Upgrade Advice

[Scarlett Letterman]

K so I want to upgrade my comp a bit before I get Battlefield 2 and BI. I'm currently running on a AMD Athlon 2500+ (1.84 GHZ), 512 MB of Ram (not sure what kind, i can check if its important), 40GB of space, and a GeForce FX5200. I can run RTW fine at about half power.

So obvously i got some work to do. My ram seems like the first order of business.
-But I'm nervous about my processor, can I do very much with it?
-How much would another 40gb of memory run for?
-And how should I buy my graphics card - used on ebay, major outlet ie best buy, or some independent store.
-And finally should i go with ATI or Nvidia and which model (200$ max i can spend). THanks a million guys for any answers.

[carthage_hanibal]

well your current amount of ram should be ok as long as its DDR, as for the hard drive they are getting pretty cheap you could probibly get 80 gb hard drive for like 50 bucks and have your 40 gb hard drive along with it giving you 120 gb of space to use up... your video card is the thing you should try to upgrade. are you looking to spend 200 dollars total or 200 on the vid card?

[Scarlett Letterman]

Hmmm, just 50$ for 80GB? Perhaps I will get that instead of the ram (fairly certain mine is DDR, it is pretty new). I am willing to go to 200$ if i must for a solid video card, but I would like to spend less. Should I go the ebay route? And also, i've heard there is a crop of new video cards coming from ATI and Nvidia this august, so perhaps I should wait til then so the older cards will come down in price?

[carthage_hanibal]

well here is a $56 80 gb hard drive made by western digital http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822135106
and as for the video card that would be a good idea i do know that nvidia is coming out with a 7600 ultra or something like that... do you know if you have agp vid card slot or a PCI-X slot?

[Scarlett Letterman]

I will check which slot I have in the morning. Those hard rives are tempting but it they don't seem to ship to Canada.

Yes I have read briefly on the new 7600 ultra's, can't imagine they will be in my price range though. As for graphics cards, I have repeatedly read that it is best to go with the 128mb, rather than the 256mb (which bottlenecks it or sometihng). Very much appreciate your help thus far hanibal.

[asearchforreason]

Well, adding another hard drive won't help your performance at all. If you are looking to boost performance for those games, you will probably see a noticeable effect if you upgrade to 1 GB of RAM. The next thing I would think about upgrading is the video card. If you can only spend $200 on the card, your best bet is probably the Geforce 6600 GT which you can find online for about $160. The processor is a little slow, but for battlefield 2 at least, the video card and memory will make the biggest difference. You still won't be able to run either at very high settings, but should be able to get about average setting out of it.

As for where to buy, try to avoid the major retailers, Best Buy, CompUSA, etc because they generally have very high prices. You are much better off using a price search engine like the one at labs.anandtech.com or for general purpose, pricegrabber.com

I generally buy from ZipZoomFly.com or NewEgg.com as they both have great prices and are reliable.

[squeaky]

Nvidia won't be dropping prices on their cards, they just make their new ones even more expensive. ATI might change that though.
200$ is kind of a mid-point between vid cards, nothing costs exactly that much. A bit lower and you have the 6600GT and 9800 Pro. Go a bit higher and you get the X800XL. up to you though.