Upgrading Computer?

I'm finally in need of a upgrade for my computer, currently sitting on:

AMD 3400 Athlon 64
Crappy Asus Mobo(Can't remember model. lol)
160GB HDD thats loud and dying.
Nvidia 8600.

Heres what I have choose so far...


Is this a good deal? I am on a tight budget, so if anyone can get the equivalent of that for cheaper. I'm all for it.

Thanks.

 

Not a terrible choice given your budget... but given that....
Seems like the only thing worth keeping on your old computer is the 8600. Which means rebuilding the entire thing, instead of an "upgrade" might be better. Meaning don't buy "slightly" faster, just invest in a few good pieces, or wait for a spanking hot deal on a complete set. I remember I got my Dell Core2Quad (the entire PC, shitty graphics card, decent other stuff) for a killer deal.

 

Usually I upgrade parts of my computer when they become outdated. Lately, I have been low on budget and been slacking. The Nvidia was recently bought about 5 months ago, so thats obviously the newest item. That, Duel Layer DVD Recorder and case is all I plan on keeping.

I thought Newegg had Mobo/CPU combos but I haven't managed to find them on there site.

 

What do you have memorywise?

 

Get paid on Monday, probably around $200 and the items I need right now critically is a Mobo/CPU, Memory, and HDD. Then another two weeks I'll have another $200 which I plan on buying other accessories. My mouse is a five year old optical mouse that is still running strong. lol.

 

looks good for the budget

honestly I'd just save up and build a new system though

 

I'm 15 and Make about $200 every two weeks on my part time job, I don't know how long it will take to save up for a decent computer.

I was considering maybe building a dell computer and paying the $40 dollars a month which isn't bad for the computer I built but a $1400 dollar computer paying about $40 a month plus interest, really don't know how long it will take to pay that baby off.

 

I just maxed out my memory to 4GB (four 1GB modules I got off Crucial.com) for around seventy bucks.

Upgrading memory is great for juicing up your comp, I not only timed a faster bootup, but I can run pretty much as many programs as I want without rrying about lag. I just ran PhotoShop CS2, AVID Video Editor, and RS HD all at once without a hitch in any of them.

I HIGHLY recommend Crucial.com for picking up some memory, they're fast and pretty fucking cheap.

 

Another way to increase your memory is to use paging files. They treat part of one or part of all of your HDDs at RAM, so you can have alot of RAM. Use some memory from that 500GB hard drive to increase your RAM. You can increase it a hecka amount with that. I got 14 GB of RAM with paging on this laptop.

 

Paging is used to make it POSSIBLE to run programs that require lots of RAM if your comp is short on the real stuff.

Writing to and from the hard drive takes much more time, and increasing the pagefile to 100GB won't make the same difference that a 4GB RAM upgrade will.

 

Hard drives generally should be used for what they are intented for, they are not nearly as fast as memory and you will feel considerable performance problems when you start using your HDD for memory while constantly reading from it.

It's only $30 for two gigabytes of memory and I like that option better.

 

Not a bad choise for upgrading, but I don't see the graphics card.

 

If you want... You can buy a kind of cheap computer and then upgrade the shit out of it.

 

I already have a brand new Nvidia 8600 which will last me quite awhile.

 

Upgrading memory won't do much performance increase from 2GB and up, keep that in mind. ( I recently upgraded from 2GB to 4GB and seem to see no performance differ)

I'd just say upgrade your CPU to at least a 5000+ or some of the cheaper phenoms... Get a new HD as well. Seagate has some good HD's that are quiet.