hey is the sempron ok for gaming or should i go with athlon. also what are the better brands of boards to use for gaming. are intel boards ok and what about asus.please help. and should i go with a new nvidia card or could i stick with my ati radeon 9200se and is there a good quality but fairly inexpensive nvidia card,kind of on a tight budget.
What’s your budget? That’ll give us an idea as to what system specs would would fit.
Athlon beats Sempron, you’ll want to go for an AMD Athlon 64 based system, there’s lots of good motherboard manufacturers out there, ASUS, MSI, DFI, Gigabyte to name a few. It depends on your budget and features you want as to what you go for.
There’s lots of theras on here about the AMD vs Intel thing, AMD’s better for gaming.
You’ll want a half decent PCI-Express Video card as well if you want to game with a nice frame rate.
it really depends how ‘serious’ you are, if you like silky smooth frame rates with all the eye candys turned on, you’re gonna have to break that tight budget. but here are my recommendations for entry-level, midrange and hardcore. when i say hardcore, i mean as hard as rock. my computer specs cost me less than $1000.
entry-level (should cost below $1000) this is what i recommend to you.
Athlon 64 3000
Asus A8N SLI
nvidia 6600GT
512mb RAM
120 gig hd
Windows XP
DVD-RW/CD-RW
onboard audio
17" CRT
midrange (should cost around $2000 or less)
Athlon 64 3500
Gigabyte K8N Ultra SLI
nvidia 7600GT
1gig RAM
250 gig hd
Windows XP Pro
DVD-RW/CD-RW
CREATIVE AUDIGY ZS
19" LCD monitor
Hardcore (around $4000 or higher)
Athlon 64 FX 60
ASUS A8N32 SLI
2x nvidia 7900GTX
2gig RAM
500 gig hd
Windows XP Pro
DVD-RW/CD-RW
23" LCD Monitor
and to answer your question, get an Athlon 64 - sempron is just like the amd version of intel’s celeron. Look for a board with an Nforce chipset, don’t get intel, if you’re gonna game. The best combo for gaming is an AMD chip with an Nforce chipset. The best card you’re gonna get for under $200 is the Nvidia 6600GT so chuck your 9200 and upgrade to this, also, beware of the different gfx card sockets, there is the PCI-E and the AGP, as you know, AGP is beginning to see the sunset, so it’s time to upgrade and you won’t find that much cards being made for AGP too. Asus is a good board all round other brands are gigabyte, DFI, ABIT, If you see a brand named ECS, dont get it, i suggested an SLI mobo in all categories because they’re so cheap and you won’t lose anything, but gain! I could rave on and on but it would take to much time! All in all, upgrade your mobo, your CPU and your gfx card. Of course, people will have different opinions, this is just a rough guideline in what you should look for.
PS sorry for the so long reply!
Assuming you’ve got a decent video card and a fair amount of RAM, a Sempron can pull it off. The CPU is important, but not the final deciding factor in the entire relm of a PC’s performance.
Exactly what is you’re budget and what parts are you looking to upgrade?
usually, the bottleneck of lower resolutions is the CPU. The higher the resolution you go the bottleneck shifts to the GPU, so in that high a resolution (1600x1200) the CPU won’t really matter, provided you have sufficient ram. plz correct me if im wrong
CPU does matter for modern games, as it takes care of all the physics and stuff like that.
PhysX discussion has been moved to it’s own thread.
thnx b