PC motherboard, CPU, RAM upgrade advice

I'm looking for a cost effective upgrade to my home PC. I don't really play high end games but I do record music which can be CPU and RAM hungry.</p>

I currently have an Athlon 2700+ CPU and 2x512 Mb memory (PC2700 DDR DIMM). I have a good size HD (250 Gb) and external HD (300 Gb) and 64Mb 2x AGP graphics card (think it's a GEFORCE2 chip set).</p>

So I wondered;</p>

(1) Would I see a benefit by changing my RAM for 2Gb of faster RAM </p>

(2) Would I need to go the whole hog and update my motherboard, CPU and RAM ? (If I did this would it support my old video card)</p>

(3) Can I get motherboard / cpu /RAM bundles ?</p>

Any suggestions on this are very welcome. </p>

Thanks</p>

 

The system you have seems fine. IF you only use it for downloading music, 1gb of RAM, and 550gb of storage is more than enough.

Why the need to update it unnecessarily?

 

This is a board for football fans

Go to a IT message board will ya.

 

Re: PC motherboard, CPU, RAM upgrade advice nt

 

Indeed I agree it is a board for football fans. I don't recall the topic of conversation ever being just about footie.

 

I think you misunderstand poet - I record music that I play with instruments nt

 

Well, it's people like you that are ruining this site.

Let's all talk about RAM and CPU's and blown out circuit boards.

 

you miserable git you nt

 

Maplin do a motherboard and chip bundle every month. usually rounfd the £100 mark for a half decent one. As you know its difficult to upgrade one without the other as they seem to have different pin arrays every other week be it athlon or Intel.

Mosy effective upgrade for me is an immediate increase in ram, and unles your using a 64 bit system then max is 2 gig matched up. Second for me is a GOOD high speed larger size hard drive. that is odten the bottleneck in a system the slow write and transfer speeds of a hard disk.

But i agree your 2700 seems a little long in the tooth now, if you can go for a Pentium dual core or four core they are by far the best for bucks these days, most places on the web will agree, they are cooler to run less noise and faster but they don't exactly come cheap. ( cue outrage from hardened AMD users)

 

Ok you start first yer big fat ****** nt

 

Cheers fella, will I notice a big increase going from 1 gig to 2 gigs then ?

 

Not really, no.

 

Shut it! nt

 

I am not big and fat! nt

 

I did that once

I put it into my VDU but it didn't help the speed of my keyboard at all. I bought a new docking station for it and that didn't help either.

 

i disagree witjh Poet there. you will see a difference

with 2 gig in, specially if you use Vista but even with Xp you won't be using the swap file which is on your hard drive nearly as much as you would with one gig. You would be surprised just how the memory use peaks and troughs during certain jobs. unzipping files. writing dvds converting files and the list can go on. If you start task manager and watch how the swap file usage fluctuates and how much CPU and memory use there is. You wouldn't see anything over 2 gig due to the 32 bit limitations,

If someone orders a system off me i tend to look at Novatech first, they do a bare bones bundle with a cpu board and memory which is often quite a saving and then they do one similar with a case and PSU. Memory is cheap now compared to what it was so you could get away with an offer board from MAplin http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?TabID=1&ModuleNo=220998&doy=29m10 then 2 one gig sticks of ram then you have everything local chepaer option id online of course. but cheapest memory locally is Icon up Sheffield Road,

 

1 GB with Vista

Which salesman(conman) sold you that?


Did your computer manage to startup?