Hi guys, I'm very bored and decided I'd take on a small project just to get me used to putting components together and that, hopefully the practice will make me more confident when the time comes to build a new rig. I've got about £90 spare at the moment, and will probably have another £100-£150 or so on top of that in a couple of months (birthday). I was thinking of upgrading my current system and thought I'd see what you guys would do in my position. These are the specs...

Athlon XP 2800+

ASUS A7N8X-LA (SKT A)

ATI Radeon 9200

Hyundai 256 MB DDR PC2700 RAM

Maxtor 80GB hard drive

LG DVD-Rom

HP CD RW

I'm pretty sure it's onboard sound too.

Running XP, do quite a bit of gaming, although I'm really restricted when you look at those specs. The highest spec game I've ever played on it is Halo I think, and even that was quite laggy at times, but I must admit I was surprised it ran it lol. BF2 was a no no, lagged like mad. SWAT 4 is fine though, that's what I'm playing now, as well as UT2004 and UT99.

I find the system to be rather noisy, especially when it comes to the CD/DVD drives, sometimes makes me jump out of my seat, haha. There's also another constant noise which I'm sure is either the HD or fan or something, not faulty, just...**** lol. I've recently had the hard drive replaced, and the CPU and PSU are probably quite new also.

I'm looking to bring it more up to date with a significant performance increase and thought someone could point me in the right direction. I'll leave it up to you guys and your imaginations lol.

Hi PGH,

I can see why it didn't run BF2 lol - it struggles on my system a bit.

Do you want to upgrade or build a complete new one?

sorry it's took so long for me to reply, my internets been down for some reason. anyway, i was thinking along the lines of building a cheap amd based system, which i can then overclock. i think, by the time i go through all the components i'll need to replace in this sytem, i might as well just put together a whole new one lol, plus socket a (462) is out of fashion now i think, worthwile upgrading to something newer like 939 or am2.

Hi PGH,

Definitely go for AM2 over other AMD sockets atm. Although i would suggest that you consider Intel, there core2duo range is very good and beats AMD's equivalent - X2.

Plus they are very overclockable

Chris

yeah the C2D seems like a very nice investement. even though it's more than i originally budgeted for a cpu, the good news is my parents have promised to buy a new computer when this ones guarantee runs out in 2008 sometime. so i have my sights set on a core 2 duo with dx10 graphics. i should think the prices would have dropped by then, and at least the dx10 cards will be of some use. some of the games using dx10 look super sweet.

so now i'm stuck, don't know what to do. i've got money in the bank, waiting for me to start buying components for a new build, but now i think i might as well save it and help my parents out next year by buying a couple of the more expensive parts. and yes, those little things are very overclockable, even with stock cooling, I hear you can knock a E6300 up to a E6400 with minimal effort. so paying the extra money for a E6400 would be kind of a waste if your on a budget. it can also clock with ease, to 3.0 ghz and remain as stable as anything, i'm sure better cooling would be a wise idea.

I noticed someone on another site who had an E6300 @ 4ghz STABLE on air!!!!!!

Crazy Shows how good they are though May overclock mine at some point, many people just bought the C2d's for their overclocking ability.