Old Comp... Need Upgrade

[fps justin]

Alright my friend and new member Lux Mundi has the following specs.

2600+ AMD Athlon xp @ 2.13Ghz
512 Ram (not sure prolly value)
NVIDIA Geforce4 MX440 (definitely needs something a bit more powerful if you know what i mean. ROFL)
and a 120GB Hard drive.

He has no idea how many watts the PSU is or what the Mobo is.

At anyrate, he needs sum power for little money. The same old Bang for the Buck. Any ideas?

[gvblake22]

Well what kinds of things does he do with his computer? Gaming? Photoshop? Internet & E-mail? Writing papers? Intense 3D rendering and movie editing? Audio and video encoding/decoding/transcoding? Lots of file compression/archiving?

His primary uses will depict the suitable parts to upgrade...

[fps justin]

Gaming.

I'm thinking of the EVGA E-GEFORCE 6600GT 128M DDR3 AGP8X. 170 dollars

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by fps justin

Gaming.

I'm thinking of the EVGA E-GEFORCE 6600GT 128M DDR3 AGP8X. 170 dollars

Yeah, that would probably be a worthwhile upgrade to improve gaming performance. He will see a big difference over his old GeForce MX

Also, what is his RAM configuration? Does he have one stick of 512MB or two sticks of 256MB? If it is just one stick of 512MB, then adding another similar stick of 512MB would be a good upgrade too. Would double his ammount of memory and give him dual channel RAM.

[fps justin]

i agree.

Something cheaper in terms of a video card would be the ASUS A9550/TD Radeon 9550 AGP8X 128MB 64BIT for 67 dollars.

Or the Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro 256MB DDR2 AGP for 154 dollars.

[Tyreal]

any of those would give a good boost. The ram is probably just a generic brand.

I would go for a cheaper videocard, and another stick of 512mb. If he is on PC2700, chuck it out and get a PC3200 stick.

What games does he/she play?

[fps justin]

i'm not all too sure but he wants to play the "newer" games.

I looked and saw this Kingston HyperX PC3200 1GB 2X512MB DDR400 CL2-3-2-6 1T 184PIN DIMM Dual Channel Memory Kit for 105 dollars.

[fps justin]

I also have a question. Would the MX 4000 and the Radeon 9550 be better than the MX 440?

[Tyreal]

Is that the cheapest kit? Since he probably won't be doing any overclocking or memory tweaking, buy the cheapest 1GB kit that is not a no name generic brand.

If he wants to play newer games that are going to be released or have been released in the last few months, you will probably want a 6600GT. You will definately want to get him to 1GB of Ram too.

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by fps justin

I also have a question. Would the MX 4000 and the Radeon 9550 be better than the MX 440?

The 9550 would be the best out of those cards, but the 9550 isn't very good. A 9600pro would be a better choice than any of those. In terms of being able to play the "latest" games, you probably aren't going to want to get anything less than a 6600GT or X1600Pro.
Maybe LuxMundi could post his thoughts since it is his system... :?

EDIT: I'm moving this thread to "HardwareLogic" because it is still computer related and not "Off Topic"...