Wondering whether it would be worth upgrading.

[Vonsteve]

Right I've only really got a budget of £200 and I think the only worthwile thing to do to my PC would be a CPU upgrade, just wondering if anything else would be a good deal for better performance. My current spec is getting on a bit:

Asus A8N-E 939 board
AMD 3500+ A64 939
2Gb Geil ddr400 ram
ATI 256mb X800 Pro

The problem is all my drives are IDE, all 5 of them 3xHDD and 2xOptical so would have to re buy those too if going for a new board and chip. My graphics is PCI-E however so this could migrate to my new board for the time being. Also my PSU is an Akasa Paxpower 460watt how good is this for futureness? It has the longer power adaptor with it.

I was thinking of saving my money for now and just investing in a Skt939 dual core chip as vista is having a little trouble at the minute on my PC.

Any help or suggestions would be great.

 

[mame]

You could get a 939 3800 x2 and an 8800gt 512mb for about £200. I would probably get all new core2 but either option isn't a bad idea. If you do decide to get a motherboard, choose carefully as a lot of newer boards only have 1 IDE port

 

[Vonsteve]

Yeah, that's what I've noticed, and having only 1 sata out of 5 of my drives is a bit of a pain when I've got 700Gb of space to transfer.

 

[semi-pro waster]

If you did want to move to a Core2Duo system then you could pick up a PCI IDE controller card fairly cheaply which would mean that it didn't matter hugely about the lack of IDE slots for this or any future builds. However it might be simpler to simply pick up a cheap X2.