Its me. I'm back. So after some long and hard thinking, I have decided I should try, or atleast see how much I can upgrade my current crap box. My current specs are: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (2 Cores)@ 3.01 Ghz AsusTek M2N-SLI Deluxe (AM2 Socket) 2GB DDR2 Mem Nvidia Geforce 8600gt So the question is; is it worth upgrading it, and to what levels can I go? What should I upgrade, and whats the highest upgrade in that category? Thanks.
You could do a Phenom II X4 with out changing mobos. You could get a 4890, or 5770, but it depends what kind of budget you have in mind.
Well my budget is quite high. Can I go any higher than Phenom II X4? Or is the best deal to stick with it? Thanks
What do you want to do with the computer? My gaming computer is based on the amdx2 4800 with a radeon 4670. I could upgrade the video card and it will game with the big boys. With the 4670 it has played every game that I throw at it, so I haven't reach a point where I need to upgrade. Occasionally I use it to edit videos, but it takes twice as long to encode videos as the phenom. My video editing machine is a phenom 9750, it's a pure video editor but if I stuck a mid/high video card it would make a decent gaming computer. But a phenom will be overkill for gaming. Your video card is what is holding you back as far as making it a decent gaming machine. Even a radeon 4670 (cost 80.00) will be a good upgrade. many people recommend at a minimun the nvidia gt9800 for entry level gaming. Currently all computers are reaching speeds where the major drawback are the hard drives. For faster gaming a quad won't help much but a new generation SSD drive will take you to the next level. Go to youtube and type in intel x-25 ssd. You will see what I'm talking about as far as extreme computing.
Well I generally use my PC for everything. I do ocasionally game with it, but I also do 3d work (from time to time) and video editing. My current machine, even with the 8600gt, still manages to play new games on low/medium settings. Dirt 2 for example runs quite well with the graphics turned down to medium or so. However, when I used to play WoW (Dont shoot me; I dont anymore) the FPS would drop to 30 or so in cities. Also when I try and FRAPS some footage, on most games the FPS drops to 10 or so.... Making it impossible to do any video capturing. I will upgrade my GPU (Best option?), but is the CPU worth looking into? Ta
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115212 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102856 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188059 Grand total: $1879.97 Thats no counting RAM. Is that in your budget? No then give us an actual budget to work with. Unless you give us a dollar amount theres just no way to tell. Thats not even the best of the best per say,
Dude.... No.... I aint building a complete new PC, not for 1k+ anyways. My budget is around £600. However, I do not feel like splashing it all out on upgrading my current PC. I can build a fresh full system instead.... I just want to upgrade my current PC with couple of new parts, that would bring an perfomance increase and wouldnt cost too much... I guess I will just stick to Phenom and 5770 like you said in your first reply.
Just get the 5770 first and see if that works for you. That will lift your framerates. CPU won't do much for the framerates. All the symptoms you describe are related to a weak video card, and the gt8600 is entry level like my radeon 4350. It plays most games but it will choke when push too hard. The 5770 is in the mid/upper range of performance. It's a tremendous increase of horsepower. That x2 6000 cpu still has a lot of good life left in it. With the money you save get a bigger cpu fan cooler for your 6000( I know my x2 4800 runs very hot with the stock cooler idles at 45 reaches 65 full load)). This is the cpu fan I got for my phenom cost 30.00 and knock 25 celcius off the full load temp. before 68celcius after 44celcius. http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1895 All the reviews I've seen comparing different CPU's, game framerates between different CPU's using the same video card is negligible. Video cards on the other hand can fluctuate 10 to 30 FPS's between different cards on the same CPU.
