Upgrades!

Okay, I'm trying to hold off on a full PC upgrade until next year sometime. I have a P4 3.2 Northwood with 2 gigs of PC3700 DDR memory. My motherboard is a Chaintech 9CJS Zenith with an Intel 975 chipset. It is an AGP 8X board.

I currently have an Nvidia 6800GT in the system, but I just ordered an ATI X1950XT card -- it just became available in AGP format.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814241049

Based on the manufacturer's recommendation, I also upgraded my power supply to a 600W one. (I had an Antec Truepower 430 previously).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817194001

I hope these two pieces will breathe enough life into my system to keep it chugging along for a while

Keep it chugging?? Sounds like a pretty respectable rig IMHO.

Should provide you some time before you have to drop some major cash

I agree with Brorlis! I'm still running an Athlon XP 2700, 1 GB PC 3200, and a GeForce 6600 something-or-other. I haven't run into a game with major performance problems yet, though--even STALKER runs quite well with a surprisingly large number of settings tweaked to "on". I did piecemeal upgrades on that box for quite a while but I'm at the point now that I will probably just save my money to buy a whole new rig when I have real problems.

I just bought a Mac Pro (quad core) 2.66 GHZ machine, 2 Gig Memory, 1 TB disk. ATI Radeon 1900 video card. Dual boots OSX/Vista with 100 Gig devoted to the Vista partition.

WoW plays at 60fps at 2560x1600 all settings maxed. :)

Photos

That is a real nice box Squidly!!!
Does the cute kid come with or is that an extra option??? :)

Beast - I am running just about the same system as you...

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Originally Posted by [AK]Devil_Dog

That is a real nice box Squidly!!!
Does the cute kid come with or is that an extra option??? :)

Beast - I am running the just about the same system as you...

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It's an extra "build your own" option. That option comes with a tax credit though.

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Originally Posted by [AK]Squidly

It's an extra "build your own" option. That option comes with a tax credit though.

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ROFL!!!
Tax credit good!!! :beer:

Well....Ive upgraded my poor system as far as its gonna go. Its at the end of its rope in the upgrade world. Unfortunately RDRAM never took off like it was supposed to, so RDRAM upgrades are ridiculously expensive. Its still a good comp and rarely lets me down.

Here is the details: Its a Dell 8200 P4 - 2Ghz, 512MB RDRAM
Dell Service Tag# 701KR11




I have upgraded the following components:

Graphics: GPU NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 GT-OC, AGP, Memory 256MB-GDDR3 http://www.bfgtech.com/6800GTOC.html
(Tried to make up for lack of system RAM by getting a tank of a graphics board - minimal improvement :blush: )

Hard Drive: Added 2 - 250GB Western Digital HD's

Memory: Added 2 more 128MB RIMMS (only cost effective upgrade)

Monitor: New Dell 24" Wide Screen http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...9&sku=320-4335

DVD-RW: 16X DVD+/-RW Internal Drive for Dell

Wireless Keyboard & Mouse: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1157067255426

It still grinds like a paper shredder on alt/tabs and zone in/outs in WOW due to only having 512MB of RAM.

But it has some life left in it.

Once the newer quad cores and Vista have seen a year or so of public Beta testing I will probably look to get a new system again.

I just bought the wife a new machine a few months ago for her graphics and web design business. So this time I get to wait for a while before I get to buy one. :( :(

Its my 5th dell in 10 yrs I've bought, you would think i would be on Michael Dells Christmas card list or something !?!?

Hey Squidly... we talked about this on IM. I think I got the week right! :D (Not that this would have affected your purchase decision anyways I don't believe.)

Apple new 8-Core Mac Pro

Mydrial,

You can get RIMMs pretty cheap on Ebay if you go that route. I bought some back when I had a RAMBUS-based Dell a few years ago. I just checked and there are some reasonable ones for sale.

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Originally Posted by [AK]Hylander

Hey Squidly... we talked about this on IM. I think I got the week right! :D (Not that this would have affected your purchase decision anyways I don't believe.)

Apple new 8-Core Mac Pro

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Yeah, I knew it was going to happen (expected it during the NAB conference next week.) I guess they have something else planned for that one. Looks like I didn't miss out on much. They dropped memory prices slightly, and added the 8-core to the top end. All the other stuff is the same. I did a price workup on a new system and compared it and including the deal I got on Final Cut Express I'd have saved only about $100 bucks by ordering today. The monitor dropped by $200, but I ordered that a couple weeks earlier so I'm outside the "price-protection-window".

No biggie... but it figures, you know? :)

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Originally Posted by Mydrial

Monitor: New Dell 24" Wide Screen http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...9&sku=320-4335

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I have the same monitor. I absolutely love it

This is what I'm running on and while I love gadgets amd upgrading them, I'm not allowed to touch this PC for a while. (At least until the sticker shock of the original purchase wears off of Stewart)

Core 2 Duo E6600 "Conroe" CPU Dual Core, 4MB Cache

eVGA Socket 775 680i SLI MB SLI, SATA2, RAID, GLAN, DDR2

XFX GeForce 7950 GT Extreme PCI-e Card, 512 MB DDR3

Western Digital 250GB SATA-II 7200RPM WD2500KS 16MB Cache

Coolermaster 600 Watt Extreme Power Supply w/120mm Fan

1gig DDR2 667Mhz SO-DIMM

And my favorite part of the whole thing: Aspire X-Pleasure Blue Aluminum Gaming Case X-Pleasure-BL http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811144128 except mine's dark blue instead of yucky boring black

Of course I have no idea what most of this means, Brorlis told me what to get and I LOVE it.

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Originally Posted by Etaoin

Of course I have no idea what most of this means, Brorlis told me what to get and I LOVE it.

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Don't blame me for your expensive taste =)

Come on, a machine like that you gotta spring for at least 2gigs of ram! :)

OK Squidly, I left out the x2 next to the ram :P

Okay, finally upped my system... Nothing major:

Went from a 2.26ghz to 3.0 CPU. Went from 2GB of RAM to 2.5. Going to look into bumping up to 4.

I can now run BF2 with my video settings at 'High'.