PC Spec Please

AdL2 · 7 Mar 2006 at 11:21

A friend of mine is planning on upgrading his system pretty soon and asked me for advice, so i thought i would ask you guys! It shows below what he is thinking about. The amount it comes to is around about his budget, except he can stretch to a bit extra for a new PSU.

If anyone can make any suggestions to improve it for a similar price please let me know.

At the moment he has an AthlonXP 2400, 9800Pro, 1Gb Samsung 2700. So he will be hoping to see quite a large improvement when playing all the latest games.

Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard £61.95 +VAT
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego - Retail £129.95 +VAT
XFX GeForce 6800 GS Extreme XXX Edition 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £124.95 +VAT
GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 £49.95 +VAT

TOTAL £430.99 inc. VAT

no_1_dave · 7 Mar 2006 at 11:31

You want 2Gb of ram to play the latest games at good settings

semi-pro waster · 7 Mar 2006 at 11:54

I can't see anything obvious to improve it, you could get an X800 GTO16 for the same price or cheaper however it doesn't have SM3 and is about the same sort of performance so I'd say go for it

AdL2 · 7 Mar 2006 at 16:12

Wow i didnt realise that the games coming out these days needed up to 2 Gb.

What about a PSU, can anyone recommend one that would power that spec?

semi-pro waster · 8 Mar 2006 at 10:46

Any decent brand PSU of 400w+ should be fine, take a look at Enermax, Seasonic, Antec, Hiper and Akasa as any of them offer suitable models. Depending on your budget you could get modular PSUs if you wanted for neatness but they usually cost a little more.

AdL2 · 8 Mar 2006 at 11:47

Ok Thanks.

What about changing the GFX for a 7800GT would this be worth the extra?

no_1_dave · 8 Mar 2006 at 11:55

Yes

But then 2Gb of ram would definatly be needed or max settings will really be choppy!

Explicit · 8 Mar 2006 at 12:57

AdL2 said:
Ok Thanks.

What about changing the GFX for a 7800GT would this be worth the extra?

7900 releases tomorrow so it's worth waiting to see what happens and decide what you can fit into your budget.

AdL2 · 8 Mar 2006 at 13:21

Would it be worth dropping the speed of the processor in order to get the better card or 2 Gb of ram? Say if the chip was changed to a 3200?

Explicit · 8 Mar 2006 at 13:27

AdL2 said:
Would it be worth dropping the speed of the processor in order to get the better card or 2 Gb of ram? Say if the chip was changed to a 3200?

In my opinion, no. The 3700+ has 1MB cache, whereas the Venice 3200 ony has 512Kb. Speed can be gained by overclocking, but cache can't. I would keep the 3700+

booyaka · 8 Mar 2006 at 13:39

will agree with the above post - i have a 3700 overclocked to 2.7ghz and only 1 ghz of good ram. Can run BF2 with all but textures on high settings (can run on high textures but lose about 5/6 fps) and it's great.

Only time you notice a need for 2gb at this time, is when you exit out of BF2 or CRTL-ALT-DEL out of it and it can take a while for the data/system to sort itself out becuase of only having 1gb.

Stick with the 3700 - belter of a chip