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Upgrade advice please

S

socalsprinter

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 2, 2010
Messages
105
Hey everyone I am looking for some upgrade advice for my wife's PC. The rig is about 3 years old and starting to show its age. Now she does game on it but the main thing she will play on it is SWTOR and not much else but she wants to play at high setting with a lowish res(22" monitor). I'm looking at upgrading the vid card and maybe adding some ram if possible.

Here are the current specs:

Athlon 64 x2 5000+
Biostar ta770 am2+
Geforce 9600 gt
4Gb DDR2 800
600W corsair psu

Budget around 150 w tax and shipping(I have to pay tax at newegg so prefer Amazon)
 
I think you're best off spending your entire $150 on a video card. HD6850 should be in budget. 4GB of RAM is enough for gaming. If she were a power user using virtual machines and stuff then I'd say to go to 8GB, but it doesn't sound like she needs that. Other than that, just overclock to get what you can out of the CPU. While it's not a GREAT CPU, it's still pretty good for most purposes.
 
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Thanks for the help I ended up picking up a b-stock gtx 460 from evga for 109. Think I may invest in a better cooler for the cpu and OC it, It is a black edition so should oc pretty well.
 
socalsprinter said:
Thanks for the help I ended up picking up a b-stock gtx 460 from evga for 109. Think I may invest in a better cooler for the cpu and OC it, It is a black edition so should oc pretty well.
Click to expand...

Good luck.

Though even OC'd it is still gonna limit the performance of that GTX 460 a bit. A new CPU should definitely be the next upgrade when you can afford it (roughly $60 to $120 or so).
 
On the CPU would any of the am2 CPUs be worth putting in or am I better off just getting a new mobo?
 
Don't AM2+ motherboards support AM3 CPUs?

In which case, a bunch of Phenom IIs are within your reach.
 
socalsprinter said:
On the CPU would any of the am2 CPUs be worth putting in or am I better off just getting a new mobo?
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Just checked your motherboard's CPU support list and it doesn't look like it supports the newer AMD Phenom II CPUs. So yeah better off getting a new mobo, CPU, and RAM (DDR3 RAM is pretty much the norm these days).
 
Its the older a2+ that they decided not to update the bios to support the newer CPUs. So ya I'm stuck the the older stuff.
 
Danny Bui said:
Just checked your motherboard's CPU support list and it doesn't look like it supports the newer AMD Phenom II CPUs. So yeah better off getting a new mobo, CPU, and RAM (DDR3 RAM is pretty much the norm these days).
Click to expand...

It may be possible to update the BIOS for it if it's an issue of CPU Microcode... Check forums at mydigitallife.info or bios-mods.com. I actually help people out at the latter site but I do not generally deal with microcode stuff, just option ROMs.
 
I am going to give it a shot actually. I have a athlon 2 x2 250 in my machine that I have been wanting to upgrade to a phenom if I can get it to work in her mobo maybe I can get an upgrade too!
 
Just a quick update. I took your guys advice and with the help of that custom bios(and a few tries...) I was able to get the athlon 2 250 working in my wife's PC! Which means I have a new Phenom II x4 955 BE on the way! SSD is the next thing I want to look into but that may have to wait till Christmas time.

She is now running

Athlon II x2 250 3.0ghz
Geforce GTX 460 1GB
4gb RAM

Which should run SWTOR great.
 
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