Upgrading my PC

[legacy-[D]Despair]

Building a completely new system crossed my mind too, I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do... Might just wait for awhile and save my money. When are the PCI-express mobos etc. coming out?

Thanks for the answers .

[legacy-Fingermouse]

I personally wouldnt touch the system you have at the minute, wait untill the 64bit cpus come down in price and can support PCI express.

[legacy-Pyrothekilla]

Sell it on Ebay then

[legacy-djini_hades]

Originally posted by Red_@y@s
yeah having 1 gig REALLY does help man ... on all games :up:

Just seems like sucha waste though... if you buy 2 x 512 MB blades (thus keepiong the dual channel balance) you have to toss out perfectly working memory... the nf7-s only has 3 slots...

[legacy-djini_hades]

You have a perfectly balanced system IMO (Well done!!!)...

If you have money to burn (and by the sounds of it, you want to get something new right now but not sure what?) I'd say:

1. SATA HDD (If you don't already have it). You have SATA on your Mobo (NF7-S Rocks! Yay!) so I'd go buy a pair (if you can afford 2), and RAID them to hold you games on (or scratch your present HDD and install your OS on the RAID SATA pair... it'll fly!!!

2. get an x800... you WILL see a performace jump of course, but you have SUCH a balanced system, I'm not sure I would... Another piece of advice, get NVidia GPU if there is ANY CHANCE of you POSSIBLY switching to Linux... ATi drivers suck...

Personally, I'd 'freeze' this system, not do a god **** thing... and save up your maoney to build a completely NEW system (AMD 64 (with 1MB cache on, not the 512k low end ones), FX6800 GPU, NForce3, 1GB 500Mhz mem of 2 blades)... When you have that put MDK64bit edition on it and keep your old comp for some stuff you can't do on the new one (or visa versa, put mandrake on the old box, and build your new one for xp64)

[legacy-Red_@y@s]

yeah having 1 gig REALLY does help man ... on all games :up:

[legacy-Pyrothekilla]

Probably not as serious as you would like but, get a system like mine it rocks

Seriously though, your system is pretty good if a little slow.
CPU and RAM are good things to upgrade and if you have 3 RAM slots get yourself 1.5GB RAM and make the rest of us cry

[legacy-[D]Despair]

Ok, I currently have this kind of system :

Athlon XP +2600 @ 2130MHz (mobo automatically oc's it :bulb: )
512MB (2x256MB 400MHz Kingston DDR, dual channel)
Abit NF7-S
Radeon 9700 128MB

Now that Radeon x800 pros are here, I noticed they are available at a fairly reasonable price of ~400 euros, I was thinking about getting one of them. However, is it a smart buy considering the rest of the system , like cpu being a slight bottleneck or anything ? Or should I start the upgrading from the rest of the system first?
I was also thinking about getting more memory. If I get one 512MB stick, that would mean bye bye dual channel (3 ram slots). How much this affects the performance? Would it be wiser to try to sell the old memory and get a 1GB dual channel kit?
Also is 350W PSU enough for Radeon x800s?

Just noticed there are people here who understand a lot more about these things than me and decided to ask. Any (serious ) input is greatly appreciated .