Looking to upgrade my steam powered PC

Currently running a 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon with 512mb DDR RAM and a Nvidia Geforce 5200 113Mb.

Not looking for all singing dancing type of thing but more of a upgrade from what i have.

Heavily addicted to rFactor on the PC and up until now it has ran without too much grief. Now the PCC2007 series is with us the old Babbage special is struggling even on the lowest settings available.

So what would be an improvement over what i have the now.

Crucial factor is it has to be much cheapness as i am on a mission to build this thing for as little as possible. So far it has cost me two meals at the local Chinese

Thanks

 

First thing I would do is up your RAM to at least a gig.

At for a GFX card, you will be limited to AGP - so unless you want to dablle in the second hand marker, then you are looking at something like this:

EVGA GeForce 7800 GS OC 256MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI (AGP) - Retail (256-A8-E506-AX)

 

I currently have 2 sticks of 256mb DDR RAM, will i just purchase and insert 2 sticks of 512mb DDR RAM?. Do sticks of 512mb RAM exist?

Oh that link looks a bit pricy, looks like ebay will have to suffice. Is that the level of card/spec i am looking at to get an improvement over what i have just now?

Thanks

 

Asus GeForce N7600GS Silent HTD 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (AGP) - Retail

Thats a cheaper card - Still a significant improvement on what you have.

As for the RAM, it entirely depends on your motherboard. If you have only 2 slots for RAM you will need to get 2 512MB sticks to replace the 2 you have - That will set you back about £40 - maybe less.

Or you could just buy the one stick of 512 and up your machine to 768MB RAM will will still imrpove matters.

Go to Memory upgrades, flash media, and usb storage at Crucial.com to find exactly what RAM you need, they have quite a nice selection tool that does pretty much all the work for you.

I would guess for that machine you need DDR266 - also known as PC2100