Upgrade for Vista

Muncher · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:10

I'm considering upgrading my PC as it's getting on a bit now and even after a reneinstall, the first cold boot of the day just freezes up windows.

It's a P4 2.26B, 1GB Ram etc, 2x 120GB WD 8Mb Cache drives

It won't be used for games or any heavy image manipulation, it's currently watercooled but I'd prefer to ditch that and go for something aircooled and silent(as possible) instead.

It will be running Vista Home Premium, so I guess my requirements are:

Intel Dual Core type chip? Which one offers best value at the moment?
New motherboard, no idea which one, decent 5 channel sound support
2Gb? RAM, no idea which sort to get
New graphics card? I need DVI output, dual DVI may be handy in future. I am guessing none of the onboard graphics chips will be sufficient?
New hard disks? The capacity of mine are ok at the moment but they are IDE. Is there much performance gain from a newer SATA drive?

I was clued up when I built this PC 4.5 years ago but have lost track of what is best now!

Cheers

Fr0dders · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:18

my advice

get a Core 2 Duo 6300 (its only £10 more than the 4300, cant see the point given the small saving)

and get yourself an X1650 XT for about £90. It will attempt to play games (will be fine at lower res) and do a very good job of Aero in Windows

as for motherboard, id possibly go for the Asus Pb5 for about £100.

and for memory, just got 2gb of value stuff. something like the following :

Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB 5000AAKS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM
(£93.99)
Intel Core 2 DUO E6300 "LGA775 Allendale" 1.86GHz (1066FSB) - Retail
(£119.84)
Asus P5B (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £69.99
(£82.24)
OcUK 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel Kit £89.99
(£105.74)
Sapphire X1650 XT 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail
(£93.99)

Total : £506.31 inc £8 delivery

masslac · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:23

Fr0dders · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:27

or the 7600 GT

the 7600 is a bit cheaper, and seems to perform roughly the same as the X1650 XT.

Some tests one is faster, other tests the other is.

masslac · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:29

Yeah, the 7600GT is definitely the way to go in that price range. Good card. The only ATI card currently worth buying is the 1950PRO imo.

Muncher · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:45

I don't need the case/PSU/AS/DVD but would like a second hard drive.

I know Vista uses RAM differently, is 2GB "enough"?

masslac · 6 Mar 2007 at 12:48

2GB is fine unless you're doing any major encoding work etc.

As for the drive, my suggestion would be one 500GB Seagate. If you have any spare cash, maybe think about an external drive for backing up your data etc..?

Edit - Might as well upgrade to an E6600 seeing as you don't have to buy a case/psu. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-128-IN

Fr0dders · 6 Mar 2007 at 13:44

tbh 1gb is "enough"

in the same way 512 was enough for XP. So 2gb is more than enough

as for the second drive. Definitely go for 1 of the newer SATA II drives. Either the Western Digital SE16 or the Seagate 7200.10

the former 500gb is about £90

bargain !

Muncher · 7 Mar 2007 at 17:36

Today I upgraded a new Dell laptop and PC both running Vista Home Premium from 1GB to 2GB each, hasn't made a huge difference. Is Vista more sensitive to disk access speeds and CPU speed? Both PCs were running AMD Turion chips.

Stabhappy · 7 Mar 2007 at 17:44

64bit vista tends to stress on ram a fair bit more, however yeah 1gb of ram is enough.

Muncher · 7 Mar 2007 at 19:23

Just upgrading our Media Centre PC to it, with 1GB of RAM it's hitting it quite hard, showing 0 free physical memory quite often.

Stabhappy · 7 Mar 2007 at 21:49

Please, understand that vista loads lots of stuff into memory before you use it. There is ALWAYS enough ram free, ready to be released to any applications that you launch. It's just Vista's way of handling ram, and it's much more efficient than XP.