Posted - 2011.06.28 16:16:00 - [3]

 

Edited by: Akita T on 28/06/2011 16:16:42

A target budget would be helpful...

You're only using little over three quarters of your RAM, you might want to upgrade to a 64-bit OS.
I suppose you're still running WinXP, I guess you could find a XP64 somewhere if you searched hard enough... with the latest serveice packs and patches and all that jazz, you shouldn't have any 32-bit compatibility problems.
Still, quite a few DX10/DX11 games start appearing, and the only graphics cards really worth buying already support DX11, so you might as well upgrade to Win7-64bit already as soon as possible.

You might end up finding your HDD a tad bit smaller than you're used to, but at least storage is rather cheap these days (you can find 2 TB drives for as low as 80$) - keep your old HDD as "OS and installs only" and put everything else on a second drive, including swap file.

The 8800 GTS 512 was quite a solid performer back in the day, and is still a somewhat decent video card, but I suppose it's starting to show its age. Raw performance wise, it's less than half of what a GTX 460 SE could handle, and you can buy one of those for 130$ on newegg, or maybe a GTX 460 for around 150$. Or if you want cheaper but still quite allright, get a Radeon HD 5770, they start as low as 110$ (and it's still about 66% faster on average than your current one, plus it supports DX11).
I suppose your power source should be able to any of those if that's the only thing you decide to upgrade (other than the HDD/OS, that is). Compared to the 8800, the 5770 actually draws LESS power, and the 460 draws only about 25W more.

Your current CPU should be just about borderline be able to handle even the 460 in most games and resolutions... but it will most likely be pretty close to the limit unless you ramp up resolution, antialiasing and texture sizes to the maximum (in which case, the bottleneck should be almost certainly the video card, not the CPU). You might not get radically better FPS, but you will get a much, much better image quality that way.

You have a LGA775 socket CPU (unknown motherboard), so there aren't many cheap decent upgrade options unless you switch out both.
If you want to keep on the intel bandwagon, the cheapest decent alternative right now would be a SandyBridge i5-2300 (quad core@2.8GHz, TurboBoost to 3.1GHz, costs around 185$ on newegg), but it would be a shame to not upgrade to an i5-2400 (quad@3.1/turbo 3.4) for just 5$ extra (190$ on newegg) or maybe, only if you're feeling generous, even an i5-2500 (quad@3.3/turbo 3.7) for just another 20$ (210$ on newegg). The 2600 is way too expensive (300$), and let's just forget you ever heard of the "K" versions (2600K is 315$, for instance).
The cheapest motherboards start at around 60$, but they're all micro-ATX ones and don't exactly bristle with features. The decent ones start at around 110$ if you don't want to bother with SLI, and more if you do. So you're looking at spending at least 300$ on CPU+MoBo.
The decent AMD combos are cheaper, but not THAT much cheaper. For vaguely similar performance you can at most expect a 15% savings, 20% if you're lucky. Then again, 45$-60$ is not exactly negligible.
The bad news, it probably won't even improve your gaming performance all that much, not unless you bought a much more powerful graphics card first.
The worse news : you might need to upgrade your PSU too.
The only good news is that you can used DDR3 on those motherboards, and RAM is also dirt cheap these days - 8 GB of DDR3@1600 (4x2GB kit) starting at just 85$ !

Posted - 2011.06.28 20:42:00 - [5]

 

Edited by: J Kunjeh on 28/06/2011 20:46:29
I recently made a few upgrades that made a HUGE difference with my system. I upgraded to 2 Nvidia 460GTX cards in SLI (from 2 8800GT's), moved to 64 bit Windows 7, and added more RAM (from 4 to 8gb). That's it, and it made a very noticeable difference across the board. Next up for me is a faster/larger hard drive and a new CPU.

Edit: but listen to what Akita says on the matter...she knows her stuff when it comes to computers.

Posted - 2011.06.29 04:45:00 - [7]

 

tbh, the 8800 is by far the greatest card ever invented, it can run anything. i would bump up to a quad core and get 8gb of ram for like 100 bucks.

Posted - 2011.06.29 15:56:00 - [9]

 

Quote:

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Budget: About 200-300 €.

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What's your current PSU ? Actual model, not just wattage listed on it.
And what kind of RAM do you have (DDR3, DDR3, speed, CL number).
In fact, can you post the same type of specs you posted for the motherboard for each of those ?

Quote:

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I have an extarnal HDD 500 gb.

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And what's the internal one ? Not just size, but actual model.
Eh, doesn't really matter all that much.
Not at the listed budget, anyway.

Quote:

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This is my motherboard: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=P45TurboTwins2000
I am using windows 7 actually, 64 version.

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Then what's the deal with "RAM: 4 gb (3,19 gb usable)" ???
You should have 4 GB usable, period. Maybe you mean 3.19 gb free ?

The motherboard allegedly supports up to 8 GB DDR3 1333 in dual channel mode in 4 slots (I assume the 2 yellow and 2 greenish ones are for DDR3, the 2 pink ones for DDR2).
I however doubt getting more than 4 GB will help unless you heavily multibox.
As I said, there's not much you can do with that motherboard, better CPUs are too expensive compared to much better CPUs (but which would need a different motherboard).


With the listed budget, at most you can change (listed from worst to best):
a) your mobo+CPU - won't really carry any noticeable improvement in gaming performance and blow through the entire budget
b) your RAM+HDD - you will only see any improvement if you had slower DDR2 and you get faster DDR3, but again, not much improvement - except in load times - and you'll probably not need the entire budget even if you go for top tier stuff
c) your PSU+GPU - depending on whether you need to get a new PSU or not, and on what video card you select, you might have quite a bit of leftover cash ; gameplay improvements guaranteed

Posted - 2011.06.29 16:47:00 - [11]

 

I have found when overclocking my MK1 i5 750 2.66ghz from 3.3ghz towards 4ghz the actual real performance on Linpack benchmark is heavily dependent on memory frequency. So now I juggle with the frequencies and ratios in bios to try and get my DDR3 1600mhz memory as close to its 1600mhz max speed as possible while overclocking the CPU frequency.