Time to upgrade?

[hc25036]

I'm a long-time lurker and very occasional poster here and I've noticed how you guys love to help each other spend money! I'm wondering whether it's time to upgrade or whether to wait a bit longer...

I build my own and we have 4 PCs in the house on a network. The main one is used mostly for browsing, homework for the kids, some heavy document production for work and never for serious gaming. The most demanding use is Photoshop CS2 and occasional video editing. It's an Athlon 64 3200 with 2 gig of pc3200, an ATI 256Mb graphics card and plenty of hard disk space. Although fairly quiet (large slow fans, Zalman coolers and an Antec Sonata case), I'd prefer quieter as it lives in the main living room.

The big question is, can I get quieter (and much faster in CS2) with some future-proofing (I always seem to buy CPUs just before the pins change)? I'll need everything except optical drives, monitor, keyboard etc in a decent case with a budget of hundreds rather than thousands of pounds. What would you do - buy or wait a bit? If you'd buy, what kit?? Thanks - Rick

is your board skt 939? if so ocuk have a couple of x2's very cheap.

[Stuart]

I do a fair amount of DVD encoding (with Encore) at home, and some video editing (with Premiere Pro).

I had an Athlon 64 3000 and upgraded to a Core 2 Duo with Asrock 775-vsta motherboard. The 775 isn't the greatest Core 2 motherboard out there, but it is cheap (around £40-£50) and does support both AGP and PCI Express graphics cards, and it also supports pc3200 ram. You can expect to pay around for the CPU.

The processor is Multi core (it is essentially two CPUs), and as far as I know, Photoshop WILL take advantage of this. I know that Premiere does.

[hc25036]

Thanks guys - Zing unfortunately it's not socket 939 (as I said, I always buy chips just before the pins change!) so the best I can do with this motherboard is XP3400 (I think). Stuart - I'm wondering about core2 duo. Is it really much faster?

[Stuart]

Unless the program (and OS, although all versions of XP are) is written to take advantage of either Dual Core or multiple processors, then you probably won't see that much advantage.

Whien I switch to Dual Core, both Premiere and Encore felt a lot more responsive, and rendered faster too.

From what I have read, the 775-vsta isn't the fastest motherboard, but it is the only one I know of that supports AGP graphics cards (which was a consideration for me, as I didn't want to spend a lot on a graphics card with DirectX 10 cards around the corner).

I have to admit, if I have the money when I do get a new graphics card, I may replace the board as well, although probably not.

One other thing to note: Even if your software isn't coded to take advantage of multi cores, then you will still get some advantage from the enhanced multi-tasking (given two cores, and two processes, Windows will generally run a process on each core).

[Logan]

Anyone have some upgrade suggestions for my current system please?

Currently, I'm running:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
Crucial 1.5GB DDR400
2 x GeForce 6600 GT PCI-E SLI
Western Digital 300GB SATA RAID
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
Saitek Pro Gamer Command Unit
Saitek Eclipse 2 Keyboard
Logitech MX1000 Mouse
Samsung 19" TFT

It plays World of Warcraft at 1280x1024 full pelt with a good FPS, but doesn't play more modern games well at all.

What would be my best upgrade options? And how much would I be looking?

Thanks

EDIT: Also sorry for hijacking the thread, can a mod move this to a new topic if needs be please? Thank you

Originally Posted by hc25036

Thanks guys - Zing unfortunately it's not socket 939 (as I said, I always buy chips just before the pins change!) so the best I can do with this motherboard is XP3400 (I think). Stuart - I'm wondering about core2 duo. Is it really much faster?

Yes I went from an x2 3800 to a c2d e6600 and the difference is substantial.

---------- Post added at 15:06 ---------- Previous post was at 15:03 ----------

Originally Posted by Logan

Anyone have some upgrade suggestions for my current system please?

Currently, I'm running:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
Crucial 1.5GB DDR400
2 x GeForce 6600 GT PCI-E SLI
Western Digital 300GB SATA RAID
Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty
Saitek Pro Gamer Command Unit
Saitek Eclipse 2 Keyboard
Logitech MX1000 Mouse
Samsung 19" TFT

It plays World of Warcraft at 1280x1024 full pelt with a good FPS, but doesn't play more modern games well at all.

What would be my best upgrade options? And how much would I be looking?

Thanks

EDIT: Also sorry for hijacking the thread, can a mod move this to a new topic if needs be please? Thank you

Yours is a 939 mobo you could just chuck an x2 at that and upgrade the gfx if you so desired

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=CP-181-AM 4600 x2 cpu on offer the 4200 is 88 quid on offer also

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=GX-065-HT this gfx

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=FG-000-AR this cooler


this would make for a good upgrade to what you have otherwise your gonna have to do a major rebuild

if your happy to spend 500 - 600 + quid then we could go down a c2d router mobo gfx ram etc or an intrim using the asrock board

[Logan]

Cheers Zing

Might plump for the CPU at first and see what happens. Not quite ready to spend £400-600 just yet!