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"Upgrade advice welcome"

Hi, note to those who have been following the 256-512mb graphics thread i started, I did well at my art exhibition and now have £500+ to spend upgrading my PC. Wahoo.

Anyway here are my current specs;

AMD Athlon XP2000+ (1.67ghz) processor

512 ram

nvidia ge force 4mmx 440-se

Dont need any peripherals just a kick ass machine that will do Half life 2 and the rest of the upcoming games justice.

Cheers Dedhed.

Hi, note to those who have been following the 256-512mb graphics thread i started, I did well at my art exhibition and now have £500+ to spend upgrading my PC. Wahoo.

Anyway here are my current specs;

AMD Athlon XP2000+ (1.67ghz) processor

512 ram

nvidia ge force 4mmx 440-se

Dont need any peripherals just a kick ass machine that will do Half life 2 and the rest of the upcoming games justice.

Cheers Dedhed.

In this order:

Upgrade graphics card to the Geforce 6800 FX or Radeon X800
Upgrade RAM to 1Gig RAM

And if you have enough money, upgrade your motherboard to a Athlon64 compliant one, and buy a new Athlon64 processor.

cool, cheers, i'll check these out thanks

Found an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ 1.8GHZ, socket 754, 512 cache, OEM for £109 is this good?

Found the x800 xt for £339 (anyone heard any better offers?)
Anyone know about compliant mother-boards for Athlon 64 processors and RAM upgrades from 512 to 1 gig

Actually I think it's better to wait for the PCI Express boards to come out; they should be due late Summer from what I've heard, well before HL2 comes out. PCI Ex graphic cards should come soon after, and while they won't offer any performance increase, the set will bode well for future upgrades.

Also, wait for the socket 939 Atlon64s and buy a mobo that uses that, I don't know why it's better but i'm sure other forumite will be able to point it out.

My maximum budget is £630 i'd love to have a grand for all the flashiest things but £630 is as far as I can go. If i get the x800 xt pro for £345 that leaves £285 for everything else RAM upgrade, Processor and MoBo.Any other ideas?

Dedhed wrote:
> My maximum budget is £630 i'd love to have a grand for all the
> flashiest things but £630 is as far as I can go. If i get the
> x800 xt pro for £345 that leaves £285 for everything else
> RAM upgrade, Processor and MoBo.Any other ideas?

Get a 9800 Pro - they cost around £140 and outside of the X800's and the new nVidia cards, this is one of the fatestes video cards you can buy.

Yes, the 9800 XT is a bit quicker, but the price difference between the two cards simply doesn't warrant the small-ish performance gap. And anyway, you can easily overclock a 9800 Pro to the speed of a XT, with stock cooling.

How about the X800 Pro for about £300? Yes, I know it's 'only' got 12 pipelines as opposed to the XT's 16, but it'll still be much faster than a 9800 pro.

Saying that, I've got a 9800 pro running at standard clock speeds, and it can handle just about anything I can through at it currently. But that's the key - it's probably only got another 6 months or so left in it, until the software starts to get the better of it.

In your position, as someone else said, I'd wait a few months for the PCI express boards (socket 939 isn't pulling its weight yet, so don't worry too much about that) and go for an Athlon 64 CPU of sorts, 1gb RAM, PCI Express board and PCI Express version of X800 (or possibly X600, although that probably won't offer much gain over a 9800 pro).

All so complicated. :)