Help with upgrade

Soup and a roll · 7 Jan 2009 at 22:01

Hi guys! My first time here, I was hoping I could get some help from you knowledgeable techies.

I'm running a computer I bought from a friend about two years ago for a couple of hundred and haven't had any problems from it. I'm looking to play some of the big games coming out soon. It does well on "can you run it" but struggles badly with Crysis. I was wondering what would be the best way to upgrade it: New graphics card, better ram or a better motherboard. I'm afraid I don't know what the weakest area of the computer is. Here's the spec:

ECS nForce4 A393 motherboard
Dual core AMD Athlon 64x2 2400 MHz
Nvidia Geforce 7900 GTX (512Mg)
2x Vdata 1Gb PC3200 DDR400 SDRAM

I don't really have a budget so any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!

Soup and a roll · 7 Jan 2009 at 22:15

Thanks for the replies:

It's very much a games machine. At the moment I mostly play Stalker, DOW and Medieval 2. I'll be buying Fallout3 and would like it to run smoothly. I don't normally use a resolution higher than 1280-1024.

Budgetwise I'd rather spend a little than a lot, but say £300. If I'd be better buying a new system I could spend more.

Cheers

Soup and a roll · 7 Jan 2009 at 22:36

Hey. The PSU is a powermaster 570W dual fan

There is a Serial ATA connecting the HD and the DVD drive but I don't know anything about it so I'll get googling. edit: Looks like first generation. The HD is a 200Gb Hitachi "7200 rpm rotational speed. It includes one 40-pin IDC Ultra ATA/133 (ATA-7) IDE/EIDE interface port, and 105.4MBps Internal data transfer rate"

Cheers

Soup and a roll · 7 Jan 2009 at 22:51

That's legendary. I'll look into those.

Thanks very much for your help mpj88 and sh4dy1981!