450 dollar budget

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Hey

Just here to say a few things.

You guys say Ram would help a lot, well it does help if using games at the Ultimate level of graphics like Doom 3 on ultra high or Quake 4 on Ultra high setting's but looking at your graphics card, you won't get higher than medium to high quality. 1 gig Ram should be enough.

You didn't say anything about your hard drive, if you happen to have a 5400rpm hard drive then a new 7200rpm hard drive is a must. Your motherboard doesn't look it has any SATA ports so sadly you can't get a SATA 10,000rpm drive unless you get a PCI card to host it which would cost more.

I also go aganist getting anything at the major chain store like Harvey Norman. Small local computer stores have much cheaper prices and better range but if you get stuck, search ebay Australia or even ebay.com to find the right price and compoent for your system.

In the future or as part of your upgrade (if into graphics/gaming), a new motherboard with the new PCI-E SLI slots will be a must but in your case it probaly wouldn't be necessary.

Another thing you could do to improve your CPU speed is to upgrade (if you don't already) to get water cooling. This will most likely overclock your system and make your computer faster. Otherwise you can include a few case fans and a hard drive cooler. A thing to watch out for when doing fan upgrades is that it isn't too loud. Case fans normally do increase the sound level by 5-20 decibels.

Hope this helped.

Kind Regards
lamedog
 
upgrading his CPU won't really do much for him at the moment, his P4 3GHZ should suffice for now.
and getting a new motherboard for PCI-E would mean he'd have to get a new video card
and remember he only has $450 to spend
 
re:

There are a few programs which you can use that can tell you what you full system specs are. Sadly I've forgotten all of them right now.

You could just check the top of the hard drive and see what it says.

Yes I agree with you apokalipse, he would have to get a new graphics card and maybe a new CPU but it was only really a comment to say if you where going to upgrade further, a SLI PCI-E motherboard is needed.

I must also say, I just brought my family a computer for their chirstmas present. It only cost me $450nzd.
They used to have a P2 350mhz, 20gig, 64 gforce 2, etc etc system that was going at snails pace mainly because of Norton Antivirus. I upgraded it to a Althon Sempron64 2600+, 512mb ddr400, 40gig 7200rpm, gforce4 fx5200, CD+RW 52x, etc etc with a new case. Its only a basic system and used my old graphics card with their old monitor, keyboard and mouse. Now they have a fast computer with everything they need. It does also play the latest games just at a little lower graphic level.

By the way ethan, an upgrade of your ram to 1 or 2 gig and possibly a new hard drive would only cost around $300. Looking at your system specs, your hard drive would most likely be a 7200rpm so you wouldn't need to worry about that. A good 1gig stick should only cost max $150AUD. If you have slow start-ups when entering windows then you may have a 5400rpm drive.

Kind Regards
lamedog
 
You may want to get rid of the 9600xt and pick up a 6600gt for cheap. The 9600 isn't fast enough to use the 256mb of memory it has so you're wasting 128mb of memory on an old card that is slow.
 
Ya I know you got that graphics card recently but for 450 bucks you should ditch it and get 2x 512 sticks or if you can 2x 1024 sticks of ram. Get a 6800gs AGP card or a 6600GT agp card, the amount of ram doesnt necessarily coincide with how good the card is. A 128mb 6600GT will blow away a 256 mb 9600.
 
yea what i would do is give my dad my 9600xt and get a new one but hes just a gotten a new card too, so yea, ill have to find somewere that'll buy my 9600xt i guess and also my motherboard only holds 2 gig right so i wouldnt be able to use 2x1024 sticks would i?
 
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