advice please on upgrade path???

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kandor

Gawd
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Aug 24, 2005
Messages
632
Hi all,

I have a friend with a pretty old system who loves to play games on it. Unfortunately, it's running out of steam pretty quickly and he has no funds to do major upgrades. Last few games he's tried he has not been able to get running adequetly to play. His wife wants to get him something for xmas and she has asked me for advice. What I want to do is suggest the best upgrade to improve gaming for under 100$ cdn. Here are the specs:

His current system (from my memory so...)

It's an early p4 system aroun 1.7 or 1.8 ghz with a 7800 ati all in wonder and 512 mb of ram.

I could upgrade is chip to a 2.4 ghz p4 for around 100 (I know his motherboard will support that) but I'm thinking it's better to get him an updated vid card like a "Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Advantage 256MB" which can be had for around 90$ cdn.

What do you think?

Thanks,

Kandor
 
Are you able to post what kinds of games he wants to play?

for all those that want to help, 90cdn is ~75us.
 
Sure: he's into mainly fps games like battlefield, call of duty etc. He plays the odd title like civ or c&c but mainly fps. 2 game demos he couldn't run recently were doom3 and battlefield2. TIA for any advice.

Kandor
 
I totally understand the limited budget, but the problem is that $75 won't travel too far for that system; you're going to want to grab another 512megs of ram (total of a gig), something like a 6200, and a newer proc.

What I've listed above is obviously far too much to fit into the $75 budget (that would net you at minimum the 6200).

The biggest issue is that if you upgrade one part of the system, another part will immediately begin holding it back. Obviously that isn't good, as you want the most out of the money you spend.

You could probably squeek by with selecting two of the three upgrades listed above (preferably the vid card and proc), but obviously the best would be upgrading all three.

Let me know what you think about what I've said and we'll see where we can go from here.
 
quadnad said:
I totally understand the limited budget, but the problem is that $75 won't travel too far for that system; you're going to want to grab another 512megs of ram (total of a gig), something like a 6200, and a newer proc.

What I've listed above is obviously far too much to fit into the $75 budget (that would net you at minimum the 6200).

The biggest issue is that if you upgrade one part of the system, another part will immediately begin holding it back. Obviously that isn't good, as you want the most out of the money you spend.

You could probably squeek by with selecting two of the three upgrades listed above (preferably the vid card and proc), but obviously the best would be upgrading all three.

Let me know what you think about what I've said and we'll see where we can go from here.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. I upgraded my old system, a 1.9ghz AXP with an MX440, and put in a Radeon 9800 pro, then a 6600gt, then a 6800nu, and well, none really helped at all. My CPU/Ram held me back the whole time. I finally saved my pennies, and bought the system in my sig, I couldn't be happier :) Well, once I get my WC setup running that is lol.
 
Well, that makes it tough - maybe the thing to do is find a decent game that will play ok on an older system and save the upgrades for later.

Thanks guys.
 
A vid card would at least allow him to play all of the games out there...How good it would play them would be somewhat debatable. I would go with your initial thought, the 9600pro as it'll let him at least try doom3, bf2, etc.
 
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