£200 What to upgrade

[WeatherMan]

Hey guys, having a hard time trying to work out what to upgrade

System Specs.


E2200 @ 3GHz
Gigabyte iP31-DS3L
Sapphire HD4850 @ 700/2240
3GB PC6400
320GB + 160GB Hard Drives
600W Tagan
Pioneer DVDRW

Freezer Pro 7
Jeantech Aqua
Acoustic Energy Aegos M's
Asus 19" Widescreen LCD
.............................................


Here's what I've been thinking about


1. Buying another 4850.

2. Upgrading to a 22" / 24" Widescreen

3. Changing out motherboard & going with 4GB ram, sticking in my old E6400 & run @ 3.45GHz. (Experience CPU Bottlenecking in a few games)

4. Swap out the case, kit it out.

5. Get a Quad (Q8200)

6. Get a few additional Hard Drives.


What would you do?

 

[Bartmasta]

All of that stuff is better than mine and I upgraded 3 weeks ago

Don't upgrade your stuff is fine, only do so when you have to

 

[daisymtc]

1. Buying another 4850.
No point. Your Mobo not support crossfire

2. Upgrading to a 22" / 24" Widescreen
Is your 19" widescreen? If you have 4:3 19" LCD, you will feel the difference of upgrading...

3. Changing out motherboard & going with 4GB ram, sticking in my old E6400 & run @ 3.45GHz. (Experience CPU Bottlenecking in a few games)
Your Mobo supporting 4GB Max

4. Swap out the case, kit it out.
Your case look OK to me

5. Get a Quad (Q8200)
I would say it worth upgrade to C2Q. I suggest getting a Q9550, although it out of your budget.

6. Get a few additional Hard Drives.
If you have enough space, why bother to have extra hard drive?


Other upgrade - Sound Card?
I don't know how often you use your PC listen to music, since you've got a good quality set of speaker, it may worth getting a good quality sound card.

 

[WeatherMan]

Hey thanks for the reply

With the Adding another 4850 situation, was also thinking of buying a cheap CF Capable mobo.

My monitor is Widescreen, do like the advantage of going to 1680 x 1050 / 1920 x 1200 though.

Reason I was thinking about getting a new case is that mine has a huge dent in the top, and is kind of aging now.

Space wise I could do with getting a few extra drives.

Sound card I have is a 24Bit live external. Been looking at the XFi Xtreme Music.

What additional features would an xfi card give me ?

 

[Shane]

i would upgarde to quad,forget teh rest.

btw im sligtly confused to why you said....

sticking in my old E6400 & run @ 3.45GHz

for starters the e6400 has twice the cache,faster bus speed against the E2200 so why are you realy using the Pentium Dual core?

 

[WeatherMan]

Its kinda complicated

I had my E6400 Ages ago in a P5B DLX & 3.45GHz (Ram limited)


Board died, got a new board, crapped out at X with various ram. So picked up the E2200 for £35 seing as it had a 11 multi, therefor letting me clock a bit higher than I could with my old E6400. ( I was having lag issues with GRID, any of the bloom scenes would plummit me down to 30FPS where other scenes I'd get around 100. Clocking the CPU higher enabled me to gain more FPS, cpu limited.

Anyway, I was running at 3.3GHz with 2GB ram, bought GTR Evo and had lag problems due to not enough ram (Vista Ultimate x64) Stuck in another stick to reduce the lag, my board is now not stable above 3GHz (also listed in the manual, using more than 2 dimm slots will cause unstability with an overclocked system. So now im back to 3GHz. Don't lag too much...

Right now I have a E1200, E2200 & E6400 with 3 crappy motherboards lying around.

I guess the most fun thing to do is get a decent motherboard, some nice ram and see what I can get out of the most worthy CPU. Which would be the E6400? Twice the cache, more overclocking headroom etc.

I know with my old P5B Deluxe I could hit 3.45GHz stable, and was able to boot at 3.8GHz. The thing holding me back was my ram, crapped out after 920 or so...

I could maybe pick up some cheap DDR2 1066, a better mobo and have some fun with my E6400, would I need to upgrade from my Freezer 7? I used to run with a Scythe Infinity.


So many choices


The above would certainly get rid of my CPU bottleneck, although so would a Q8200

 

[Shane]

ahh i se,tbh mate what i would do is ,if your a ebay member sell all those processors you have,the E1200, E2200 & E6400 and get this.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/141517

45Nm and has 2mb more L2 cache than Q8200 you were looking at for not much more.

 

[WeatherMan]

Hey thanks for the reply

I recon id get around 50 squid from ebay for these cpu's so il leave it,their always handy to stick in peoples boxes or as a spare .

Plus I'd like to order asap

I only have £150 now, due to the £200 I was getting was from a system build from a guy, who now whats his computer after christmas!

The £150 is Christmas money that I have avaliable now. Im thinking about getting 3/4GB ram that I can get a nice OC out of. Plus a mobo that will give me a bit of headroom on my cpu.

Any idea's on the motherboard?

Seing as I got 3.45GHz on my old P5B, All i'll need is a mobo that can do around 500FSB, and some ram that can match that. which should set me up for around 3.6GHz

I could either get 3GB of PC8000 and be guarenteed to get over 450FSB, depending on the motherboard. Or Get some PC6400, (which is cheaper) and try to find a decent set which will allow me to OC up to where I want.

 

[WeatherMan]

I've been looking at a Asus P5Q / MSI Neo3-FR | What one is the better overclocker?

For the ram, I have my eye on some an OCZ 4GB PC6400 GOLD Series Kit. These do 500Mhz which is fine for me.

Abit dubious about whether or not I'll need a new cpu cooler... My old Infinity cooled my chip well, at 3.45GHz I was at 1.4v IIRC. May have to go up to 1.45 to get any higher than 3.5GHz stable, would a Freezer Pro 7 handle this?

I can't really tell when its running a E2200, which is at some rediculously low voltage, idling at 24c & loading at 50c