Upgrade Time - any advice appreciated

[sudo909]

Hi all,

My chipset fan's become louder than a 747 taking off so while i'm replacing that i figured on a little upgrading.

I don't keep current on best buy hardware and the advice given here when i first built this system was excellent, so i'm back for guidance if anyone is willing.

Dfi Lanparty UT NF4 SLI DR
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2Ghz
GeForce 6800GT (did have 2 until a small 'incident' during removal lol)
2x 1gb Corsair 3200 DDR200
Thermaltake 480W PSU

Only used for gaming, mainly wow on a 22" monitor running at 1680x1050

What would be the best performance upgrade for the equivalent of $500 spend?

J

 

[baron5]

theres not really too much you can do with the 939 socket, the only worthwhile cpus i think are the opteron which are hard and pricey to get a hold of these days. If you wanted to spend to 500 a good recomendation would be to upgrade the cpu, motherboard,ram and gpu while you keep your case and psu and hdd.
this is what i was thinking.

Newegg.com - Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more!
Newegg.com - G.SKILL PI Black 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL4D-4GBPI-B - Desktop Memory
Newegg.com - XFX HD-487A-ZHFC Radeon HD 4870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card - Desktop Graphics / Video Cards

that comes to about 425 or so shipped so you can easily add a nice psu into the mix, but first tell us how many amps it has over the 12v rails which will be on a sticker on the side of the psu. You could actually get a antec 300 case + antec psu combo which would be about 500 alltogether and reuse your hdd, its really up to you. But i would probably go with those parts, keep your case and get in a newer hdd, or a psu if you need it.

 

[sudo909]

Thanks baron5,

18A PSU

I have a nice case already but the antec bundle looks good value if my current PSU cant handle the requirements.

The HDD is a Seagate that has never given me any problems but would a 6yr old HDD affect system performance?

 

[synergy]

Yes, but no. Technically a 5 year old HDD will run at half the throughput of a newer SATA II drive. However, no drives (except SSDs) really utilize that full throughput and you probably wouldn't see enough performance increase to justify spending the extra bucks. If the money isn't an issue then it couldn't hurt.