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Chaos (40)
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[Millicent Bystander]

Looks my PC is finally unable to run the latest upcoming games that I actually want to play (Left 4 Dead and Far Cry 2) so I'm seriously looking to upgrade.  Last time I did any research on PC components was January so I'm pretty out of touch.

At the moment my PC is a Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 3500, 2Gb RAM, Ati 3850 Graphics, 2 x 80Gb Hard Drives and a old but very nice 17" flatscreen monitor.  Its running Windows XP Pro

I'm looking to upgrade the processor so the motherboard and RAM will have to be upgraded too.  I could also use a new hard drive and I might as well get Vista at the same time.

So, what do you guys recommend.  My budget is small.  Are the new AMD processors any good?

[thereason]

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200809.ars/2

[Chaos]

intel q6600 is an awsome quad, and tis cheap too (£120)
Asus P5Q Pro Intel P45 mobo(£100)
4GB of geil black dragon ram 4x1GB (£60)
ATI HD4850 Vid card (£120)

HDD wise, I would get anything by WD but the caviar drives are awsome for the price...
pick a size you want... and make sure its sata II (2 drives are better of course, 1 windows/apps/games and 1 for media/backup ect)

dvd drive, best ones can be had for about £15

a MODULAR 650w psu (get a branded one like corsair, antec, ect... and make sure its 80+ certified)

pick a nice case with good airflow, I recomend the antec 900 (also buy and install any optional fans, the 900 has an optional 120mm side fan)

and get vista x64 (home premium will do most people for gaming ect...)

If you can afford it, get an arctic freezer 7 cpu heatsink, youll get your cpu up to 3.2 ghz that way

can get the lot for about £750 and itll play anything current or in the pipeline

[claws]

Depends how much you want to spend (assuming you can re-use case - check the PSU). If you're looking to keep it under a couple of hundred or so, go AMD - otherwise I still think the dual core Intels are nice.

I'd probably spend less than Chaos - I don't think the £100 quid mobo's really offer much more than the £50 quid ones - but do pick a decent brand.

[Chaos]

i picked that mobo cuz its p45, which means itll be able to handle both the quad and 4850... p35 wont as its pcie 1.1 i think
but oddly, intel chipsets for ati cards and nforce chips for nVidia....
im writing a whole 20 page rig building tutorial with all this listed

[Millicent Bystander]

I was looking at under £200 for the mobo etc and maybe another £120 for a hard drive/Vista, the graphics card is adequate for the moment, it's not even a year old and can actually still be bought.

[Chaos]

lol well your looking at buying something thats not future proof...
so keep your graphics card
you can get vista home premium oem for about 60 quid... 500 gig hard drive for about 60...
but if you want a mobo that you wont need to upgrade if you get a new cpu, then youll need either a p45 or p43...
thing to remember is that someone will always buy your old rig
so sell your old setup and start a fresh...
its a nice feeling to know its all new ect

[Zarf]

Intel vs AMD, Intel have a decent lead - only slightly more expensive than the similarly performing AMD offerings but the Intels have a lot more overclocking headroom.

you can grab yourself a decent mobo for around £50, 4gb ram for about the same, Q6600 for £115 - Thats roughly your £200 budget.

[thereason]

Don't upgrade to Vista, you will get lower frame rates and have less ram available in game.  Xp pro service pack 3 is perfect for older/less powerful systems

[Zarf]

Not the case Reason - with 4GB ram you need a 64 bit OS to be able to use it all, and XP x64 is pants.  Frame rates are equal nowadays with current drivers.

[thereason]

But he is not looking to spend much money so stick to 3gb  and dont waste money on vista (i presume he will PAY for it) and stick with XP.  Why upgrade to get the same frame rates?

[Alex]

I made the experiment myself a month ago, switched from XP to Vista.
Why? Because everyone said it's fine by now and the drivers fixed the performance loss etc. That, as I found out, is not the case.
On my old rig (Pentium D 3,0 Ghz, HD 2900, 2GB ram) I could run TF2 at max. details with pretty stable 30-40 fps in XP. In vista, I got 25-30 fps idle with nothing going on, and in combat it dropped down to 10-15, unplayable.
In XP I could watch HD-Movies (720p) with no lag whatsoever, in Vista I'd get a lot of lag and, thanks to the sound always fucking up if the CPU-load is 100%, sound-stuttering. Listening to music while decompressing something? Better not.
Since all of the above was not unexpected for me, I never formated my XP partition, and was happy I could just switch back. Not a big deal.
However, the real horror started when I wanted to get rid of the small Vista-Partition I created with the Vista installer. Starting up Partition Magic, my whole 750 GB drive, all three partitions (Vista, Games and my Files) showed up as "BAD".
Long story short: the Vista installer somehow fucked up the partition tables so that you couldn't read them in XP. I had to gather all the data and recreate them byte-per-byte so that my files weren't lost.

tl;dr Do not switch to Vista, it still is slower. If you have to try it, do not delete your XP installation, and DO NOT mess with the partitions using the Vista setup.

Thread-related:

I would go with the stuff Chaos posted, for the case I can recommend the antec three hundred, really nice layout and airflow, I like it

[Chaos]

I STILL think that vista is quicker than XP
I had XP on this machine and it stank
XP- for lesser computers sure
vista for good ones

but if your are limited to 200 quid, do what zarf said, but make sure you got a 1333Mhz fsb and PCIe 2.0 to futureproof it

[mode_seven]

Oh stop being such a smug arse, not all of our computer budgets match the GDP of Paraguay.

[Chaos]

Oh stop being such a smug arse, not all of our computer budgets match the GDP of Paraguay.

SCREW YOU
ILL BE AS SMUG AS I LIKE
GET A BETTER JOB