Im slowly upgrading my pc piece by piece and I want to know if I should change the cpu first or the video card. I play games and do light video editing on my computer from my camcorder then just general internet stuff. My pc has a Pentium D 3.4GHZ with a 500g HD and a ATI Radion 512 X1650 video card, plus 2gb DDR2 Ram. Also I think with vista all I can run is the 2gb of ram?
It depends. If you are going to keep the same motherboard I would just upgrade the video card. A different cpu won't give you a big performance hit. Your cpu is already plenty fast for a single core. If your motherboard is AGP based, it will not upgrade very much. But a good video card that will be better than the 1650 is the radeon hd3650 which is available in agp. The 1650 (I own the same card on my older PC) doesn't have the shader 3.0 that alot of the new games require, that was it's weakpoint. For video editing, nothing beats a dual or quad, but that would be a major upgrade new motherboard/cpu/ram.
I'd suggest listing the major games/apps you use so we can know what is the ideal parts. Also a budget would help a bunch too. Upgrading from an older PC can be hard. Sometimes you just gotta start over. But again, tell us what games you play and the video software you run so we know what you need to do it best, while not going overboard on the price, so include your budget.
jony: The Pentium D is a dual core processor, not a single core. It is not, however, "plenty fast". It should be sufficient for older games, but is not a fast processor by any means (A $200 Core i5 750 for example is actually twice as fast per-core, making it four times as powerful). The X1650 is, however, the weakest link in the system. While a Pentium D 850/950 is enough to play the majority of games out there that aren't top-end, the X1650 will struggle to play almost any modern games at all. It all depends on the use. If you only ever play stuff like web-based flash games or ancient stuff like Warcraft 3, keep the X1650. If you want to play modern stuff that's even relatively tolerable like GRiD, Left 4 Dead or Bioshock 2 then you need a much more powerful graphics card. If your X1650 is AGP, then you're sort of out of luck here, the best you can buy for AGP is an HD3850, which is not a very powerful card by modern standards (It will play all the titles listed, but only quite juddery and on reduced settings). If it's PCI-express, then it's good news, as you can buy any new card out there, within budget, limit of your PC case, and your power supply. We could do with knowing all of these before continuing.
