Upgrading my PC!

[baillie353]

Hey people! I am hoping to upgrade my PC, preferably without having to swap my mobo...

My current spec is:
ASUS M2N4-SLi mobo
AMD Athlon 4200+ 2.4 GHz
2 GB DDR2 RAM (Not sure of MHz)
GeForce 8600 GTS (512 MB) SLi enabled
250 GB IDE HD
80 GB IDE HD

I could really do with some help...
I don't know which processor to upgrade to (I want more power than I already have and for the CPU my budget will be no more than £140) Socket AM2
I also don't know where to find good RAM (800 MHz - it's the max my mobo can take according to the asus website, preferably 4 GB worth)

Upgrading to SATA hard drives (x2 of the following for RAID):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Generic-Hard-Di ... 95&sr=8-15 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Generic-Hard-Disk-Drive-500GB/dp/B000OUG69K/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1222606895&sr=8-15)

Upgrading to Nvidia 9800 GTX+ OC (And possibly adding another in SLi in the future)
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/6170273/B ... oduct.html (http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/6170273/BFG-GeForce-9800-GTX+-OC-512MB-PCI-Express-2-0-x16-Graphics-Card/Product.html)

All suggestions are welcome! And also if you have any alternatives, please feel free to post away!

Thanks everyone!

[UKGouki]

only thing i could suggest is if you want to stick to duel core the athlon 6000+ am2 is a **** fine chip found here http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... AMD-X2M260 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?AMD-X2M260) and great for a gaming orentated pc

if you want quad pumped im not to sure unless theres a bios upgrade to enable the phenoms on your motherboard the 9950 or even 9850 quads are getting good reviews but have nothing on the intel quads both can be found here http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... ?AMD-P9950 (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?AMD-P9950) depending if your an overclocker or not if not you may not need the unlocked multi on the black editions :wink:

[baillie353]

Thanks for your help!

I'm just trying to get as much info as I can because I hate buying things - especially at such prices! - and not knowing much about them... y'know?

I'm not on overclocker... simply because I don't know the first thing about it and I wouldn't want to risk messing things up... I'm just curious as to how much power I can get out of this motherboard :)
Motherboard these days are getting more and more expensive - the Nforce 790i Ultra being a fine example! Sweet mobo, sure... But costly so I wish to stick with my M2N4-SLi.

The black edition sounds good, but howcome the 6000+ is 3.0 GHz and costs not even £70, whereas the black eds is 2.g GHz and close to £130...
I understand the 6000+ is dual core, the black eds being quad core... But i'm not even totally clear on what the difference with dual and quad cores are! lol

The 6000+ sounds promising, being Dual core and 3.0 GHz for less than £70! But just wondering if someone can clarify the differences between dual and quad core and if it's really worth the extra £60 to go quad!

Also I need some help on the RAM deal :)

Cheers!

[UKGouki]

quad basicly means 4X 2.6 = 10.4GHz etc.. duel = 2x 3ghz =6GHz about the just of it quad is more powerfull but theres not a lot of multithreded apps out there that fully utilise all the available power

as for ram Geil has some really good ram 800mhz cas latency 4 and still on sale on novatech here http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/spec ... GEL-BD642G (http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?GEL-BD642G) 2gb for under £30 i personally use corsair ram its just preference and what ive always used *slaps self need to change my ways* lol

[system7]

CPU-Z is the utility for sorting out RAM questions: http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

Uninformed people get the idea that going from say DDR2-533 to DDR2-800 memory is going to make their PC run 50% faster. It's just not true. You'll probably only add 10% speed maximum with the best, lowest latency RAM in the world. Even dual-channel makes hardly any difference. But adding memory capacity certainly can help if you're running out of it with a big operating system like Vista. And on many Intel chipsets, with say an E2180, you're DDR2-800 RAM is only going to run at DDR2-533 speed anyway. Only an overclocker would benefit. AMD stuff is slightly different, being CPU controlled, but even so, don't lose sleep over memory speed.

The bottom line is running memory faster trades off against worse latencies to make the performance improvement negligable. Your system falls into that difficult ground where your next major upgrade really ought to be a complete rebuild to a higher spec. But you could start lining up a lot of the components like case, PSU and graphics now if you know where you want to go with it in the long run. :)