What should I upgrade?

N

Nalif

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 12, 2005
Messages
223
My birthday is at the end of January, so I'm trying to figure out what the smartest upgrade would be. I use my PC for graphics design and gaming. I play Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, etc. My resolution is 1680x1050. I have never overclocked, but I'm not against it. In fact, I picked up the Q6600 in the hopes of overclocking it, but never purchased a good enough cooler for it. I live in Florida. My budget is 200ish. My current hardware is below:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Processor: intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 stepping
Video Card: 7800GT
Ram: G.Skill 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800 RAM and G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1000

My video card is obviously the weakest link, but my motherboard only supports PCI-E 1.0. I'm thinking I should upgrade the motherboard in the hopes that somewhere down the line I'll have a couple of hundred to spend on upgrading the video card. However, I'm using DDR2, and I'm already invested in 6 gigs of it. What does the [H] recommend? I'm a college student, so funds are generally pretty tight (thus the 7800GT :D )
 
personally id get:
$150- hd 4850 512mb
$37- xigmatek s1283
$8- xigmatek ACK-I7751 retention bracket
for gaming and overclocking purpose
 
Today's PCI Express 2.0 cards are backwards compatible with the PCI-E 1.0 (x16) slot, and vice versa. Therefore, you would have no problem using one of the $200 HD4870 (512MB model) or GTX 260 (with 192 stream processors, or Core 192 model) cards.

That said, if you want a good CPU cooler as well, pick up the following:

$46 - Xigmatek HDT-S1283 CPU cooler & ACK-I7751 retention bracket (about $8-$9 shipping on CPU cooler but free shipping on retention bracket)
$160 - Sapphire 100245L Radeon HD4850 (free shipping)
====
$206 - Subtotal (not including shipping, taxes, or rebates)

(Yes, I'm fully aware that chrscoog beat me to the punch on this one, so consider this a more accurate price estimate.)
 
There's no drawback, as no single GPU card, on its own, currently utilizes the full bandwidth that's provided by the PCI Express 1.0 bus.
 
I agree with tiraides and crhscoog. Aim for a 3.2Ghz OC (400x8), since you're using all 4 RAM slots.
 
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