chaos945
OSNN Senior Addict
- Joined
- 10 Feb 2003
- Messages
- 934
Well it’s become that time of the year again, that’s right time to upgrade some components of my main PC. Now I’m sitting here with a pile of money to spend but many things in need of an upgrade. The main things I’m doing on this bad boy is graphics and games, so I’d have to say that in any case more RAM and a better video card would probably be the best bet for me. I wanted to hear it from someone else first before I go out and spend, spend, spend, so give me any thoughts you may have.
Current Specs:
- Motherboard - Asus A7N8X Deluxe
Things I support but don’t have: SATA RAID, a better processor, more RAM, a better video card.
Now with the RAID I don’t think I’d get much of a performance increase rather than with file transfer rate on my hard disk and possibly loading times of games, but when it comes to graphics I really don’t expect a whole lot so that’s probably not a good one to go for (for me anyways). Currently I’m running 2 hard drives that can’t support RAID 0 together a Maxtor 30gb ATA133 and a Western Digital 40gb ATA 100.
- Processor - AMD 2100+ (thoroughbred B core) 1711MHtz
Obviously a new processor would be great for lots of things, but for the things I use my PC for it really isn’t that much of a gain. It would only benefit me in rendering times with my graphics apps, games would do better with a new video card rather than a better processor; and even the rendering time would do better with more RAM than the processor. I’ve been taking a serious look at the Barton core with 333FSB but I think I’ll wait for something with a 400FSB to come out (hopefully its still on Socket A(462)).
- Video Card - Asus 8200 Deluxe, w/ Geforce 3 + 64mb DDR SD VRAM
This would probably yield the best performance increase on games, maybe a nice new Radeon chip like the 9700 Pro or something like that? I don’t think I’ll go with Geforce again just because their new chips seem a bit “edgy”. I’ve not used a Radeon chip since my old IBM PC in 1995. A new video card would increase the performance of my graphics apps too, not rendering but while in the GUI. (3DSMAX, XSI, Maya)
- RAM – Micron 1024mb PC2100 CAS 2.5 non-ECC
I really, really should have gone with a nice PC2700 or PC3200 when I built this PC but I know better now don’t I? Ah well, next PC. But for now I think quantity will be key and my board supports 3gb so maybe another 512gb or 1gb chip will do, I got 2 256 and a 512 in there right now (the 256 is on my Dual Channel DDR) This will be a VERY good performance increase too since most apps I use are RAM dependant. (rendering, loading times, etc)