a little help?

[railrunner]

4 years ago i built my first pc

P4 2.0 Ghz
Shuttle AV42 mainboard
mid tower ATX case with led fans
1 GB ddr sdram
geforce 5200 agp card
500 watt power supply

it's been a great solid rigg but it's getting seriously out dated and i was thinking of upgrading. when i started looking around i realized i have been way out of touch with the computer world and now i'm a bit unsure what to do. do i gut most of what i have and replace what i cant use or just start all from scratch? i was thinking i could just change my mobo processor and RAM but then i realized that eide isn't standard anymore and my hard drive and optical drives are all eide. most of the mobo's i look at only have one eide slot and the rest is sata. then there's the fact that agp is out the door now with PCI-E taking over. anyway i was wondering what you guys thought would be my best bet. i'm not a hardcore gamer but i do like to game some, and i like it to be smooth with good graghics. my wife does some picture editing and surfs the web like crazy and my daughter does the whole i-tunes mp3 thing. i was thinking of an asus m3a78 board with a phenom 8650+ 2.3 Ghz triple core or is that overkill? like i said i dont have a clue anymore. also how many watt psu is necessary now? any help would be great.

 

[Ste]

Depends on what you want to do.

Specifically what games you Do want to play..

But yea, you will probably need at least 600-700 hundred for a new build.

Its only worth it to upgrade a system every 6 months to 2 years, nothing older than that..

Edit, if you put in about 800 plus 200-300 for a nice moniter that could last you another few years. Even longer if you upgrade single parts every so often.

 

[railrunner]

i like playing RPG games and the call of duty games, and i'd like to get into the crysis games but i can't play them now. i could keep my case and power supply but i dont know what else i could keep. it sucks because this rig has been so good to me and still is, just outdated.

 

[Ste]

It depends what standard you case and power supply are.

Not to mention the brand/model and amperage of the power supply.

 

[railrunner]

power supply is a power magic 10A/5A frequency is 60/50 Hz if that helps

 

[railrunner]

would i be able to plug my old ata hd in the 1 ata100 spot on a new mobo? and if i did would there be conflicts moving my old hd with my OS on it and using it as my hd? i just really dont feel like saving all my files and stuff and wiping it clean you know what i mean?

 

[kmote]

You will not be able to use that PSU in a new build because it will probably only have the old 20 pin motherboard plug. TBH I wouldn't bother trying to salvage anything from the old machine - you said yourself it is a great machine just outdated. So why not leave that one for your wife's browsing and you get yourself a nice gaming machine (crysis requires some powerful HW). That way you don't have to mess with what works only to get maybe an optical drive and HDD.