PC upgrade, please spec

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29 Nov 2006
Posts
19
Hi I've been doing some research into a major upgrade for my stone age system for a while now. I built this PC a few years back, and my knowledge is more than a bit rusty. Heres my current specs

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 1.49GHz
2x512MB DDR 333
450W Dual Fan Gold PSU
GeForce FX 5200 128MB
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB ATA-100
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE 7.1 Sound Card
DVD ROM drive
CD-RW Drive

I plan on getting a new CPU, motherboard and GPU and these seem to be the best options at the moment

Gigabyte GA_965P_S3 PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £88.11
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86Ghz (1066FSB) OEM £111.61
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler £16.44
BFG Geforce 7600 GT OC 256B £111.61
£337.47

My real questions are will I need a new PSU? (I don't plan on overclocking, but it is about 4 years old), and will I need to buy fresh RAM? my RAM will definetly be the first thing I upgrade but I cant really afford to do it anytime soon.
Thanks a lot in advance guys
 
argh that's annoying. Ah well I guess i might as well make a new system and get myself these bad boys

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC5300 667MHz Value DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB5300DC)

Yeah I'll check out those PSUs. How powerful do you think I'll need it, about 450w?
 
As your not overclocking then that should be fine with 450-500W and it will give you a bit of headroom if you ever do decide to clock your conroe.

The Seasonic M12/S12 500 (depending if you want modular or not) is good PSU. It kind of depends how much you want to spend?
 
Cheers. Yeah it seems like a lot of money, I mean I've seen 500W PSU's included in cases for about £40. Is £80 justifiable in your opinion considering I'm on a student budget? :P
 
The PSU is one of the most important parts of your system and shouldn't really be skimped on. If you get a generic one and it goes pop it could take down all the other bits of kit you've shelled out on so deffo worth spending the extra IMO.

As long as you get something from a reputable manufacturer then you should be OK. Maybe something like

OCZ ModStream 450w ATX2.2 Power Supply £46.99 inc VAT

would be good for your needs.

Might be worth you posting something on the Power Supplies forum with your max budget. You should get some different suggestions as I'm no PSU expert but if you can stretch the budget a bit then you won't go wrong with Seasonic, Enermax, Tagan etc
 
thanks a lot for the advice guys what I'm probably gonna do is get 2x512MB of RAM now, and get two more next year some time. Does this sound like a good idea? I'd appreciate it if you could reccommend some memory that works well like this. I assume that I'm going to want to have 4 identical memory sticks eventually.
 
i would get a 1gig stick for now and when u get memory get a 2nd stick of 1gig.

much better that way then 4x 512.
 
Ok, I guess I'm gonna have to shop somewhere else for memory, as they all seem to come in pairs here or just blow my student loan on 2 gigs.
 
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