upgrade suggestions

ecclesk · 3 May 2006 at 15:27

I currently have a 3Ghz P4 478 socket in my system, and i recently installed 1gb of crucial DDR400 PC3200 (x2 512 dualed). The problem i have is that i want a PCI-Express mobo but there are very few available for the 478 socket, should i be thinking about a mobo + cpu upgrade? if so can anyone suggest a mobo + cpu, would spend around £200, also is the ram i have likely to be usable on a new mobo as i dont fancy splashing out on new ram as well
when i only bought the crucial ram 2 months ago.

any thoughts or ideas would be appriciated

Thanks

semi-pro waster · 3 May 2006 at 16:10

The Ram would be fine on an A64 as they still use ordinary DDR Ram, what graphics card do you currently have or even what graphics card do you want to change to? It is certainly possible to get a single cored A64 and motherboard for ~£200 but dual core is out of the budget unless second-hand.

Dual core Intel and PCI-E probably isn't much of an option either due to the fact that most of the motherboards only seem to support DDR2.

robertgilbert86 · 4 May 2006 at 12:10

I reccommend an AMD64 3700+ (with 1MB cahce) as that will clock to over 2.6Ghz stably with stock fan (ie make a FX-57!)
So that would be about £130/140
Try get a mobo for £50.

And get a 7900GT if you can (its the best value at the moment), otherwise a 7800GT (£170-180) or 7800GTX 256MB (£190/200).

I know it's over your budget but the performance increase will be amazing. And it would be a waste to do anything less.

Don't worry about socket AM2 as the CPU performance is only like 5% more and DDR2 isn't as great as it should be (crap CAS latencys so far...).

You current RAM will work fine with that set up, if you play BF2, sell your 2x512mb and buy 2x1gb value ram.

ecclesk · 4 May 2006 at 13:03

Thanks for the advice guys,

I currently have an 6600 agp, but a friend has given me his 6600 GT PCI-E, so the plan is after a cpu + mobo upgrade use the 6600 GT for 3/4 months untill i can afford another £200 - £250 for an new PCI-E card.

ecclesk · 4 May 2006 at 13:16

another thought, would it be worth me buying one of the few 478 socket PCI-E boards that are available and keeping my 3Ghz P4 as it does seem to perform quite well, would there be a big difference in performance if i did decide to uprade the cpu + mobo to what you have suggested?

Thanks again for your help on this

robertgilbert86 · 4 May 2006 at 17:24

Maybe get the pci-e mobo if its dead cheap (£40ish). But there is a big leap in cpus comparing intel to amd

The biggest difference you'll see in games will be as the result of a graphics upgrade. Maybe even go: new 478 mobo with pci-e and get a 7900GT