Upgrades

Hi, was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction on upgrading my pc to 1gb ram and getting a new graphics card? Where should i buy the upgrades etc

Regards and thanks in advance,

matt

 

What do you have currently?

 

256mb ram
Nvidia GeForce MX 440

Quite poor really... i have 80gb hardrive but i think that should do me for now.Im really not too wise on the insides of a pc etc so need help

 

bump :good:

 

If its quite an old system then you may have sd-ram. If its newish/3 years old then its probably DDR. If you want to upgrade to 1gb then you'll probably need to get rid of your current stick/s because your mobo may not have enough slots. Get 2 512mb sticks from Corsair, Geil, OCZ, Crucial or Kingston.
For your GFX card then that depends if your card is the AGP8x one. If it isn't then you'll need to get a new mobo for a powerful card.

 

If your on an extreme budget, I would suggest getting a 9600XT. They're cheap and will play most games. As for ram, sometimes even one stick of 1gig is cheaper than 2 sticks of 512mb. Just depends.

What are you planning on doing with your computer?

 

Download this:
http://swg-planet.com/aida32ee_393.zip

extract the files, and install the program on your computer, then open the program (AidaWare32) and click on "Summary" now take a screenshot and upload it in a new post.

Then i can see what we can do upgrade wise.

The file that i have provided for download is a system information tool (a very good one) it will tell us everything we need to know.

 

I'll probably have about 200 to spend, maybe slightly more or less. I use my pc mostly for downloading and playing games, bit of office work in there too

 

I only built the pc last christmas so i assume its DDR. I thought it was ok but I borrowed splinter cell two from someone the other day and it wouldn't play so im just going to upgrade it anyway. With the new arrival of broadband on my pc i may need to consider an external 80gb hardrive to pair up with my current one if possible as my current hardrive is quickly becoming full!

 

Right now im at college with all these sh*tty filters etc so I can't download it now but i will when i get home at lunchtime and i'll post the results Thanks!

 

um....how do u take a screenshot? :swt:

 

Press the Prt Scr (Print Screen) key on ur keyboard. The open up paint or something and go to edit paste then save and voila

 

Press the print screen key next to scroll lock then paste the picture into MSpaint and save as a jpeg file.

 

Here

 

For around $200USD, what you want to do is go up to 512MB of RAM, so grabbing another 256MB stick should help. As far as gaming is concerned, look at a Radeon 9600Pro or XT or a GeForce FX 5700 or 5700 Ultra. Don't get the Radeon 9600SE or FX5700LE.

I use some of this Kingston PC3200 myself. Having faster RAM is fine, as the rating is the speed it's guaranteed to work up to, so it will work fine.

This is the only non LE 5700 Newegg has in stock right now. I use this Radeon 9600XT. You can buy the retail version of it (that has a few more extras), but you'll pay about $20 extra for it. I linked the Lite Box version, so you basically get the card, driver CD and S-Video cable.

If you do end up being able to swing some extra cash, look at a Radeon 9800Pro. Those run around $200-ish, and are probably the best value for the AGP format right now, mainly due to the wide availability.

 

Thought I'd try it and take the benchmarks. This might answer your question Procal X, as to why my prescott is beating your 3400+.

My PC, in the benchmark is directly below an FX-51 in the Memory read test, and tops em all in the write benchmark.

If some one would mind interpretting these big words, I'd be grateful

 

Im English so its about £200 Bit more, sorry, made it unclear!

 

Thanks for all the replies by the way, very helpful :good:

 

I'd try and get a 9700Pro you can get it from www.overclockers.co.uk under ATI > AGP > 9700/9800 Range for £105 including delivery and vat

 

All i can say is you've got a really nice pc :good: I don't have a 3400+ (754Pin 64Bit) I have a 3200+ (939Pin 64Bit) (2.0Ghz Stock).

I presume those screenies you took were of how much data your cpu can transfer per second..? (read and write)

Out of curiosity it would be nice to know whether it's your memory.. or the amount of the FSB your running at.. or because im not running dual channel, or what is different from your pc to mine technology wise that is giving you this incredible increase in performance compared to my AMD64..

I'll look into it, rather interesting really :good:

And i just noticed OMG you have 2GB of memory :O LOL thats alot