Old PC new life?

[fimbles]

I recently upgraded my old pc.

Ill be passing it down to my younger brother to replace his overheating xbox 360.
It will run the newer games at low quality settings. (eg grid, fear 2), My question is is there anything i can replace in this old dog to get a bit more of a kick out of her? I think the gpu is bottlenecked by the cpu after a hefty overclock with only1 fps increase.

I would prefer to replace as little as possible, but will spend a little more if the results would be worth it.

Any help or advice would be great !

Rough specs.

Intel Pentium 4 northwood. 2.66 ghz socket 478
1 gb of ram
Nvidia 512 mb 7600 gs AGP
Mainboard Model 0804h (0x134 - 0x22080)
80 gig hd
Dvd rw

Ive also included a cpuid file. For those more technicaly minded than myself

Thanks in advance.

 

[kimsland]

AGP Transfer Rate 4x

No nothing to update
Possibly the Harddrive if it seems sluggish, ie big games on small harddrive don't mix real well

Still a good basic computer for a younger brother

 

[fimbles]

Ty kimsland.

I noticed you quoted AGP x4.

Does this really make much of a diffrence than x8? Also i will be giving my brother a 160gb usb external drive, its sata on a an ide bridge. Would it be better to install the games on this? or were you refering to drive speed?

Is it worth getting a cheap motherboard cpu bundle and switching parts? Or am i gonna be limited by the age of my remaining components?

Thanks again all.

 

[redk]

You could always OC the processor some, possibly with the help of a new heatsink/fan. Also, another GB of RAM could help performance. Other than that, you can't really do much. If you upgraded processor and mobo, you'd need a new video card, and RAM as well. So...

 

[kimsland]

Both the Motherboard and Video card are rated at a slow 4X
I wouldn't be upgrading anything

The external on hand is a good idea as well

1 gb of ram on XP is ok

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

You can spend $300-400 and get a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card that are much, much faster than your current one. You can also probably do it with less than $300 too, depending on what resolution your brother will be gaming at.

 

[fimbles]

Thanks for the replies.

Ill leave it be and tell him to pester for a new one at xmas