I am very cautious about upgrading my PC a bit. Plz help

L

LittleBahamut

178
After owning my first ever built PC from my friend, I am thinking that I want to upgrade this baby a bit. Here is what I am using:

AMD Athlon 64 3200
Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9
1 GB of Kingston 3200 DDR ram
Antec Smartpower2.0 500W
PNY GF 6600 GT PCI Express
Maxter 6Y250P0 250GB Harddrive

What I am thinking is I want to upgrade my video card to either a 7800 or a 7900 PCI Express card. But I remember this term someone once told me about video cards "bottlenecking" the CPU because its too slow or something for the video card.

I plan on buying on a card from newegg.com but really don't know if I should just buy a new video card or not. Or maybe I would have to upgrade something else too. :indiff: Please help. >_<
 
I think just a video card will do. You could also upgrade the CPU, but that won't really have a big impact on performance in games. It depends on how much money you want to spend.
 
agreed with Road_dogg33j, looks like a smart purchase in the Graphics department is all you need, the rest seem fine, if you are going to go a little furthur A new motherboard would be a safe bet.
 
Agreed.

Even though a 6800XT card wouldn't bottleneck your system, if you really want to spend the extra $150+ on a 7800 then by all means, do so. It will keep you more future-proofed, but a more budget-like solution would be a 6800, because, in reality, it is worlds faster than the 6600 (depending on the kind you get).

Also, if you go with the 7 series, don't buy a 7900. It's a waste of money, mainly because the 7800GT's and GTX's (as well as GS's) outperform it in most games.
 
ROAD_DOGG33J
The 6800xt isn't much of an upgrade over the 6600gt as can be seen from here:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/286/15/

And the 7800s don't outperform the 7900s.
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I was kinda wondering that myself... Go for a 7950GT SLI card for your current setup.. I know it's complete overkill, but then at a later point, you can upgrade your mobo and CPU, and then when you reach another "I can't play this game is the best resolution" point, buy yet another 7950GT SLI card and have 4 GPUs in your box...

That's what I would do at least...
 


Thanks for the input guys. 👍 What I am thinking about now is going with a 7800 and adding another 1GB of ram into the PC. I will possibly make the change around the winter time to see if prices drop on cards and rams before I make my purchases. Feel free to keep on giving me purchase advice. Anything helps.
 
Flerbizky: It also takes over a 500W power supply to really run a 7950 effeciently with 2GB RAM and a 64 bit 3200+ and a 250 GB hard drive. You would probably experience alot of system crashes. Plus, SLI generally requires at least a 800+W power supply (and if I'm not mistaken, the better 7950's require 950-1000W).


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814121003

Not the fastest card in the world, but it will suffice for being future proof for quite a while. Fairly cheap for that much badass-ness too.

And for RAM, you have to match RAM timings if you want to be able to keep your current stick and run another. Some sticks are even made so they run with one other specific kind of stick. so watch out.

If you want to go all out with a whole new set of RAM....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820141214

Fairly cheap with nice timings.

But if you decide to only buy another 1GB stick, be careful what you buy. Your current stick might not agree with the next one you buy.
 
I would say that with that setup, 500 watts would be fine, but not exactly future-proof. Depending on the other components, SLI can be run from as little as 600 watts, maybe even less. There is a company shipping quad-SLI computers with a 660 watt power supply, but I'm not sure how that works out. That's about the only case where I can see at least 800 watt power supplies being needed.

Plus, I'm sure he would want PC3200, instead of PC2700 for memory.
 
first upgrade your motherboard
then upgrade your cpu
then you graphics card
then your ram to 2gb
then psu
then storage capacity
then screen
then speakers
then keyboard/mouse
and repeat
its what i call continuous upgrading, and you can take parts out like the input devices of the cycle but the first 4 things are the ones that you will most likely need to upgrade.
 
ROAD_DOGG33J
Plus, I'm sure he would want PC3200, instead of PC2700 for memory.
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Doh...thought it said 3200.

rualeb: That's what I call a waste of money. I mean come on...every few months upgrade your keyboard and mouse too? Wtf?
 

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