 9500GT level otherwise, other than that it'll be a revelation compared to a P4.
 
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DDR3200 ram and decent(ish) AGP cards go well on Ebay too so that may free up a little revenue, might let you go to a 160/250gb drive and 9500GT.
Make sure the board runs AM2+ natively (the two sockets are forwards and backwards compatible) because the next generation chips are going to be AM3 and they will only be backwards compatible with AM2+ not AM2.
Also make sure there are enough IDE slots to take your older drives, a lot of boards only have the one these days (though as you've specced a HD I doubt it's an issue).

So for me I'd say squeeze the extra £8 for the 160GB Seagate Barracuda (twice the size) and the extra £11 for the 9500GT (about 200% faster in a lot of games) and that would be the ideal VFM rig.

I'd even drop to an AMD x2 5000+ to cover the extra cost of the graphics otherwise there's a bit of a serious imbalance between CPU and GPU meaning the graphics card will bottleneck like anything.
 
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HDD size is not an issue, as i have over 750Gb on my W2K3 server, running my domain. plus my 1Tb on my Office PC. But will look at the 9500 series.

Cheers
 
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