Skellington9270
New Member
Greeting and salutations,
Some back story before we get into it. I have very, very little disposable income... basically nothing. I'm 24 but instead of student loans I have medical bills. I've been building computers since I took interest is high school and took a few vocational classes in A+ and networking but that was 7-8 years ago.
So let's roll with that. Before you laugh, this rig has been built out of 6 different computers, virtually from different eras and up until I switched mobo's and CPU's everything had been working as well as it could for over 3 years.
My current rig:
Motherboard - HT2000 mcp61pm-hm
CPU- AMD Athlon 64x2 6000+ (never tried or been overclocked)
4x1GB DDR2 (all the motherboard can handle)
and an off brand 400w power supply.
Cooling is no issue (4 120mm case fans and 1 60mm cpu fan/heatsink
My current two issues:
Asus GeForce 8500GT just bit the dust by short circuiting the hdmi port thus rendering it useless
and to top it off, critical hard drive failure. Nothing could be recovered.
What I'm looking for is help and brain storming in using as many parts that currently work as I can with a newer or "new to me" build. Also a working OS that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg. All it has to be is Vista or newer. I'm not looking for the latest and greatest. Just something that can run... let's say Command and Conquer 4 on medium/low settings and be reliable.
If I keep my mobo it's limited to one PCIE x16 1.0 but I recently read that 2.0 cards can work on it as well?
On a good day I'm looking at maybe $100-200 to spend on new parts.
I can put computers together but I don't know details which is why I'm asking for your help.
Thank you for any input.
Some back story before we get into it. I have very, very little disposable income... basically nothing. I'm 24 but instead of student loans I have medical bills. I've been building computers since I took interest is high school and took a few vocational classes in A+ and networking but that was 7-8 years ago.
So let's roll with that. Before you laugh, this rig has been built out of 6 different computers, virtually from different eras and up until I switched mobo's and CPU's everything had been working as well as it could for over 3 years.
My current rig:
Motherboard - HT2000 mcp61pm-hm
CPU- AMD Athlon 64x2 6000+ (never tried or been overclocked)
4x1GB DDR2 (all the motherboard can handle)
and an off brand 400w power supply.
Cooling is no issue (4 120mm case fans and 1 60mm cpu fan/heatsink
My current two issues:
Asus GeForce 8500GT just bit the dust by short circuiting the hdmi port thus rendering it useless
and to top it off, critical hard drive failure. Nothing could be recovered.
What I'm looking for is help and brain storming in using as many parts that currently work as I can with a newer or "new to me" build. Also a working OS that isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg. All it has to be is Vista or newer. I'm not looking for the latest and greatest. Just something that can run... let's say Command and Conquer 4 on medium/low settings and be reliable.
If I keep my mobo it's limited to one PCIE x16 1.0 but I recently read that 2.0 cards can work on it as well?
On a good day I'm looking at maybe $100-200 to spend on new parts.
I can put computers together but I don't know details which is why I'm asking for your help.
Thank you for any input.