Upgrading on a budget

Mysteria · 24 Jul 2007 at 19:57

I'm looking to upgrade my current system and I've got a budget of £200 ish. My issue is what to upgrade first.

My current system:

Akasa Eclipse 62 Case
AMD 3500+ 939 CPU
Zalman CNPS7700 Cooler
Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe Mobo
Enermax Noisetaker 485W PSU
2GB Corsair Value RAM
XFX 6800GS XXX Edition
120GB Hitachi 2mb Cache (Windows Drive)
250GB Samsung 8mb Cache (Games Drive-sorry its not a Raptor

)

Ok, so my question is what would be better to upgrade-the graphics card or Mobo/CPU/RAM? I do plan to upgrade all at some point but student budget won't stretch that far atm.

I was looking at a 8800 GTS if I went with graphics card but I'm not sure whether the 12v Rails amp on the PSU are good enough (I get a bit confused by it tbh). My other concern was that my other system components would bottleneck a new graphics card.

Help and advice would be much appreciated. Cheers!

1337z0r · 24 Jul 2007 at 20:00

You could get away with having a 8800GTS in there. The CPU would be the main problem as it would most likely bottleneck the GPU. You could try looking around for a cheap dual core socket 939 if you do not plan to do a major upgrade as you have 2GB of ram. I would thin think the PSU will cope as it's not cheap brand Enermax are fairly good.

You would see no difference in games by upgrading to Intel and not upgrading the GPU imo.

The_Vindicator · 24 Jul 2007 at 20:26

I have a nice X2 4200+ you can have if you trust my cursed hardware

Alex UK · 24 Jul 2007 at 20:36

If you'll be upgrading all your components gradually, then the logical place to start would be a decent Mobo/CPU/RAM combination.

Bloodust · 24 Jul 2007 at 20:44

I got 8800gts replacing my old 6600gt and it gave me no improvent in mmorpg game (Lineage II). Havent tried any fps games yet tho..

Mysteria · 25 Jul 2007 at 17:19

Alex UK said:
If you'll be upgrading all your components gradually, then the logical place to start would be a decent Mobo/CPU/RAM combination.

Thats what I was thinking, but will probably be xmas time before I can upgrade again so looking for best boost now for what I can afford and what will run with my other components.