Repair/Upgrade or New PC?

ixoy

My current PC is as follows:

* Graphics Card: Club3D Radeon X550 256MB, 128bit,PCI Express
* Mother Board: ABIT KN8-SLI,nForce4 SLI, Socket-939, ATX, 4xSATAII, GbLAN, Firewire, PCI-Ex16
* Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHz Socket 939, 1MB, BOXED w/fan
* Memory Crucial PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB CL3 5ns

It's got HDs, etc but that's fairly irrelevant for my wants. It's 3 years old and recently the PSU died. It'd cost about €90 to replace with a decent model.

I have about c€500 that I kinda need to spend on PC stuff sooner rather than later. Should I repair (90e) and then upgrade (given the PC is 3 years old)? Are my upgrade options limited?

Or should I stump up for a PC like this one in Komplett's clearance section? Is that a good value (it seems to be, totalling up the individual componets)? I can see it doesn't have an OS but I could swap the HD out of my current machine (or is that impossible?).

My wants:
* Not a heavy gamer but would like a bit smoother performance (e.g. Half Life 2 "drags" a little under my current setup on full resolution)#

* Ability to store decent amount of data and good number of external USB ports (I've loads of external USB devices which my current machine can handle)

* Future proofed to a reasonable degree if I'm buying a new setup.

So given I need to spend roughly 500 (max, let's say 650), what are my best options? Repair/upgrade, new budget PC (clearance or otherwise) or some sort of odd combo?

John mac

New mobo , new processor, and new ram.
a lot less than €600.
the HD and dvd etc will still work on it.

(my €2 )

TerrorFirmer

That's actually a really nice machine from Komplett. Great processor, lots of memory, solid graphics card - Half Life 2 would run at 1920x1200 maximum settings beautifully. If you've been getting by with an X550.....this would blow you away. Hard to fault that machine to be honest, and you'd get a good 180-200 or so for the current machine as is. Though if all you're playing is Half Life 2, a new video card, another gb of ram and a new psu would cost about 150 and perform excellently. Guess it depends on what else you do with the machine - upgrading that one isn't out of the question to be honest, though if you want to play the latest games at high settings the CPU is a bit on the old side.

Gurgle

ixoy wrote: »

My current PC is as follows:

* Graphics Card: Club3D Radeon X550 256MB, 128bit,PCI Express
* Mother Board: ABIT KN8-SLI,nForce4 SLI, Socket-939, ATX, 4xSATAII, GbLAN, Firewire, PCI-Ex16
* Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2.2GHz Socket 939, 1MB, BOXED w/fan
* Memory Crucial PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB CL3 5ns

this, this, this and this leaves you with change

TerrorFirmer

If you were upgrading current machine I'd just go with this and leave it - putting anything more into it is really a waste considering the limitations of what you can get out of it.

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=389040
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=338686
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=123472

ixoy

I went with a half-way point between the two and got a 550W PSU last night as well as a couple of other small things. I didn't like the idea of letting my machine just "die".

Now I'm going to have a think over the weekend on how much more I'm willing to spend (I have to spend a certain amount - it's a "use it or lose it" scenario). It'll be more helpful when I can establish exactly how much I've left! I'm leaning towards a "lazy" approach and just buying the pre-built machine, especially given it's got a thumbs up but we'll see.

Solitaire

Unfortunately you'll soon start to be CPU-limited with that old CPU if you decide to play more recent games, and dumping it would require a new mobo and RAM as well (not that you need to spend THAT much money on them) as that's about as good as Socket 939 gets.