How should I upgrade

**Lord Kal** · October 08, 2006, 10:13 AM

I'm looking to make a minor (i'm on a budget here, lets say less than £100) upgrade to my PC to make it better-suied to play the games of today.

It runs fine with medium-high settings in RTW (well, grass makes it choke) but it really struggled with the MTW2 demo.

In short, i need an upgrade to play MTW2 comfortably. A quick, simple upgrade to make everything smoother.

here's what i've got

Pentium 4 2.0ghz Processor
Board: TriGem Computer, Inc. Cupertino 1.01
512MB DDR RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500
SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio

So what should I go for?

**shurick** · October 08, 2006, 10:18 AM

£100 not going to improve it much.. its more like bandaging your system up to last a bit longer in today pc games world. My suggestion is to get more RAM and also try to overclock your cpu and maybe video card. But dont screw with overclocking if you dont know what you are doing cause the whole thing will go kaboooom!!

**Lord Kal** · October 08, 2006, 10:21 AM

Originally Posted by shurick

£100 not going to improve it much.. its more like bandaging your system up to last a bit longer in today pc games world. My suggestion is to get more RAM and also try to overclock your cpu and maybe video card. But dont screw with overclocking if you dont know what you are doing cause the whole thing will go kaboooom!!

Given my track record I decided that overclocking would be a bad idea. And yes, i'm looking for a patch-up, i'm moving away in a year's time and I shall be parting company with it then.

**krazykarl** · October 08, 2006, 10:34 AM

assuming you have a s478 P4, you could probably find a used 3ghz chip on ebay I have seen them going for under $100usd. Also, I would get more ram, but thats just me and I hate using under-ramed system.

**Lord Kal** · October 08, 2006, 10:40 AM

Originally Posted by krazykarl

assuming you have a s478 P4, you could probably find a used 3ghz chip on ebay I have seen them going for under $100usd. Also, I would get more ram, but thats just me and I hate using under-ramed system.

Would the mobo support it?

And also, s48? How do I check?

**Incinerate_IV** · October 08, 2006, 10:54 AM

I think your best bet is to just upgrade the ram and video card, those are the 2 easiest upgrades. Maby you can get a picture of the motherboard so we can see what kind of graphics card slot you got.

**krazykarl** · October 08, 2006, 11:01 AM

http://www.cpushack.net/SocketID.html

There is pretty much a list of every socket ever created. Your main concern is weather you have a socket 423(really old design) or socket 478 (newer design)

**Lord Kal** · October 08, 2006, 11:41 AM

Mm, but how do I check?

**krazykarl** · October 08, 2006, 12:06 PM

a couple of ways, A its writtien on the socket, but since you most likey cant see that, if you have a 533mhz FSB chances are you have a 478, whereas if you have a 400mhz FSB, you are most likely on 423 you can check your FSB in the BIOS, or by running wcpuid.

**Lord Kal** · October 08, 2006, 12:53 PM

It says socket 478 when I ran WCPUID.

OK! So i'm good to get a 3.0ghz CPU from Ebay then? What sort am I looking for?

I'm utterly hopeless when it comes to this so if somebody could point me in the right direction, give me an example, find one on ebay, or anything like that I would be eternally grateful.

**Lord Kal** · October 08, 2006, 12:56 PM

There's a 2.8ghz here: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Processor-Inte...QQcmdZViewItem
for 40 quid... what do you reckon?

Also, how fiddly is it to replace a processor?

**krazykarl** · October 08, 2006, 01:44 PM

if you are going to upgrade, go all the way go to 3.0-3.4 if the 2.8 is a really good deal, go for it, but otherwise hold out for something a smidge faster.

To replace a processor issnt super hard, but you have to be very careful. You take off the existing HSF unit, then lift the handle dealie, then remove the old cpu. then put the new one in, lower the handle and put the New HSF unit in.
BE VERY CAREFUL if you crack or chip or bend pins on your CPU your SOL.

Edit. if the new cpu doesn't come with a new HSF unit, go buy one that is rated for said CPU, higher clocked chips have a higher thermal dissapation and will require a beefier HSF unit. And when you put the New HSF unit in, you will most likely have to get some new thermal paste, scrape the old crud off, and get some arctic silver, its like $5 a tube, and you only need a tiny bit.

**AlfonsoVIII** · October 11, 2006, 01:58 PM

i would agree and get a faster processor and a new video card. I can only assume you have AGP for your video card slot, so upgrading to a 7x00 series would be most beneficial. Your amount of RAM may become your bottleneck so adding another 512MB stick will also help. However, without buying components to see what works for you to where you can play M2TW is a gamble. But find a better video card after you replace the processor.