Not sure of my next buy

[LegendBreath]

Hi there!
Need your help once again
I'm not sure what to buy next, currently my system is the following:
- ASUS A8N-E Motherboard ATX S939 NFORCE4 Ultra
- AMD Opteron 144 Processor S939 Venus 1.8GHZ 1MB L2 Cache 90NM 64BIT
- OCZ Performance Series REV3 PC3200 1GB 2X512MB DDR400 CL2-3-3-6
(I'm such a lazy guy... copy pasting, eheh)
- EVGA E-GEFORCE 7600 GT KO 580MHZ 256MB 128BIT 1.5GHZ GDDR3

Ok so now, what would do the biggest difference on that system? Like for example if I put 2GB of ram, would it run faster than if I put another CPU?

Thanks for your help, and don't answer things like: change everything, or blah blah blah... lol

BTW: I am a gamer.

 

[j12]

ok i don know how you are gonna put another cpu unless u get another mobo, or get dual core. you can go for another gig of ram. and save your money until dx10 comes out then get a high end video card.

 

[LegendBreath]

Man, if you didn't know, it is socket 939.

 

[dwarf]

the ram is fine, I'd say, the amount of that doesn't have as large an impact as an upgrade to another component might be, I'd say the best upgrade for you, even in a gaming aspect is getting a dual core processor, I'd say an opteron 165.

I don't know if you overclock alot, but either way it's a nice processor and will almost gauranteed run your games better for the mere fact that it's going to take the load off one of the cores to run the usual background programs.

and if you overclock, well, as you might have experienced with your 144, these are some of the best overclockers out there if you get a good stepping, which is fairly common in my experience.

 

[LegendBreath]

Well, I never found out how to overclock, eheh I don't understand the 64BIT overclocking, and the RAM timing. Would I get a good overclock with my current setup? Even with RAM?

 

[Ronnie]

i second the opteron 165 last time i checked it was $160

 

[LegendBreath]

Yeah well that's USD, I'm in Canada and I don't have a big budget, eheh. Well it might be in my budget...

 

[dwarf]

yes, if you have a good stepping, I don't know about your particular bios, so I wouldn't be quick to suggest anything, usually you find Jumperfree configuration, switch the FSB setting, normally the first option to manual, and it'd probably be set at 200 by default, increase in increments of 5 FSB, and find the Vcore setting, and switch that to manual, don't change the multiplier, you should see the voltage for the CPU there, I wouldn't recommend raising it too much at all for your first time say 1.375 instead of the default 1.35, and keep it there, just to give a little overclocking headroom, you'll want to exit and save each time until you reach your desired overclock, I'd say maybe a 400mhz overclock isn't too much trouble for your processor.

In any case, good luck with your future endeavours, I have to run now.

 

[LegendBreath]

I'd say maybe a 400mhz overclock isn't too much trouble for your processor.

Really??? Even with my RAM. BTW: Thanks for your infos

 

[dwarf]

Hah, yeah, your ram should be alright, OCZ is a nice company for overclocking, my impression was the amount of ram doesn't have an impact on overclocking, just the timings and characteristics of that particular brand, I had 2x512 OCZ platinum in my opteron 165 rig and overclocked to 3 ghz with little problem, though I had an exceptional stepping.

Ah, my sister's yelling, gotta run.