Need some upgrade advice

celliott · 13 Sep 2007 at 15:11

So I have about £200 ish to upgrade my PC. Although I do play games I do quite a lot of multitasking so am pondering whether to go for a cheap upgrade to C2D or go for an 8800GTS or something.

One game I had problem with in particular was Rainbox 6 vegas. Although the first level is known to be a little laggy as they overdid the textures or something, it was unplayable on my system so I left it.

What do you reccomend?

Spec is:

AMD Opteron 170 (Can clock to 2.5GHz but it runs a bit warm, so I run stock)
Asus A8N-E NF4 Motherboard
ATI Radeon X1800XT 256MB
Hiper Type-R 480W PSU (Was made before all the ones that go bang, has been reliable for over 2 years so I have trust in it

)
Maxtor Diamondmax21 320GB HDD
NEC 3450 16x DVDRW

Thanks in advance.

semi-pro waster · 13 Sep 2007 at 15:17

I don't know what Rainbow 6 suffers most from - a lack of CPU speed or graphics power but it might be worth considering some aftermarket cooling for the CPU if you haven't already to keep at 2.5ghz regularly. You could probably afford that and a 320mb 8800GTS.

celliott · 13 Sep 2007 at 15:21

Got a Freezer64 Pro at the moment, have reseated it several times with AS5. Airflow in the case is quite good.

I think its the stepping of the chip that makes it run warm. At 2.5GHz your looking at between 52-54c under load on both cores which is too warm really even though it's not going to do any damage.

pc-modd · 13 Sep 2007 at 15:23

OcUK GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail = £178.59

Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler (Socket 478/754/939/940/AM2/LGA775) = £32.89

Total = £221.17

over your £200 but you should get some back from your old GFX so you will have spent less

pc-modd · 13 Sep 2007 at 15:25

celliott said:
Got a Freezer64 Pro at the moment, have reseated it several times with AS5. Airflow in the case is quite good.

I think its the stepping of the chip that makes it run warm. At 2.5GHz your looking at between 52-54c under load on both cores which is too warm really even though it's not going to do any damage.

Even if you upgrade to a core2 for that budget you would need to overclock and the temps wont be much better, 54c is not that hot and something like the tunig tower is a lot better at cooling that the freezer 64!