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FAO those of you who still keep up with PCs

I've got 512 megs of ram, a 1.3 or 1.4GHz Duron, an old Abit KT7A board running it all and an oldish Seagate Barracuda 80gig hard drive. Currently running a 370meg pagefile with about 60 megs of free memory. I tend to browse umpteen pages at once in opera and run OE, and want the PC to be a bit faster. I also do a bit of photoshoppery from time to time. I also seem to be running a ridiculous amount of CPU usage but that seems to be coming from Opera.

Nowthen, is it worth shoving in another 512megs of ram? Is it worth me meddling with this DDR thing (IIRC I need paired DIMMS?). Should I just chuck it in the bin and buy a new box sans monitor etc.? I've got a nice monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. so there seems little point in laying out for an entire PC setup.

OTOH, would just ripping out the ancient mobo and memory and shoving in a modern Asus, AMD chip (as they were cheaper last time I looked) and some new memory be worth doing? I've already got a decent PSU and case so most of the bits are already there... I have a feeling this might be dearer than just buying a new base unit though.

I suspect the easiest and cheapest way to do this would be to reduce the amount of s**te open in Opera...

Reply to
Doki
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If you don't even have DDR ram then please, for the love of god, just get a new PC...

Reply to
DanTXD

Well I posted that before I'd finished. Ebuyer were knocking out a Dual Core Athlon 64 and mobo for £200 the other day. That, 2gb of DDR for £80 off of eBay from the USA, and depending on your GFX wants (I.e. do you want to play Battlefield 2) some form of card and you're laughing.

Reply to
DanTXD

It's capable of taking DDR ram. IIRC when I put it together I either had some normal RAM knocking around or DDR was outrageously expensive.

Reply to
Doki

$ for $ you are not going to get much of an increase in speed by messing with your current hardware. I'd start again. Keep the HDD as a 2nd drive perhaps??

New base units say from Ebuyer, or Dell would give you massive performance increase for less than 300 notes.

Tim..

Reply to
Tim..

I'm in the same situation, but with half a terrabyte of HDD space, and another 300gig removable USB drive I have to install, to move my MP3s to.

I hav a decent Tagan PSU, so the HDDs are getting kept, and I've going to stick a new card, 2gig DDR, and a 3200-3800+ CPU/mobo in.

Reply to
Elder

Get a Intel Core 2 Duo - they are cracking! Just built one for a family friend any they fly! Have a google about them, Intel have finally managed to whoop AMD... (For the moment)

Justin.

Reply to
Justin Cole

Yep, I'm running one at 3ghz stable as a rock on the stock HSF combo at stock voltage and it kicks my 64x2 AMD system from here to somewhere very far away and back. There's more to come from it once the proper cooler arrives, then I can up the voltage a little and try for a bit higher (I had 3.15 out of it but I dropped it back down for now.)

Reply to
Depresion

Will it benchmark faster than my 1 year old 4800 dual core x2 athlon overclocked to a real 2.7 with cas 2 corsair 4gb mem (needs 64bit operating system), pair of geforce 7 xfs graphics, raid 0 on a pair of raptors for boot with 6 more serial ata2 250gb storage drives for movies (ahem) and other real work? If it does and it will run my 64bit windows (needed for my pro engineer solid modeling soft) then my board mem and cpu is for sale? Any takers?

Thing is I dont think it would. Or would it? At least if it did, not by enough to warrant another rebuild? But if so then I will!

Reply to
Burgerman

I have heard they are pretty quick, but I'm worried that it might be a one way path, and also too much of an upgrade for a "repair" install to successfully handle.

Reply to
Elder

I'm getting seriously tempted by an Apple Core Duo machine.

The idea of dual-booting Windows and OSX appeals lots.

The idea of running most Windows applications at near-native speed on the OSX desktop rocks even more.

Reply to
SteveH

Oh yes... Read all about it...

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Justin.

Reply to
Justin Cole

I don't know but it will benchmark faster than the current 64 bit FX chip from AMD at 1/2 the price.It's only got 2 gig of ram in it and that's CAS 4 and a single X1900XT but it shifts Oblivion smoothly enough at the native

1680x1050 and makes mince meat of the stress calcs in 3d CAD work. I'm ruining a mirror RAID array for my data drive for integrity from a hardware controller so as far as the OSs see it (XP, Vista and Linux at the moment) it's just a normal SATA drive.
Reply to
Depresion

Bah I went through 4 different mother boards and 3 CPUs and a mix of ATI and Nvidia cards on a single XP install with no stability issues (mainly to see just how much abuse XP will take before falling over and the answer was a lot)

Reply to
Depresion

Excellent then. Might look into it.

Reply to
Elder

Eastenders DIVXs or you been doing a Larry Flynt impersonation?

Reply to
Doki

Yup, reckoned to be the best thing since, well, since, erm... you get the picture.

Reply to
DervMan

Built one other day, very very quick.

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

Better than that, and I'm no IT guru, but their performance is more consistent. Probably because of two cores, eh? :-s

Reply to
DervMan

You mean like the X2 Athlon 64 cpus?

Reply to
Elder

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