Upgrade - can I do 2.5Gb?

Dan G · 12 Apr 2006 at 13:48

Hi! I was pondering upgrading my rig £100 - £150, so I thought of RAM.

I've got:

DFI LanParty UTNF3 250Gb Socket 754
Newie 3000+ OC'd to 2300MHz
1GB (2 x 512) GeIL Value PC3200, OCD to about 220MHz on Cas 3
6800LE, overclocked to 280/530MHz and unlocked 16*6
WDC 160GB SATA Drive

First off would RAM be my best upgrade? I could get some OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC3200 Dual Channel Gold for £152.

I've only got three slots so could I keep one of my GeIL's in and get 2.5Gb? Or would I only be able to use the OCZ? Or could I buy a further 1GB or 512Mb stick for the third slot and keep my current RAM?

How would my OC go? And will it make any tangible difference to everyday use? Especially as adding a 1GB stick would be MUCH cheeper!

Ta all

trojan698 · 12 Apr 2006 at 14:38

Well theres no dual channel anyway, so you wouldnt be missing that. You thought about skt939 ? asrock dual sata + an opty maybe?

Dan G · 12 Apr 2006 at 21:35

Yes I had thought about that quite a lot, but I believe that would end up quite expensive, so much so I might be better of with a whole new rig I think.

Is there anything else I could do to this for £0 - £100/£150?

Cheers.

trojan698 · 13 Apr 2006 at 17:03

If you browse the competition you could probably find the asrock dual sata for ~£40 and might be able to find a reasonably priced opty 146 also

Saying thay, skt939 is soon to be replaced with am2 with 754 outliving it, I'd go for the opty route personally though, the extra cache and clocking potential would make it worthwhile also allowing you the option of dual core and a pci-e gfx card in future.

The ram would be an option, assuming you played the newest games that require 2GB to be played smoothly. You could always opt for a 754 PCI-E board + gfx card, although I doubt you could afford a better card than you have just now, on your budget, after buying the motherboard.

HangTime · 14 Apr 2006 at 13:15

Just get yourself a single 1gig stick as you only have 3 slots. 2gig RAM is enough for now.

m3csl2004 · 14 Apr 2006 at 19:21

i think running 3 sticks of ram may mean you cant run very tight timings, so ive heard anyway

imo dotn splash out on ddr, its old tech and will soon be replaced, intel dont use it, and amd will be following shortly (of course it will still be around for a lot longer)

you could get a 754 pci-e board and a new, faster graphics card, allough tbh the dfi is an excellent board

you could also buy a 754 venice if you fancied a bit more on the cpu