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Ok, my situation. I have a 3 year old rig, my third pc. An over the counter, best buy, propriatery system from Hewlett Packard. It has an AMD Athlon XP 1900+, 1GB DDR pc2100, a total pos Asus A7m266-m mobo that has the worst bios known to man I think, and I have upgraded several months back to a ATI 9600 Pro 128 card. It also has the other budget stuff like a 60 gig HD@7200 rpm, soundblaster live value, cd burner, dvd-rom.
This rig has and still does play all my games, but as we know, Doom 3 is less than a month away and HL2 is right around the corner (we hope). So maybe its time for an upgrade.?? Which brings me to my dilema. I have been reading tons of stuff in forums about all the upgrading paths I could follow, but to tell you the truth, I have reached brainlock. I just don't know which path to get started on. I have never put a system together from scratch although I don't believe this is a problem for me. So I am turning to the infinite wisdom of the [H]ard Forum community.
I recently read the "oc'ing the Athlon 3000+" article, and was very interested in this path due to the cost. But I will need a new case I guess which will add to the cost somewhat, and then add my old equipment to that to form the "budget upgrade". Then I came across a pc sales and service guy here locally that said he could get me into a new tower with an Athlon 64 3200+ with 512mb pc2700 ram, 430 watt psu, and what is probably going to be another "generic mobo" for around $475.00 But I have to talk to the service tech for actual prices and specs, and he comes back from vacation this thursday. Good thing here is, I have an old laptop they will trade or buy for $400.00, Making this a $75.00 deal. But I might get another somewhat propriatery mobo system that won't overclock due to the bios, which is something I definetly want to get involved in eventually, soon if possible. Maybe they will install my mobo of choice for a little extra, i don't know. Then the wife gets the old Palomino system minus the 9600 pro. I will be using all my old extras like speakers, keyboard, etc. on the new rig.
Then I started thinking about going for a lower end proc (lower than a AMD64 3200+) and enthusiast mobo to save some bucks and get that extra umph I need for the next gen games. I don't want to upgrade the graphics card just yet so i'm hoping to get the performance from the proc and mobo. I would like this system to get me another couple years of gaming before I really go all out and build a system that won't be budget minded.
What do yall think? Sorry for such a longwinded post. Peace
This rig has and still does play all my games, but as we know, Doom 3 is less than a month away and HL2 is right around the corner (we hope). So maybe its time for an upgrade.?? Which brings me to my dilema. I have been reading tons of stuff in forums about all the upgrading paths I could follow, but to tell you the truth, I have reached brainlock. I just don't know which path to get started on. I have never put a system together from scratch although I don't believe this is a problem for me. So I am turning to the infinite wisdom of the [H]ard Forum community.
I recently read the "oc'ing the Athlon 3000+" article, and was very interested in this path due to the cost. But I will need a new case I guess which will add to the cost somewhat, and then add my old equipment to that to form the "budget upgrade". Then I came across a pc sales and service guy here locally that said he could get me into a new tower with an Athlon 64 3200+ with 512mb pc2700 ram, 430 watt psu, and what is probably going to be another "generic mobo" for around $475.00 But I have to talk to the service tech for actual prices and specs, and he comes back from vacation this thursday. Good thing here is, I have an old laptop they will trade or buy for $400.00, Making this a $75.00 deal. But I might get another somewhat propriatery mobo system that won't overclock due to the bios, which is something I definetly want to get involved in eventually, soon if possible. Maybe they will install my mobo of choice for a little extra, i don't know. Then the wife gets the old Palomino system minus the 9600 pro. I will be using all my old extras like speakers, keyboard, etc. on the new rig.
Then I started thinking about going for a lower end proc (lower than a AMD64 3200+) and enthusiast mobo to save some bucks and get that extra umph I need for the next gen games. I don't want to upgrade the graphics card just yet so i'm hoping to get the performance from the proc and mobo.
I would like this system to get me another couple years of gaming before I really go all out and build a system that won't be budget minded. What do yall think? Sorry for such a longwinded post.
Peace