Computer Upgrade - calling all tech-heads!

[grave_digga]

I get all my parts used of eBay. My whole system was for about 250$ and i use it for almost two years now. Athlon X2 6400+, 4GB DDR800, MSI Mobo, Arctic Cooling Heatsink, Geforce 8800GTS 512MB, LG DVD Burner, 2 x 500GB SATA2 (Raid 1), Coolermaster Case, good Power source. Runs good enough for me and the price for the used components was 250$ nearly two years ago, now it would be maybe about 150$. So get some used stuff, for 200 you could get a decent machine filling your needs. I would go for an Athlon X2 250/255/260/270... they have enough power for your needs. All dual core and could get used for about 40$ up. Or get a phenom x3 or x4 for the double price. 4GB Ram are just fine for Windows 7. I prefer Arctic Cooling heatsinks, for this processors a Freezer 7 is just fine.

Lets make a list:

- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 AMD ~20$
- 4GB DDR2 800 Ram ~45$
- Athlon X2 250 (2 x 3GHz) ~50$
- Geforce 8800GT 512MB ~45$
- MSI Motherboard ~35$ (used)
------------------------------------------------------
~195$

That's only a few searches by ebay and this are all buy now items. If you bet on the items you could even get better items for the price i mentioned above or get it cheaper and get for the "saved" money a 200GB SATA HDD (Samsung). Then the 200GB drive for OS&programs and the 500GB as storage. Well depends also on your power supply, maybe it's good enough to power these components if not you'll have to get a better one.

That's just a little opinion from my side, i never buy new computer stuff if possible. You could save so much money when you get used stuff. I always look for bargains (i hope this is the right word, in german it's Schn�ppchen). Also it looks like the computer stuff here in germany is a little bit cheaper then in the states. Plus you could sell your old components also which gives you back also some money, like 60-70 bucks or something.

[Phenom]

I get all my parts used of eBay. My whole system was for about 250$ and i use it for almost two years now. Athlon X2 6400+, 4GB DDR800, MSI Mobo, Arctic Cooling Heatsink, Geforce 8800GTS 512MB, LG DVD Burner, 2 x 500GB SATA2 (Raid 1), Coolermaster Case, good Power source. Runs good enough for me and the price for the used components was 250$ nearly two years ago, now it would be maybe about 150$. So get some used stuff, for 200 you could get a decent machine filling your needs. I would go for an Athlon X2 250/255/260/270... they have enough power for your needs. All dual core and could get used for about 40$ up. Or get a phenom x3 or x4 for the double price. 4GB Ram are just fine for Windows 7. I prefer Arctic Cooling heatsinks, for this processors a Freezer 7 is just fine.

Lets make a list:

- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 AMD ~20$
- 4GB DDR2 800 Ram ~45$
- Athlon X2 250 (2 x 3GHz) ~50$
- Geforce 8800GT 512MB ~45$
- MSI Motherboard ~35$ (used)
------------------------------------------------------
~195$

That's only a few searches by ebay and this are all buy now items. If you bet on the items you could even get better items for the price i mentioned above or get it cheaper and get for the "saved" money a 200GB SATA HDD (Samsung). Then the 200GB drive for OS&programs and the 500GB as storage. Well depends also on your power supply, maybe it's good enough to power these components if not you'll have to get a better one.

That's just a little opinion from my side, i never buy new computer stuff if possible. You could save so much money when you get used stuff. I always look for bargains (i hope this is the right word, in german it's Schn�ppchen). Also it looks like the computer stuff here in germany is a little bit cheaper then in the states. Plus you could sell your old components also which gives you back also some money, like 60-70 bucks or something.

Thank you very much this is the type of response I was looking for

I won't have a need to "play Crysis 2 on Ultra" I just want to be able to rock Doom 3 & Quake 4's world in ultra settings with smooth 60FPS if possible.


I play one game on my PC and that's Quake 1. Other then that my PC is a working machine that does Photoshop to the near extreme (1920x720 images and higher = 5MB+), SOME video editing, music and the occasional moments when i want something other then Quake and I venture onto Q4, Doom3, QW:ET, FarCry, UDK (Unreal SDK) and my own 3D programs with are geared towards lower ended PC anyway.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

looking for a $200 upgrade...

And so far,im the only one who's offered a suggestion thats what you're looking for.

r00k says get more moneys, MH says build onto what you've got , I say Press Forward!


1) under your price point,allowing for the memory purchase required. $150Mobo/CPU combo +$40-50 for memory and/or HSF solution.
2)the suggested motherboard supports socket AM3 Phenom II's , which enables a later upgrade for a 4core or 6core. My Phenom II x4 BE (955) is bad ass,and I bet the 555BE Phenom II dual core (That can possibly unleash into 4core's,if mobo supports it!I haven't done the homework whether your memory modules would be compatible with suggested mobo)



Saying AMD isn't a contender against Intel is just pure fanboyism.

Jeremy, going with the suggestion I made, you'd be poising yourself to join that chart at any Phenom II level, on the AM3 architecture. It's whats happening on the "Poormans Gaming Machine"..... If you go Intel, you might as well get a 2nd job

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I get all my parts used of eBay. My whole system was for about 250$ and i use it for almost two years now. Athlon X2 6400+, 4GB DDR800, MSI Mobo, Arctic Cooling Heatsink, Geforce 8800GTS 512MB, LG DVD Burner, 2 x 500GB SATA2 (Raid 1), Coolermaster Case, good Power source. Runs good enough for me and the price for the used components was 250$ nearly two years ago, now it would be maybe about 150$. So get some used stuff, for 200 you could get a decent machine filling your needs. I would go for an Athlon X2 250/255/260/270... they have enough power for your needs. All dual core and could get used for about 40$ up. Or get a phenom x3 or x4 for the double price. 4GB Ram are just fine for Windows 7. I prefer Arctic Cooling heatsinks, for this processors a Freezer 7 is just fine.

Lets make a list:

- Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 AMD ~20$
- 4GB DDR2 800 Ram ~45$
- Athlon X2 250 (2 x 3GHz) ~50$
- Geforce 8800GT 512MB ~45$
- MSI Motherboard ~35$ (used)
------------------------------------------------------
~195$

That's only a few searches by ebay and this are all buy now items. If you bet on the items you could even get better items for the price i mentioned above or get it cheaper and get for the "saved" money a 200GB SATA HDD (Samsung). Then the 200GB drive for OS&programs and the 500GB as storage. Well depends also on your power supply, maybe it's good enough to power these components if not you'll have to get a better one.

That's just a little opinion from my side, i never buy new computer stuff if possible. You could save so much money when you get used stuff. I always look for bargains (i hope this is the right word, in german it's Schn�ppchen). Also it looks like the computer stuff here in germany is a little bit cheaper then in the states. Plus you could sell your old components also which gives you back also some money, like 60-70 bucks or something.

Warranties

I have ASUS warranty's and other's, the benifit of brand new parts. If it shows up DOA, just RMA that bitch and wait for another. If you bitch, you can also get free shit too. Just have to work the operator...

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Games like Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 2, Metro 2033, Grand Theft Auto 4, and games which are basically console ports make better use of a quad or hex core than other games. It all depends on what you want to play. Crysis is still the most heavy game on any system, much more so than Crysis 2. I wouldn't bother with AMD myself, the times when AMD ruled are over. You can get an i2500/mb/6gb ram/650 watt power supply for under $800 and be able to overclock it quite well with just a decent aftermarket air cooler and run rings around any AMD platform. NVidia and ATI both have good cards in the 250-300 range that really run most stuff very well. I agree with r00k that you should probably upgrade your OS if you decide to move to a more modern platform, XP just isn't capable of using the hardware to it's full potential, and Vista isn't either. Windows 7 is the way to go there, Professional is the one I would go with. However don't expect a modern platform to work very well with older IDE hard drives either, it's gonna be a trade off I think depending on how much you want to spend, and how you want to space out any upgrades you would want to do.

IDE drives do just fine on Windows 7, there isn't much noticable difference between a SATA and IDE drive, unless you just moving around tons of data,thats where its noticable. I can move 50gb/s to my external 350gb HP SimpleSave drive, and that's pretty beefy. It's faster if it isn't 700mb+ movie files.....

PATA vs. SATA 1.5 Gb/s vs. SATA 3.0 Gb/s from a performance standpoint is largely about drive interface speed. The drives themselves generally make more of a difference than the interface speed, because there is no drive at present that is capable of sustaining PATA 133 MB/s let alone SATA 1.5 Gb/s, nevermind 3.0 Gb/s.

As a general rule, newer drives tend to perform better than older drives, so sometimes you'll see very similar drive models in PATA and SATA 1.5 and SATA 3.0, and lo and behold, the SATA 3.0 drive performs a bit better than the older SATA 1.5 or PATA. This can be seen for example in the Maxtor line where the DM 10 300 GB PATA / SATA 1.5 was superseded by the DM 10 SATA 3.0, and you got (a) a somewhat better sustained transfer rate (around 5-10 MB/s), and (b) compatibility problems with some SATA chipsets (e.g. nVIDIA nForce 3 -- been there, done that, got the jumper, got the firmware, never resolved).

Conversely, when you don't stick to the same family of drives and compare different model drives, the bets are off. For example, you can see below a PATA drive compared to a SATA drive, and the PATA drive is faster.

The burst speeds show the difference in the interface. This makes no difference here to the sequential read speed, which is the more important factor. And there's much more to drive performance than just these figures -- you need to look at more sophisticated tests such as StorageReview's to see that.

Every PC ultimately ends up with a bottleneck, not everyone has that massive piggy bank that can afford a good reaming, so... Definately AMD ftw, Intel is just plain too expensive. I chose AMD platform for todays gaming,and have zero complaints.



Here is the CPU+onboardGPU solution I suggested in action
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXFADGoFo9I]WOW on a ATI HD 4250 - YouTube[/ame]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKxYob7Y6Go]Street Fighter IV PC HD4250[/ame]
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqJcn5yZUbw[/ame]

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I'd suggest just saving your cash. If you get around $600 saved up then you can at least replace the mobo+mem+cpu with something in the current mid-range specs. Then if you want you can either use your current system as a second rig for multi-computer multi-tasking. This is what I have done in the last 8 years. I went from a
1.5gib DDR 184pin Ram
Asus A7N8X-e Socket 462 (circa 2003)
AMD Sempron 1.8ghz
40gb hd WD SATA
160gb HD WesterDigital SATA
eVGA GeForce 6600gt AGP 256Mb
Antec case (white) with 300w ps
Sony DVD

ViewSonic flatpanel(1440x900) monitor

to a (now 3 years old)

Asus P5N-D
Intel Core2 Duo 3.2ghz
4GiB DDR2 Ram
320Gib Western Digital SATA
eVGA Geforce 8800GT PCIe 512MB
Pioneer DVD
Antec case (black) with 600w Ps

ViewSonic 1920x1080

It's always more fun to build a whole new system. Otherwise, you will just keep doing small half ass upgrades and end up buying pieces of hardware that will become non standard in the next 3-5 years like AGP or memory with odd pin configurations. Basically all the stuff that goes on that motherboard will be outdated in that time, so its best to build an entire machine around your mobo/cpu choice.

Oh and my computers are name BLACKNIGHT and WHITEWIZARD just for fun.

Agree'd,upgrading a current rig is just ensuring another foot goes in the ground tech wise, thats why we always buy new and I have a abundance of old towers laying around.
Last three PC's was called "ASUS" , "Work" ,and "Kids". hehe
I also like to name PC's, but haven't done so in awhile When I buy hardware I also like to read real-owner reviews of the stuff im interested in,and compare them price to performance vs the competition.

AMD phenom II 555 BE vs Phenom x4 9950 BE - CPUs - CPU-Components
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/29...nom-phenom-555

[bluntz]

Phen You are like 3 generations back and those caps are bound to go soon my friend.
I would be hounding ebay for a current rig if I were you.
At least a core 2 duo,A quad core maybe and something better for a video card.
Should be able to do it for under 2 bills.
P.S HP supports linux more than most.
DDR3 is cheap and you can reuse your drives.

[AAA]

Minds first combo is ok but I'd go with an Asus, Gigabite or MSI motherboard.
get a motherboard with core unlocker $60 for a low end one, then a Phenom II 555 which if your lucky you can unlock to a quad core $89.
And you will still have money left for 8gb 4x2 DDR3 1333 NCIXUS.com - Buy Kingston ValueRAM 8GB (2X4GB) DDR3 1333 CL9 240-PIN SDRAM - KVR1333D3N9K2/8G. or 8gb 2x4 1600 NCIXUS.com - Buy Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 Vengeance 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600 CL9-9-9-24 Dual Channel Memory Kit - CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

8gb is explosively over doing it :F Mindz does it with 2.

And yes, thumbs up on ASUS hardware.

[Roy Batty]

Everything is personal taste and experience, just putting up options and not looking to start a war about what's better than each other.

+1 to ASUS motherboard, whichever you decide to do.

If your in the US, check newegg a lot, you can get some really great combo deals at times, and maybe get something really great for a great price.

[Phenom]

Whoa mindz you took it to level 2 brah! You Gelln' man?

I relay don't like the integrated graphics videos though Black Ops looked like i was watching it through a dog's butthole! EW!

My PCI-E x16 7800 GT is still kickn in the Quake 4 category!

Good stuff! I like the idea of an Athlon64 x2 6400+ Windsor

Motherboard time! Wh00p!


You guys said...?

[foq]

Phen, take a look at your power supply make/model and report back. The PSU is the cornerstone of any rig, and out of all it is the one part at absolutely ought not to be skimped on.

[Phenom]

I have a 400watt PSU not a 450watt like I boasted about earlier!

Please don't tell me I need a new PSU cuz I don't want to hear it.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Whoa mindz you took it to level 2 brah! You Gelln' man?

I relay don't like the integrated graphics videos though Black Ops looked like i was watching it through a dog's butthole! EW!

My PCI-E x16 7800 GT is still kickn in the Quake 4 category!

Good stuff! I like the idea of an Athlon64 x2 6400+ Windsor

Motherboard time! Wh00p!


You guys said...?

Windsor is hella dated now. MrsMindz is running a Windsor 4600+, with a 8500GT and can run Q4/Crysis 1 with ease. For what you want to do, Athlon64 x2 6400+ will do it.

It's just whether or not you are ready to prepare for the NEXT upgrade,during this upgrade.

*DINGDING*
Round - 1 AMD Athlon X2 6400+ - 3.2GHz - 2MB L2 [VERSUS] AMD Phenom II X2 555 BE - 3.2GHz - 1MB L2 - 6MB L3

[grave_digga]

Well i'm here on 6400+ and i really like it. For motherboards i often use MSI boards because they're affordable and stable in almost all cases. If you take a AM2 CPU maybe you'll get an AM2/AM3 board which supports both CPUs. Then you could take DDR3 Ram which is cheaper then DDR2 and you'll get the AM3/DDR3 combo nearly for the same price as the AM2/DDR2 combo and you have the opportunity to upgrade to an AM3 CPU in the future.

@Mindz: I don't care about warranty. If you use the hardware within it's specs (no overclocking) it will last for 4 or 5 years. Harddrives normaly come with a 3 year warranty and the only thing here ever died are HDDs or power supply's. Ram/Mobo/CPU always worked. The case should have an good air flow. Idle my 6400+ runs at about 25-30� and the HDDs are directly in the air flow so they get not hot.