Worth upgrading or just keep it as it is?

[~Darkseeker~]

Well, I got a free PC a little time ago, it's really better than what I expect from a free PC, I believe they were priced at £1200 in 2007 lol.

Anyway, through the installation of various spare parts, I've got it to this stage:

AMD Athlon 64 x2 4600+ @ 2.4GHz
2GB DDR333 SDRAM (4 x 512MB)
1TB Samsung Spinpoint
2 x Gigabyte 7600 GT cards (256MB each) in SLI (so, 512MB in total...)

I'm not a huge knower when it comes to older AMD stuff, If I bought say, a GT 430/40 and stuck it in there, what kind of WoW settings could I expect? I know on 'Fair' settings it gets about 55-60 in enclosed spaces, and about 30fps when the viewing distance is greater. Trilinear filtering and 1xMSAA and so on. It's a Socket 939 chip, and the 4600+ is about as high as it goes really, and no other 939 chips really exist greater than the athlon. It's also DDR memory which limits it's expandability somewhat. So, do you think with a bill or so I could turn this alright-ish PC into a good one?

Not looking to make it a behemoth, Going to get me a SCAN 3XS GTK SLI for that...

 

[Indigo]

You've hit on every point that makes it hard to recommend updates. The FX-60 was the fastest CPU to support that socket, but they were pricey chips to begin with, probably won't be much better now that they're not made anymore.

I have that exact same CPU at home from an old server build, and it's a good chip, but definitely not the fastest one anymore. If you can find some cheap DDR400 (333 on that chip is probably holding it back a tad) and upping it to 4GB, you'll get some more life out of it. The GPU won't be too hard, and that GT 440 would be a fine chip to throw in there.

The rest of the system should be ok for a bit longer. I'm actually working on getting my old 4600+ back into use again.