Little bit of help on an upgrade?

Leicester

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I'm new here, and I can already tell from previous forum experiences that this is going to sound SO nooby, but I need a little bit of tech help as I'm fairly novicey when it comes to hardware related matters.

Basically I felt the need to give mah pc a little boost as its getting quite old now. My current specs are:
2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
1GB RAM
RADEON X700 SE, which I'm pretty sure is 256mb
Anything else more specific just ask


I use it for various multimedia purposes (photoshop, Adobe Flash etc.) and for casual/medium gaming. I'd ideally like to move up to 4gb RAM and a fairly decent 1gb GPU, but having very little knowledge I didn't know whether this would require a new motherboard/processor?

Also, any recommendations on the sort of GPU I might need?

Cheers guys, sorry if this sounds like a long demanding list of questions :confused:
 
More RAM will definitely help, and a different graphics card wouldn't hurt either.

It looks like that is an MSI K8N motherboard, which runs DDR memory up to 4GB @ DDR-400. if so, then you can get more memory here. I do suggest you shop around.

That's also got a PCIe x16 slot for the video card.
 
That's a great board for the age of the system. As Dngrsone says, pumping the RAM up to 4GB of DDR400 should be easy (if not expensive now that they're not made anymore) but you can get lucky on EBay in some cases.

The PCIe x16 slot will accept just about every video card out there now, so just find one that fits your budget (and your power supply) and you should be set.
 
What OS are you running?
And what performance are you expecting?

you have a number of upgrade options, but where is the current setup letting you down?

is it really slow to boot? do you frequently find that your machine is more chugging than flying through the internet (taking log times to open pages stalling, etc.)

if you open your task manager and look at the performance tab what is looking busy when your computer isn't going as well as you'd like? is the CPU being thrashed, is the RAM all used up?

just going on what you've said so far...
For general use the first thing that you're really going to want to do is upgrade the RAM. that's going to give you the most bang for your buck, you'll notice the most difference.

after that, you say light gaming, but what sort of games, are you talking latest greatest, or just a few that you might pick out of a local supermarket, or the cheaper "last seasons" titles from the reduced bins in game shops?

Depending on the game you might want to consider a new video card, but this wouldn't be a priority for me (as I'm much more into buying the cheaper titles and just having some fun, rather than buying latest greatest being first to complete etc.)

After that perhaps an SSD (though you don't specify the type/speed of the HDD that you have, much I'm guessing it's mechanical). But with a faster HDD you're going to see faster boot times, less time to open documents load games etc, in fact anything that previously used your disk will now be faster.

after those upgrades, then you're really getting into the realms of processor upgrade which may or may not need a main board replacement...

Which is why I say look at your task manager and see where your weak point is.
if your processor is the weak point you may want to look at upgrading this first. and if this were to make a main board change it might open up different avenues for upgrades, (like faster SATA speeds, different buses/slots/speeds available etc) and then you'd want to do that first as this might make you take a different choice on other upgrades.


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because the performance of graphically intensive games can depend on this item.
-that's why I asked what sort of calibre of games the OP was interested in playing.
 
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