Help me upgrade my PC

[richy22]

Well I want to upgrade the bits inside my PC so wanted some advice off the guru's on here.

Mainboard : NEC COMPUTERS INTERNATIONAL GA-8I915PMD

Processor : Intel Pentium 4 519

Physical Memory : 512 MB DDR2-SDRAM



The two things I want to do is upgrade my memory and maybe my processor.

Also looking for a bigger Hard-drive current one is

Hard Disk : ST3160023AS (160 GB).

I want to get an external HD as well and have seen a 1TB one Im going to get. Idea behind that is to transfer movies onto that so they dont take up space on here. Then I can hook it up to the PS3 and watch all my crap

I have no idea when it comes to computers and would just end up buying any old s**t so any advice would be great

Oh whilst im here my current video card always had trouble running certain games. They would "judder" like f**k if ran at 1024x 768 (or whatever it was) and I have to run them at 800x600 to get the damn thing to be playable. Is this memory related or Video card related??

Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce 6200 LE

 

[Andy.]

How much are you looking to spend? The RAM and processors that you would be restricted to use by the MB would not give you that much of a boost for the cash that you would spend. The 6200 is also bottom of the pile now I think, I am not surprised it is stuttering.

Even most of the base systems of today will wipe the floor with a P4 I thinik..You would probably get the best value for money/ performance increase buying a complete new system if you can stretch to it.

1TB USB drive would be painfully slow to load full of data. There are eSata external drives now which are up to 4x faster than USB, which makes a huge difference with 1TB! They also have USB connections on them, so once loaded from the PC, you can read them on the PS3 without any problem.

 

[richy22]

hmmm i was hoping to spend as little as possible thought about a new build actually, case, psu etc. Im guessing that would be expensive though? When i looked before buying my dell from the dreaded PC world i was up to about 800 quid

 

[Griff]

"Upgrade" isn't really any option in your case.

A new system can be built on a fairly respectable budget. It all depends on A, What you are going to use the PC for and B, How much you want to spend.

 

[Rojer]

Personally i would just bin the one you have and either build a new one (recommended) or just buy one of the shelf from PC World etc. If your going to use your PC for games and movies, you would want a big HDD with a good transfer rate etc and at least 2gb of ram and a dual core processor maybe even a quad core processor if you want to go all out.

 

[richy22]

I was going/planning on using it for games, Media Centre and a bit of editing (video), and obviously surfing the web.

So what would be a fairly respectable budget? £200-£300 or more?

 

[Rojer]

maybe a bit more try 400-500