well I bought a new pc round about few months ago, well i just generally feel its time to upgrade it a bit nothing major just something that will increase performance of the pc. Not in the gaming area i have bought a graphics card for what i need and i not for dvd drives becaue i am happy with those aswell. Something along the lines of HD, Ram or processor but to be honest i dont want to go out and buy a new processor after just 5 months wel anyway this is my pc at the moment. Asrock K7VM4 Motherboard AMD Athlon XP (Model 8) 256 MB DDR-SDRAM PC 3200 Hitachi Deskstar7K250 80 GB (7200rpm, 8.5ms access, 2mb cache, -757mbit/sec raw, 29.7-61.4mbyte/sec sustained, 1" high) Sapphire Radeon 9600SE 128MB DDR AGP 8x DVI-i TV-Out Retail Box Pioneer DVR-107D Lite-On Combo LTC-48161H Also Whats PF Usage in windows task manager? and what should it be around?
Hi, What speed is you CPU? It may be worth upgrading that, I know its a pain if you've only just upgraded, but I went from a 1600XP to a barton 2500XP and the difference was fantastic. You say you don't play games so your card is fine, but what is your main application? A HDD with an 8mb cache would make a difference too, althought the Deskstars are a fine drive Again, personla experience, I went from a Seagate barracuda 2mb cache to a Western Digital SE 8mb Cache, difference was great, for load times, copying and general useage. More memory is always good so it may be worth putting another 256mb in there. All this depends on your budget and needs of course, let us know what you will be doing and how much you want to spend (also if you in UK,CND,USD etc..) Guys on here will help gladly. EDIT: Your PF useage is PageFile, vitual memory on your HDD. Difficult to say what it should be, depends on what your doing, mine is at 200 at the minute.
well i dont have a clear budget if you get me i was moving towards the ram aswell? i was wondering do they both have to be 3200 since the onei got is 3200 do i have to get another 3200? and how much should i go up by? am in the uk the budget? well under £100 and any sites wud be great
Hi, the RAM doesnt HAVE to be the same, but in an ideal situation they should be. You can put in a stick of slower memory and depending on your motherboard it should operate the 2 sticks at that speed. Some fussy boards will just give you error beeps Depending how close you want to get to a £100 you could get a 512MB stick of cheap 3200 and have about £25 spare or push right to the limit of £100 and go for some 512MB corsair *nice*. I will only recommend people I have dealt with and although there are cheap sites such as e-buyer, their support sux and that makes a big difference in my book. Give these guys a try www.aria.co.uk Hope this helps. EDIT: theres also a thing about matching the FSB of your CPU to the memory speed, although ive never understood it myself. My 2700 (DDR333) worked fine with my 1600XP (266 FSB) Praetor? can you enlighten us? cheers
It is Dunno but wasnt there something about the hardware design of PC2700 and PC2100 memory which prevented them from being run interchangeably?
They run ok together but drop to the lowest speed, I gave a friend a stick of 256 2700 and he ran it with his 2100. Didnt realise he only had a 266 chipset when i gave it him I see a lot on the net about matching chip FSB and memory speeds, only reference I can find is that ddr333 outperformed ddr400 when it was first out, alongside a barton CPU. Seems unfair to me as DDR400 was out before the chipsets had matured. I'm not one for benchmarking but I guess there is a site somewhere that has tested it...tomshardware or anandtech maybe. Anyway, sorry Im going a bit OT. Get more memory
I dont want to do no oc at the mo. i was wondering however if i should bother? What i really want is a new comp soon something with pci express, the new ddr memory and a 64 bit processor so it will last me through college and uni with some upgrades and i wondering wha price i would be looking at
Hi, as far as i know there is no AMD board with DDR2 or PCI-X support....yet. It will be here soon I'm sure, but as more appear there will be price drops....as always. Difficult to know when to buy, but you have to take the plunge one day, or make do with what you have. One of Praetors responses on another post was for a guy to buy a 2500Xp and an Asus motherboard...thats sound advice and wouldnt cost you a great deal, even with some added memory
do u think it will be by te end of the year? i need the pc to ast me a good vouple of year and i only want to spend 200-300 upgrading it at a later date
Prolly but it wont come cheap (neither with PCIX cards and DDR2 memory) Not gonna happen ... not for that length of time nor that amount of money.
ok when will those feature fit in the £1500 range? and how much do u think i will need to spend at a later date to keep it up to descent standard
You can buy a pre-built NEC machine for £1,299+vat. 3.6ghz P4, 1gb DDR-2 400, PCI-X ATI Card. I guess if you can buy it for that price you could build one for a similair price tag, just not around an AMD unfortunately. Dificult to say how much you'll need to spend to keep it decent, things change way too quick, if you had a PCI-X Nvidia 6800, you could another later on (SLI). But this too is a while off yet. Unfortunately, you'll have to make your choice now and HOPE it outlasts your expectations...but I doubt it will though
No No, I dont need any graphics card..gaming aint wot i want to use it for. i just want pci express incase at a later date i decide to upgrade because i know thats whats gonna become the norm. My main things are DDR 2 and to make it future proof.
No I know, I was just giving an example of that price range you mentioned £1500. If you want DDR2 and PCI-X and an AMD CPU, you will have to wait a while. Id recommend waiting a short while when there released to, so they can iron out any bugs with chipsets etc. Future-proofing is the biggest problem you will face, I dont think its possible to build a home PC that will last a couple of years and still be high-end, even mid-range is a push. I think your best vet for now would be to add a 512MB stick of memory to your current setup and wait it out for a while.
