You reckon this is a worthy upgrade??

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ShaolinDreams

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Ok heres the deal. As you see in my my sig im going to make quite an ambitious new pc for myself, which i have approximated to be around >£2000.

Thing is i have to wait for a few months say 4months before i get that money, but right now i could easily squeeze £200 on some sort of upgrade.

My current specs are as follows:

CPU - P4 Prescott 3.2ghz (OC@3.7) -1mb cache HT socket 478
MoBo -Asus P4P800SE AGP 800FSB (OC@900)
RAM - 2x1GB DDR Corsair XMS3200C2PT TwinX CAS2
Graphics - Gainward Bliss 7800GS 512MB AGP (OC@7800GTX speed)
PSU - Hiper 580w Type R
HDD - Hitachi 160gb SATA

as you can see its pretty dated now few gens back, i think its come to its limit. But i only got the graphics card over a year and a half ago. £250 is cost me at the time (dont ask:rolleyes: ) i really think it isnt being fully utilised because i cant even play some games like fear even on low. my cpu or ram could be bottlenecking? what im thinking of doing and i dont mind splashing £200 out, is a small but significant upgrade, this..

cheapupgradede0.jpg


ASRock Motherboard - Product - 4COREDUAL-VSTA - Overview

Ignore the fans and smaller items. i want to keep my agp graphics card its got some juice in it yet to get me to my new build. i do honestly believe, being intermediate with computers that something is holding my graphics card back and getting a faster dualcore cpu, faster DDR2 ram, higher mobo FSB, and faster harddrive will raise the performance to be on par with my graphics card. Im not asking for a incredible step up just to allow me to play some DX9 games that i cant run properly now. This is important.

What do you think. Without worrying about cost or budgets, do you reckon theres a decent enough performance boost with this upgrade? Any suggestions are muched welcome.

Regards ShaoliN :)
 
Well, one thing to consider is that board will be pretty useless when you want to move on to a PCI-E card because it's bottlenecked by the AGP bus, meaning you will only get PCI-E x8 speeds, so you will be limiting any 8800 card or an HD3870, and any future cards to come.

I mean, it's a pretty cheap board, so just get rid of it when you plan to get a new card.

If you're being limited in a game like FEAR, then you definitley have some bottlenecking issues, although a P4, especially one at 3.7GHz, should be able to handle FEAR just fine.. your system should be able to max it out as is...
 
Thanks for the response guys. Im not looking to ever use the pci-e on that Asrock DUAL mobo.. just transfer my 7800GS, HDD's and PSU. I only want the mobo cos it takes my not bad graphics card and i can really improve my cpu, double the bandwidth of my ram and C: harddrive at quite a reasonable price it seems to me.

Yeh something is bottlenecking me.. What gets me is i cant even play some dx9games, eg FEAR, Stranglehold, Rainbow Six Vegas,Colin Mcrae Dirt.. at ANY setting (i see a kid playing a game perfectly that i cant even play with the asrock mobo and 9800pro!! AGP) Wouldnt upgradeing socket 478 to core2duo, ddr1 to ddr2 and sata1 to sata2 HDD and having a higher FSB mobo rectify this? (with spare parts im building a lil pc for my mum so that aint a problem either)

I am building proposed build like in my sig, thats without question. but i would like this current pc just to improve... so when i connect it to new pc for some lan gaming with a friend.. it will be more capable then it already is. Plus some sort of improvement will get me to my new rig. Again dont worry about money or wait for new build. Do you think this upgrade will improve this current pc reasonably?

Thanks :)
 
thanks but i think you didnt get what type of upgrade this is. as you can see in my sig i will in future have a badarse gaming pc, this upgrade is to tide me over and make this system more responsive at a reasonable cost.

you wouldnt go with asrock, well that sure explains alot :freak: . Im not looking to sell my 7800 infact i dont sell anything i just pass it on, and it aint time to pass on just yet! so a good mobo and okish graphics card is gonna set me back money which i dont have, atm £200 is my max bugdet for this. my mate is selling me his E6600 to put in it so thats looking sweet. all i would like is some confirmation that there is going to be a little increase in my system performance and allow my card to play some games that i have been struggling to play (Which are well within capability of my 7800GS OC)... im not looking to make directx 10 blah blah blah or even high end pc, because im gonna be building that in a few months anyway (Sig).

P4 socket 478 to E6600 core2duo £50
DRR to Ballistix DDR2 677 £44
Mobo 800FSB to 1066 FSB (without slight OC) £45

your telling me for £139 that aint a reasonable upgrade?

Thanks again.. but please elaborate more then "i wouldnt get that" can i have some reasoning to that please. Just to clear things up again my budget is £200 max.

Regards ShaoliN :)
 
i dunno what kind of responsiveness you can get out of an asrock.. i mean i had an ecs nforce 4ma w/ an fx62 and got some crap responses.... lol
 
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