I have a AMD Athlon(tm) with 1.25 GHz and 256 MB of RAM. It also has a 127 GB Hard Drive. I want to be able to play the current games like Gears of War and Crysis. I am limited in money and figured that upgrading would cost less than buying a whole new comp right? So what kind of upgrades should I get and where? I don't need to have the best upgrades just good enough so that the games I play would be stable and run smoothly. Thanks!
you have to upgrade the whole system to get any new games running. new motherboard, power supply, cpu, ram, and graphics card is needed. instead of upgrading, you're basically building a new computer. you'll need at least $800 for everything, $1000 to be on the safe side.
Yeah, a upgrade will definetly be needed. Even my pc (see my sig) cant play Crysis maxed with good fps on a good resolution, not pc in the world can. For a good upgrade, around 2k is needed. Maybe a little less, but I ordered a new upgrade, 2 3870s, Q6600, new mobo, psu, hard drive, ram, and some more stuff for a little less. This system is estimated to play Crysis on veryhigh with around 27fps, which isnt a lot.
So I would have to upgrade the whole system. Well what if I just want to make my computer faster. I would have to change the processor right(those chips that says intel on them)? I have never change a processor before. How do you know which processor will work on on the motherboard?
you'll only be able to find original athlon's used at pick and pull computer shops. best thing to do is max out the ram, before switching the processor. to find out what processor socket type you have, download cpu-z. and to find out what memory your motherboard uses, go to crucial.com and run their system scanner.
Ok I'll upgrade my RAM first. There is no limit to how much RAM I can have other than how many slots there are on the mother board right? Like I have 3 slots and put 3 1GB RAM, my comp wont limit me to 1.5GB? Also, I've downloaded cpu-z to see what type of RAM I need. I have 3 slots. It says 256MB DDR PC2700(166Mhz) Kingston Part Number: K. So if I go to the store or search on ebay, I just look for RAM that are DDR?
you might be limited to 1.5 gigs of ram as i think each slot on your board maxes out at 512meg. what is the make & model# of the computer or motherboard to see what you have & what you might be able to goto? what is your budget amount?
If I'm honest, upgrading hat system will be a comlete false economy. The components for it are so old and rare, you'll end up paying more to upgrade your existing components than to buy far superior new ones. The best thing I can suggest you do is get a decent performing low-cost new system, and you can proceed from there. You don't need high end components to play recent games, but you can't skimp in any area (for example, no matter how fast your CPU is you'll need a decent graphics card, and vice versa). I'd recomend tracking down: Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160 Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Motherboard 2x1GB PC5400 DDR2 RAM Nvidia Geforce 7600GT PCie Graphics card Thermaltake Purepower 500W Power supply You can use your current hard drive, CD drive, mouse keyboard and monitor, and potentially your case as long as it's not too small. Also, it sounds like you formatted your hard drive when you didn't have any windows service packs installed. If you were to back up your data, and reformat it within a Windows installation that had service packs, you could get some additional storage space, as no 127GB hard drives were made, that's just the maximum windows can recogise of a drive formatted before SPs were put on it.
