Upgrade - worth it?

Hawk Tuah · 30 May 2006 at 15:16

I'm currently running a 2.6 P4, a 6600GT, 1gb ram and 200gb HD in a T2-P Asus Terminator (which fits perfectly. so I'd like to keep with the size).

Although most games and everything runs pretty well, I think games out this year may struggle. BF2 wasn't smooth.

So I've been contemplating this...

ASUS T2-AH1 ATI 200, Black S939 BAREBONE DDR400, PCI-E x16, SATA, 6ch Audio, Gbit lan,7in1 Reader £99.86
AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 3800+ Socket 939 , Manchester Core, 2x 2.0GHz , 1MB Cache, Retail £190.80
256Mb XFX 7600GT Mem Clock 1400 MHz, GPU 560 MHz, 12 Pipes, Dual DVI-I S-Video/TV Out £111.63
Icybox IB-128SK-B Black SATA Removebale HDD Rack with Blue-Eye Lockable Aluminum/Plastic £7.80
320 Gb Western Digital WD3200JD Caviar SE, SATA150, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 8.9 ms £74.38

£496.21

I can use the memory and HD I already have. The icybox will allow me to fit a 2nd hard drive into the spare optical bay giving me 500gb (I could do with a bit more storage.)

The only things I'm not sure about are the graphics card and whether getting a dual core x2 is worth it or not.

semi-pro waster · 30 May 2006 at 17:02

You could leave it until you reach a stage where games won't play as you want and then upgrade at that point? As far as what you have specified goes all the parts are compatible, I'd probably suggest going for a faster graphics card though to get more of a jump, the X1800XT at £170inc Vat is about as good as it gets in the price range.

gr1mey · 30 May 2006 at 17:11

its not a brilliant time to upgrade CPU really.

AM2 isnt much special, and new Intel Core Duo are out end of July.

x1800xt will probably still be a nice card in a months time though

Old Wino · 30 May 2006 at 18:04

semi-pro waster said:
You could leave it until you reach a stage where games won't play as you want and then upgrade at that point? As far as what you have specified goes all the parts are compatible, I'd probably suggest going for a faster graphics card though to get more of a jump, the X1800XT at £170inc Vat is about as good as it gets in the price range.

I agree with above 6600gt to 7600gt =not much of an upgrade. I went from 6600gt to 1800xt and glad I did