Upgrade advice needed.

Steveh_monkey · 7 Nov 2009 at 13:34

Hello

I built my PC about 3 years ago mainly so I could play Oblivion, and it's held up suprisingly well over the years and still is fairly nippy, and handles most of the games I play fairly well. Since then I haven't kept track of the technology releases so I'm not sure what's hot and what's not (DX 11? I thought we were still waiting for the DX 10 revolution? lol)

I'm adding a hardrive soon as well as upgrading to windows 7 and was wondering if there's any upgrades I could do to improve gaming performance on some of the more recent games

Anyway, here's the current spec

E6300 @ 1.86 GHZ (not overclocked)
Gigabyte DS3
ATI X1900 on a 17" 1280 * 1024 res
2GB of Ram
Enermax 500W.

So yeah, Could I maybe upgrade the GFX card to something a bit more recent and overclock the CPU or would the system be bottlenecked at all?

I might consider gutting the core and adding new CPU + Mobo + GFX + Ram but I'd rather not and save a bit of money.

Any advice appreciated
Thanks

pastymuncher · 7 Nov 2009 at 13:40

Clock the cpu and get a new graphics card. That would give you a massive boost and tide you over until you are ready for a new system.

mattyfez · 7 Nov 2009 at 13:41

In order of greatest priority;

New graphics card
Overclock CPU (may need a better cooler)
Get a bigger screen, I use a 22" at 1680x1050 which is a nice size for games whilst not requiring an insane graphics card set up for good performance in modern games.
Add 2 more Gb RAM and Use Win7 64bit.

Steveh_monkey · 7 Nov 2009 at 14:47

Super news thank you
Any recomendations for GFX cards then? Maybe something one <£100 and £100< just to be me started

+ How essential is new RAM? not sure If I'll be able to find the same or similar RAM again.

One last thing, I've got Windows XP atm, if I buy a Windows 7 upgrade edition will I be able to perform clean install on Windows 7 once I've installed it? I generally find once a year around august my PC goes bonkers and need's a fresh install.
I suppose if I own a Copy of XP and an Upgrade edition of Windows 7 then it's like owning a windows 7 retail, I can just reinstall a fresh XP and then upgrade to windows 7? Or should I just go Windows 7 retail for safety?
That probably belongs in the Software section but no point in starting a new thread me thinks

Thanks again

asoxedri · 7 Nov 2009 at 15:18

can you name the chipset please, there are a few DS3 around.

Steveh_monkey · 7 Nov 2009 at 16:52

It's a Gigabyte 965P-DS3, Chipset P965/G965 according to CPUZ

Tigjaw · 7 Nov 2009 at 16:59

Steveh_monkey said:
It's a Gigabyte 965P-DS3, Chipset P965/G965 according to CPUZ

Nice board!

*points at own sig*

I'm also interested in this thread. I've got a similar system - E6600 overclocked to 3GHz, 4GB RAM on the way as I've purchased 64Bit W7 and I was wondering whether it would be worth upgrading yet.

I'm guessing, keep my CPU but upgrade the graphics card?

cjph · 23 Nov 2009 at 20:17

Same boat again - I have a 965P-DS3 (Rev 3.3) with an E5200 which does a storming 3.7GHz. Primarily used for FPS gaming (Arma 2) and I wonder if a quad would gain me anything ?

New 775 quads are high prices imho, though understandable given the number of people wanting an easily upgrade. I read a lot of good things about the AMD 620/630 quad and 435 triple cores, and for less than the price of a new Q9400 you could get more cores plus a newer platform with PCIe 2.0 and crossfire support. Has anyone got experience of moving from fast Intel dual to multi-core AMD ?

cjph