Upgrade me a two year old PC for C&C

silvine

Hi,

I posted here a week or two ago about this PC.

http://www.ciao.co.uk/HP_Pavilion_T770_uk_Photosmart_PC__5806048

I want to buy a graphics card and some RAM for it. Can anyone make a recommendation?

I want to be able to play C&C3, Half Life 2, speed up iTunes/Windows and do it all for around €200-250.

Many thanks

Cassiel

The spec on that link is a bit odd. Says its an AMD Athlon but it has a 775 chip socket (Intel).
Can you confirm if that is an AGP graphics card you need? A good one of those will pretty much use up your budget and thats a bit annoying as the PCI-E equivalent will be half the price.

Spear

silvine wrote:

Hi,

I posted here a week or two ago about this PC.

http://www.ciao.co.uk/HP_Pavilion_T770_uk_Photosmart_PC__5806048

I want to buy a graphics card and some RAM for it. Can anyone make a recommendation?

I want to be able to play C&C3, Half Life 2, speed up iTunes/Windows and do it all for around €200-250.

Many thanks

I can't see any mention of what socket it really is as it's clearly not socket 775 as mentioned. I've a horrible suspicion it's socket 754 so a processor upgrade would be awkward. But that video card needs to be replaced, but it's AGP only which will also makes things awkward.

Cassiel

On the right side of the page it lists skt 775, which disagrees with the processor spec.

Spear wrote:

I can't see any mention of what socket it really is as it's clearly not socket 775 as mentioned. I've a horrible suspicion it's socket 754 so a processor upgrade would be awkward. But that video card needs to be replaced, but it's AGP only which will also makes things awkward.

nesf

Spear wrote:

I can't see any mention of what socket it really is as it's clearly not socket 775 as mentioned. I've a horrible suspicion it's socket 754 so a processor upgrade would be awkward. But that video card needs to be replaced, but it's AGP only which will also makes things awkward.

Upgrading the board, chip and making the move to PCI-E in one go might be an option if he has the cash. More complicated though.

silvine

Here's the official HP spec.

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/pdf/c00573490.pdf

I've only limited pc knowledge when it comes to upgrading. I can put in memory and graphics cards alright but I haven't done much beyond that.

I take it PCI-E is the successor to AGP and more expensive? Are there no modern AGP cards about that would be up to handling C&C3 and Half Life 2?

I could push the upgrade budget to €300.

Thanks for the help!

8T8

Not a problem get an AGP X1950 Pro will handle C&C3 plus Half Life 2 without a hitch.

I'd open up the case just to be sure though that it does have an AGP slot or tell use what kind of graphics adapter does it list under display adapters in the device manager.

silvine

I'll do that, cheers.

How do I find out what kind of Ram it has (speed etc) so when I'm buying some it matches what is already installed.

I'm of the understanding that when you upgrade your RAM it has to be the same type as the Ram installed.

kmick

Sounds to me like a lot of hassle when you can buy a decent box here for 599 http://www.aldi.ie/special_buys/product_312.html I know it is more than twice your budget but any speed increase via upgrade you get is likely to be much less than buying new. Can you stretch to 599?

Also my experience with the newer graphics cards is that they need a lot more juice than the older power supplies can provide. Make sure to check the rating of your power supply. If it is less than 300 than you prabably need to buy one of those as well. Then you get into a where do I stop - i.e. you will probably require a bigger/second hard drive to continue to hold the crap the builds up. All of a sudden you have the price of a new one.

silvine

Well the thing is I've a budget of €1200 for some new toys!

I was originally going to buy a new gaming PC off Komplett but a few people convinced me to go for the X Box 360 and upgrade the old one with the change. A lot of great PC games seem to be on the X Box without the added expense of continually upgrading.

I also need a monitor (the old one comes with a CRT) and a new keyboard. This wouldn't really leave me with more than €300 for the PC upgrade.

I thought €300 would be more than enough for a graphics card and a bit of memory. This would hopefully give me another year or so with the old PC - which I will be using for downloading movies, iTunes, RTS gaming and work.

I'm open to suggestions...

Cassiel

Would anyone reckon you might get €200 if you sold the PC? That it'd bring you up to €500 for the PC box?

You'll upgrade the memory handy enough, second-hand but that x1950 graphics card is going to be worthless in 12 months time and you'll likely need a new power supply for it anyway. There is an nvidia 7800gs which you might get away with but costs more and again will be worthless in 12 months.

Tesco's have a couple of iQon PC bundles, was looking at them yesterday think the one with a Pentium D dual-core and a 19" widescreen was €699 probably integrated graphics, but there is 25% back in clubcard points this week. :rolleyes:
so theroetically it will cost you, eh, less.
Check out adverts.ie

One from the top:
http://www.adverts.ie/showproduct.php?product=28725&cat=8

monitor is small but its the same resolution as a 19", would do the job if your not going widescreen.
Could do with another stick of 1Gb ram for Vista.

And if it ain't canvassing, I've a 7900gs PCI-E that'd slot in there for a €100, and it plays everything at that resolution.

right, from a budget of €300 I've spent you €600

How's that look?

TerrorFirmer

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=311352

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=324393

No point going overboard if its an older machine. Not the greatest video card out there but will run Half Life 2 and C&C at high settings easily unless you have a huge monitor, and only cost you 150 for the 2.

Also I wouldn't recommend the Aldi box to any gamer. The processor is low end and probably can't be overclocked due to bios limitations by Medion or whoevever, and the graphics card is pretty poor - actually outright crap for games, and the aldi one is even worse then the standard 8400GS - and would need replacing for anything serious. Not really a bargin in my opinion for that line of thing, although its good value for the average day to day user maybe.

nesf

silvine wrote:

I thought €300 would be more than enough for a graphics card and a bit of memory. This would hopefully give me another year or so with the old PC - which I will be using for downloading movies, iTunes, RTS gaming and work.

If you are only looking to get another year out of it but upgrading to a whole new PC then going the AGP/memory route actually makes sense. Upgrading the motherboard etc would make sense if you were planning on incrementally upgrading the machine over time.

The specs say 2 DIMM slots and 1GB of memory, do you know if both slots are occupied at present? (I'm guessing they are but I could be wrong)

2GB of memory and a newish AGP card should be able to handle most games for the next year (imho).

kmick

So you need

A semi-decent graphics card (116)
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=304903

A Gb of ram (44)
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=301115

A 17inch lcd or eqiuvalent (179)
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=328394

A new keyboard (24)
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=317813

for 300 euro. I would wager that kit is already too poor to run the latest games at anything but medium to low settings. I could be wrong. Add an extra 300 or 400 and buy a dell or an adli/lidl and it will be good for another 3 years not withstanding the reservations about the graphics card in the aldi/lidl. Someone on here should be even able to build you a whole PC for that money which would be good for you needs.

However I would not expect miracles for 300 or even 600

silvine

Cheers. I've a 300 budget for the graphics card, memory and keyboard. I've already got the monitor picked out and it's not included in this budget.

A lot of people seem to think I'd be better with a new PC altogether.

Cassiel

yar at the Building and Upgrading thread, sometimes enthusiasm gets the better of us but it's hard to justify spending €300 now to upgrade a system for just twelve months, when for a few dollars more you can have a system with a bit more go and has a future upgrade path.

If you are 100% happy with the general performance of the PC then go for the AGP graphics card, for the x1950 make sure and check your power supply rating. I had the nvidia 7800gs agp, myself with a pentium 4 3.2, roughly the same as your CPU. It was a great card. Ran half-life2 at 1280*1024 resolution with all the gloss turned on. Same for FEAR. The 7600GS won't do that to the same degree but it will be light years ahead of what you have.

1GB of ram is absolutely fine for gaming and general PC use for WindowsXP, I'd say that you likely have 2 512MB sticks so to upgrade to 2GB you'd have to buy two 1GB sticks of RAM. If it is really low spec RAM in there it might be worth upgrading to 2 x 512mb sticks DDR-400 of Crucial Ballistix or other performance memory, if the board supports it and you can tweak memory timings in your PC's BIOS.

silvine wrote:

Cheers. I've a 300 budget for the graphics card, memory and keyboard. I've already got the monitor picked out and it's not included in this budget.

A lot of people seem to think I'd be better with a new PC altogether.