Upgrade advice please

BrianScott1980

BrianScott1980

BrianScott1980

Associate
Joined
19 Jul 2007
Posts
8
Hi,

I've currently got the following and looking to see where approx £150 would be best spent.

19" acer widescreen.
4 GB RAM.
2x 250GB HD.
X1800 XT 256MB.
3500+ AM2.
Asus AM2 mobo.

Would I be better upgrading the mobo and cpu to a dual core or would I be better getting a new graphics card?

Performance on Vista seems fine, I'm just looking to beef it up a bit for some newer games etc.

Thanks,

Brian,
 
I agree with Guzzidom, that's about right.

If you can stick with your motherboard, then stick with it. You might even be able to go to dual now, and then later tri or quad core, without changing it.
 
The only caveat is that it may be wise to check first with your mobo manufacturer

It should be backwards compatible, I say "should be" because some motherboard manufacturers haven't released BIOS updates to allow for the extra features of AM2+ and some boards may not support them for hardware reasons, the vast majority of AM2 boards however will support the chip, just running it with the original AM2 extensions with no BIOS updates..

For information.

AM2+ boards will run both AM2 and AM2+ chips and will have compatibility with the upcoming AM3 chips, though probably running it with AM2+ extensions (much like the AM2 and AM2+ situation now).

And now I need a lie down.
 
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Thanks for the advice. I'm just home and had a look to see what motherboard I have. It turns out to be the ASUS M2NPV-VM. Is this compatible with the chips mentioned so far? Also, am I likely to see a great deal of difference for the £150 spent?

Cheers,

Brian.
 
BrianScott1980 said:
Thanks for the advice. I'm just home and had a look to see what motherboard I have. It turns out to be the ASUS M2NPV-VM. Is this compatible with the chips mentioned so far? Also, am I likely to see a great deal of difference for the £150 spent?

Cheers,

Brian.
Click to expand...



I should say so!. Going from a single core running at 2.2ghz and 512mb of cache to a chip with two cores running at 3.1ghz each and 2mb of cache and a graphics card with something of the order of twice the performance.
Should be noticeable to say the least.
 
That all comes to £165 ish though.
You could go for the 9600GT which would then all come under budget and still gets double the futuremark 06 score your current card does, in combination with the faster dual core CPU it would blow your old setup into the weeds.
 
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