Upgrade for ATI Radeon 4300

[Whelkmaster]

hello guys

I mentioned in another thread that I have a premade "gaming machine" that I found to be less than desirable and I hope maybe I can get the advice here to make the right choice when buying a couple of upgrades

first off it has inside it an ATI radeon 4300 which is not ideal and im suffering a little with framerates and general performance whilst gaming, I currently have 4GB or ram and an AMD phenon X 4 processor

im quite happy with the amount of ram (although im curious, with DDR2 is it possible to get a couple of 4GB sticks?) and I think a quadcore should be good enough for running most current games, but would like to know if there is a suitable not massivley expensive GPU that could be bought to replace my Radeon?

im making a new build also but that will take some time to get all the componants together, so an adequae upgrade for the Radeon would be great to keep me going in the meantime



thanks for your patience with my increasingly silly questions

Regards

Whelk

 

[Fat.Clown]

your budget?
will your power supply unit be able to handle the extra load?

4gb sticks of ddr2 is quite expensive, you are probably better off getting 2 sets of 2x2gb sticks. that is, if your motherboard has four dimm slots.

 

[Whelkmaster]

ah right yes Budget, well i was hoping to keep it under £100

as regards the RAM i have 2 DIMM slots on the motherboard so thats why I was thinking 4GB sticks, but I think my issues have more to do with the appalling graphics card than the ram so may just keep it at the current 4GB

aslo my power supply is currently 450W

 

[Stevo808]

I just bought me this card: Newegg.com - XFX HD-577A-ZNFC Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

I been playing Dead Space 2 and Home Front on max settings w/o issues. With your current specs this card would run perfect, but maybe others have suggestions as well.

 

[Whelkmaster]

ok thanks for that suggestion, found this on a UK site

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-xfx-hd-5770-pci-e-21-%28x16%29-4800mhz-gddr5-gpu-850mhz-800-cores-2x-dvi-mini-dp-single-slot


looks pretty nice so will probarbly go for it, thanks for the help

 

[Stevo808]

No problem, glad to help.