I built my system about 4 or 5 years ago, at the time i put mostly top end parts in it, cost me about a bit. Quad cores were pretty new at the time and I was hesitant to use one as I tried a build and found that a core 2 duo gave me better performance, I was using Age of Conan as my benchmark. Now the system is starting to show its age, and while I am not ready to build a whole new system I was wondering which upgrades would give me the most bang for my buck without breaking the bank. I just purchased a 120 gig solid state hard drive and im waiting on a new dvd drive to reinstall my OS onto it. Was thinking maybe a ram upgrade would be best but the motherboard im using is pretty old and has a coldboot error on it plus it doesnt support ahci for the ssd. My CPU is socket 775 and motherboards for that arent very easy to find or cheap. Any advice would be great. Current system specs Intel Core 2 duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz 3.06GHz Ram : 4 Gig 1066 Motherboard : Abit IP-35e Video Card : Gtx 260 HDD : Hitachi 1tb 7200 rpm / Corsair Neutron GTX 120gb SSD Sata 3
It is a DDR2 board... You can get some good deals on top notch 775 boards on Ebay...Just did 2 upgrades for friends... You should be able to find something for under $75... The best bang for your buck depends on what all you do with it?...Encoding?...Gaming?...Surfing?...Business?...and what is your budget?... Where do you live..USA?...East Coast?..or West?...