Big or Small Upgrade

[FeZ]

Hi guys,

I was starting thinking of PC Upgrade again lately, and the more I look into alternatives it seems more and more complicated.

ATM I use an AMD Athlon 2000 / 512MB 266 Memory / ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.

Most of the games/applications I use would greatly benefit from more CPU power and more/faster RAM. The problem also is that my MBD now only supports AGPx4 so my Radeon is not running at its full potential.

So if I want to Upgrade small I would get a new MBD with an AGP slot. In this scenario I could also use the powersupply I use now (350W but quality manufacturer).

The question really is will I see a huge performance gain between AGPx4 and AGPx8 ?
If so I could get a faster/bigger HDD from the money saved )=)

The problem is that I actually dont think that AGP8 would be that much faster, definitely not twice as fast in a real game environment. Can Somebody confirm this ?

If this is the case I would need a BIG Upgrade with a board with PCIe slot and a new Videocard and most likely new PSU.
The other problem is that I would need to go for an expensive highend videocard and not a lowend one that may just be slightly faster than my card now ?

At a small Upgrade I am looking at ~ 600 € but with this I am at a dead end if the Videocard is the bottleneck.
A big upgrade may be as much as ~ 1500 € but this would be upgradeable in the future.

[chris]

PCI-E is the future I think. But it requires big upgrade of everything.

If you've got the money, go for the big upgrade - you won't regret it. I'm happy after having done the same thing.

I did an upgrade in about AUD$1000 to get P4 3.4ghz, Nvidia 6600GT 128mb video card, 512mb ram and a good Intel D925XECV2 mainboard. I already had the HDD, so didn't need a new one. It all performs okay.

[FeZ]

I thought so that a small upgrade does not make much sense, but in this case I may wait for X-Mas ;)

[[MC]Heiliger]

U* won't need a new video card during the next year or maybe longer! :cool:
About the motherboard, they aren't that expensive, the most money will take the cpu and the hdd. And U* want a good processor, well, maybe U*'ll need to wait until Xmas or U* may become lucky and find a nice offer? U* can get alot with 600€ U* only need to know where to buy your stuff!
I payed for my 1GB DDR RAM 400MHz and CL3 Cache 100€, it's not any special offer but I'm fine with it, 'cause it's working smooth.
I don't know what kind of harddrive are U* looking? If it should contain something around 200GB space it gonna cost a bit more than those 100GB drives and lower, well the more space the more money they'll take from U*. Sheesh, that's like it's working with video cards and cpu...:eek:

If U* can't wait, get a drive, that give U* more place to waste until the next hdd. :rolleyes:

[FeZ]

I was thinking of one of that WD Raptor drives with 5ms access time. Its only 74GB but costs about 150€.

For that money I can get a slow 300 GB drive I know, but I dont need that much space anyway, I want speeeeeeeeeed ^_^

For my 600 € budget I was thinking of a 3.8GHz AMD64 / ASUS Board / 1GB CL2 Memory and a nice heatsink.