Recommend me an upgrade

Furton

Furton

Furton

Soldato
Joined
9 Aug 2003
Posts
2,715
Location
Liverpool
I've been away travelling for 10 months and wouldn't mind upgrading my PC a little bit now before I do a complete overhaul in about 6 months. At the moment I have a

Opteron 144 @ 2.6Ghz
1 GB RAM
DFi LanParty (Think it's the sli version)
ATi Radeon X1800
Windows XP

I've been thinking of getting a second hand Dual Core Opteron, an upgrade to 2GB and maybe Windows Vista. Which Dual Core opteron overclocks well and what sort of RAM would I need to match it with.

Lastly, is the upgrade from WinXP to Vista worth it or necessary?
 
£200-300? Thinking of getting a new hard drive as well, I assume Seagate are still the best but is it the .10 version or the ES version?
 
Well within your budget and would allow you to upgrade to quad core with the same motherboard if required, it does also re-use your existing graphics card. Although the CPU has a fairly low initial clockspeed, don't be fooled, many reach 3ghz or above comfortably. :)

Gigabyte GA_P35C_DS3R (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 & DDR3 Motherboard £69.99
(£82.24) £69.99
(£82.24)
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC) £39.99
(£46.99) £39.99
(£46.99)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB ST3320620AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £45.99
(£54.04) £45.99
(£54.04)
Intel Core 2 Duo E2160 "LGA775 Conroe" 1.80GHz (800FSB) - Retail £44.99
(£52.86) £44.99
(£52.86)
Sub Total : £200.96
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £8.25
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £36.61
Total : £245.82
 
Didn't think a full upgrade would be so cheap. So I could save money by just getting an old Opteron and RAM and saving the rest for when I want to do a proper upgrade?
 
I'm not sure what Opterons are currently going for but an OEM X2 3800 on OcUK is about £45. 2gb of DDR comes in at £65 minimum so it is £110 and re-using your existing cooler plus the hard drive which is £50ish. If you can find the parts secondhand cheaply then it makes sense but otherwise I might be tempted to just suggest going for the Core2Duo which will almost certainly overclock better and it does provide more of an upgrade path.
 
Okay, will have a look into both options, cheers mate. What about switching to Vista, worth it or not? 64Bit platform stable these days?
 
Not really my area, you'd be better taking a look in the Windows sub-forum but from what I can tell it is generally pretty stable and good unless you need odd types of legacy software when it might not be supported. :)
 
I'm thinking I might just go for the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ (Socket 939) - OEM until I can afford a full upgrade in about 6 months time. Will I see an improvement from a single core Opteron to a Dual Core Athlon?
 
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