Upgrade or Purchase New Computer?

[nbost]

Hello everyone. My younger brother is interested in experimenting with Unreal Development Kit and other such programming activities. In addition, he enjoys playing games. I'm moving back to college soon and will be taking my gaming pc back with me (he has been using it over the summer).

Right now I'm looking at either upgrading a computer I put together in 2006 or putting together a new one for him. I have not looked into components much since 2006 so I figured I would start here with any recommendations you may have.

Here are the current specs:

Dual Core AMD Opteron Processor 165 1.81 Ghz (for over clocking capabilities)

1.00 GB RAM G.Skill Value Series 184-Pin DDR 400 (PC 3200)(one stick is faulty, was intending to put more in but never did)

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT

DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D 939 nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

Antec TruePower 2.0 550W Power Supply


He would like to be able to run Unreal Development Kit and Battlefield 3 when it comes out. Not necessarily with extreme graphics settings, he does not care so much about that.

Thank You,

-Nathan

 

[patonb]

I'd get a new motherboard/cpu/ram and use the rest, with a precaution on the psu as they do age.

It should be a couple hundred bucks, ~$250, fr an AM3 board, an x4 cpu and 4 or 8Gigs of ram.

The case/gpu and psu should be just fine.

Welcome to TF.