[Plusi]

Hi all

I play alot of games on my computer, and as a gamer, performance matters. My computer has served me well for a while now, but I think I have to replace some components that aren't pulling their weight as some of the more modern games are lagging, stuttering and taking all day to load on my current system, hehe

I'm not sure what to upgrade next though, so I was wondering if anybody could give me any decent advice. My current set up is as follows -

Windows XP Home SP2 (which I dont intend getting rid of)

My CPU is a 1.8ghz AMD Athlon 64
I have half a gig of RAM (did have 1 gig, but one of my 512's was faulty and will be replaced - possibly thinking of replacing it with a 1gb board)
GeForce 7600 GT Graphics Card

I also have a 160gb hard drive internally, and another 160gb hard drive externally

My MoBo is a WinFast 760GXK8MC

Any advice would be great. Thanks!

[alex]

Hi Plusi.

The most beneficial upgrade for any gamer is the graphics card. But I'd also strongly recommend having 1gb of ram in your system as your games will also be suffering from a loss of system bandwidth. 1gb is the sweetspot for XP.

Is the gpu AGP or PCI-E? Also, whats your budget.

I wouldn't worry so much about the cpu as Athlons, even at that speed, are fine gaming cpu's. Modern games are also a lot more dependent on the gpu than the cpu.
Plus (I guess your gaming at 1280x1024?) that cpu will be fine at that resolution.

[Plusi]

Like you said, Alex, I can't get this RAM fast enough...going back to 512 feels like losing a limb!

My graphics card is AGP. I picked it up fairly cheap just over a year ago as it seemed like a good buy at the time. To be honest, I half expected the CPU to be the 'bottleneck', but they aren't my area of knowledge, lets say, hehe

I'm hoping to not have to spend too much, maybe less than £150. I have a car on the way soon too

[alex]

Okay, double the ram. Do try and get a matched pair of 512mb dimms though. This will mean doing away with the dimm you already have installed.

For a card, well, this will do nicely.

But do shop around, and have a look at ebay as well as AGP card's are still costly because the market is so small.

Sites I'd recommend:

www.scan.co.uk
www.savastore.com
www.misco.co.uk
www.aria.co.uk
www.overclockers.co.uk
www.komplett.co.uk
www.ebuyer.com
www.dabs.com

[Plusi]

Thanks, I'll give that some thought. Cheers :)