Upgrade or rebuild?

G

GhostEye

New Member
Hello all and ty for reading my thread! any advice is greatly appreciated. On to the important stuff:

I want to be able to play the new games like bioshock, upcoming crysis, at good settings with no frame lag and old games like fear, halflife 2, las vegas, Supreme commander at top setting with no lag.

Now i currently am running a amd 3800 x2 (dual core). sadly this is a HP so i cant overclock it at all. i have 1 gig of DDR2 @ 200 mhz and a ati x1650 radeon graphics card (PCI Express slot).

Do you guys think If i upgraded my graphics card to a 8600 GT:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150229

and put in another gig of ram (if i need more gigs lemme know), would i be able to play the prior mentioned games at medium-high settings with no frame lag? if that gfx card is a POS i wouldnt mind spending another 150 and getting the 8800gt but i rather save my money :)

Or do you think my CPU will be to slow, or the memory would be to slow or something like that were I should just discard this machine and buy a whole new one.

O and one final note: Should i upgrade my comp to windows vista ( i have a best buy rebate reciept for a free upgrade ). Im thinking ill need it for dx10 for crysis and whatnot.

Right now i can barely play fear and supreme commander gets very laggy. even WoW is sitting at around 20 fps with 1600 resolution (only 2x AA). And switching inbetween programs takes foreever but this might be a different issue with my comp.

thx for reading
 
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for 1 your ram CANT be running at 200 Mhz. your processor is a dual core, i cant see why you would be laggy very much, though with your resolution (1200/1600 i think u said) i am beginning to understand. since it is an HP, upgrading anything besides the ram, GFX and HDD can be troublesome. i suggest trying to upgrade your graphics card, but make sure you have adequate cooling, eh?

a card with 256MB of Vram doesnt cut it nowadays, unfortunetely. something like an 8800GTS with 320MB of ram will actually see a very large increase, if the processor will not be bottlenecked by it. personally, i have never changed the proc from an HP, so i can only speak from friends experience there, but as far as i have seen, it can be difficult.
 
For one you don't have to oc to run games like Fear, Prey, HL2, and others at 1280x960 like Fear or 1280x1024 like Prey, HL2, and others on high settings. These games are maxing at the 1280x1024 by their own design. The HP there would definitely be a little antiquated by 1gb, power supply, and the cpu to a limited degree for Vista and one of the new high end cards.

The present games out still won't benefit to any degree from DX10. The games that will eventually come out that require it will then utilitize more of the improvements. A good 2gb of performance memory won't help you much on the prebuild there unfortunately. A good 450w supply is the recommended minimum for the new 8600s and 8800s.
 
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