Re: OT: System Upgrades

In article <43c9saF1msm20U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Moif Murphy" <charliealpha@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Although I work in IT I've not kept up on the hardware side of things for a
> long while and I'm thinking about buying a few bits off of ebay over the
> coming months with a view to completely revamping my system. The last time I
> did this was well over 18 months ago.
>
> ATM I have an Athlon XP 2200 with a corresponding bargain basement
> Kobian/Mercury motherboard and 2 x 512mb sticks of DDR RAM. I'm also running
> with an AGP Radeon 9500 (not overclocked). My WoW runs fine but I see these
> beautiful screenshots of WoW and I want that too!
>
> So what's a good thing to aim for within a relatively good price range?
>
> I'm currently considering another AGP card in the Radeon 9800 range.
> Processor wise I'm considering another Athlon, something closer to the
> 3.0ghz mark which I'm presuming is 64 now and of course 1gb if not 2gb of
> RAM. Is it all DDR2 now? Not to mention a new case & fan that doesn't sound
> like a tractor :)
>
> TIA for any advice.

If you just want to pick up a few parts on ebay with the aim of
increasing your WoW resolution and FPS, then I think you'll be fine with
an Athlon XP 3200+ or so and that Radeon 9800 you're looking at. This
should be very cost effective and get you 1600x1200 @ 60 FPS or so (but
I'm not real familiar with the 9800 -- using x800 myself). Whether
either of these pieces will work depends completely on your motherboard,
so you need to become an expert on it by poring over the website.

If the mobo needs upgrading (requiring also a new cpu, ram, probably
power supply as well) and you're looking at a new case & fan and a new
video card (mandatory for better WoW performance) then it really makes
no sense to upgrade anything -- just build a new system. You can always
take the old system, replace the fan(s) with something less noisy, and
use it for a backup server, webserver, squid server, mailserver,
firewall, snorter, Linux testbed, or whatever.
.

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