milespower
Posts: 32 +2
Greetings TechSpot guys and gals!
I am looking forward to a Summer upgrade and, since I'm quite poor (and have saved a lot of money since January till now) I cannot buy a new computer or have great amounts of money spent on stuff like this. My computer as of now is this one (and yes I know it's quite old...I had a 2 yr old laptop but it broke down):
these are the core components that I want to upgrade for now: CPU, RAM and VGA. The thing is, and giving that I have a small monitor (compaq crt 17") I wanted some advice on what should I upgrade first:
Cheers!
I am looking forward to a Summer upgrade and, since I'm quite poor (and have saved a lot of money since January till now) I cannot buy a new computer or have great amounts of money spent on stuff like this. My computer as of now is this one (and yes I know it's quite old...I had a 2 yr old laptop but it broke down):
- CPU: Intel Celeron D @ 3.06 Ghz (oc 3.33)
- RAM: 1GB DDR400 (2x512MB)
- HDD: 120GB Seagate IDE + 80GB Hitachi SATA
- VGA: nVidia Geforce FX5500 256MB
- MB : Asrock 775VM800 (775 1.1*)
- SND: Creative SBLive! Gamer w/ kX drivers
these are the core components that I want to upgrade for now: CPU, RAM and VGA. The thing is, and giving that I have a small monitor (compaq crt 17") I wanted some advice on what should I upgrade first:
- CPU: Options are a Prescott P4, a Cedar Mill P4, or a Pentium D (9xx series, the 8xx series doesn't offer much performance compared to cedar mill P4's). Each one obviously cheaper than the next, I'm tempted at the Pentium D since it's a dual core and thanks to it's 4MB of cache and in this case 3.46 Ghz, almost 1.000 marks on Passmark CPU test. That's quite close to many C2D's out there...
- RAM: The cheapest of all upgrades, I should probably get 2GB (which is the board's limit anyway) at the same DDR400.
- VGA: I'm looking at AMD's offer since they supported AGP 'till mid-2008 which gives me DX10.1 AGP cards, in this case the 4650 1GB which has an impressive performance (comparable to a nVidia GF 9600GSO) or the 512MB "HD3650" and "HD2600XT/Pro". These latter ones are somewhat more powerful than the 3650.
Cheers!