Dr Nick

Hi everybody!

I am thinking of spending about £100-150 on an upgrade for my PC

I have Asus A7V266 mobo, 256 mb SDRAM, Athlon 1200 (o/cd to 1308 ) and Gforce 4mx gfx card.

I am either going to get a 512 mb DDR 2100 stick at about £110

or a Athlon 2200+ cpu at about £130.

One day I will buy the other one but for now can only afford one of the above.

The things that push my system that I generally do are:

encode MP3s (from discs that I own)
play quake 3 fortress on line way better than counterstrike IMO
run far too many TSRs in the background
run seti@home modules (currently one takes about 6 hours)

I am erring towards the memory since I believe a doubling of capacity and bandwidth cant be a bad idea and whilst my mobo only supports up to the 2200 presently it may one day support the 2600 with a BIOS update.

Comments appreciated.

Cheers

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

CPU first then RAM. the ddr ram will be quicker than your sdr setup but not that noticeable. More importantly the amount of RAM will help more, as you will be doubling up.

The CPU will have the biggest impact here. However you wont be getting the best from it until u get some DDR RAM to

DominicA

i'd go for the RAM and wait for the CPU to come down in price... crucial should do 512Mb online for £90 ish....

ChrisB

What O/S? If it's a 9x product, then more 256MB is pointless.

2000/XP will use it properly.

I'd probably take the CPU first.

DominicA

as above, if running 9x then go cpu..... oops

jase555

Better Graphics Card

gf4 mx ........

get a gf3 ti 200/500 or gf4 ti

Dr Nick

I run ME. What camp does this fall into apart from the C**p one?

I am happy with my GFx card for now. A full Gforce 4 was too expensive when I last upgraded from my trusty TNTIIM64. I will buy another one when Doom III comes out next year ... mmmmmmm monstery

Cheers

dsmith

Best upgrade would be Win2K Pro or XP

or the CPU then 'cos ME wont know what to do with the memory. Consider a quick ATA133 disk and card aswell instead though.

Deano

ChrisB

Yeah, Win ME is essentially the same code base as 95/98, so doesn't make proper use of more than 256MB. You might see some improvement going to 512MB but not as big as 64 or 128 to 256MB.

I'd swap the CPU for an Athlon 2000 and move up to W2000 or XP if you're apps / games support it.

Dr Nick

I have no intention of giving microsoft any more money for a long time. Certainly not with their spyware registration system.

The next move will be Linux and Ive got some serious work to do to get my head round this new OS first.

So I'll be sticking with ME for some time.

Thanks for the advice all

naturbo2000

How about:

Athlon 2000+ - 80.08 + VAT
extra 256MB Ram - 24.93 + VAT

= 105.01 + VAT
= 123.39 inc VAT and delivery

www.ebuyer.com

- as good as Insight used to be