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From: mac on 31 Jul 2010 08:52
My son has a gaming pc. I am considering an upgrade for his Birthday.
He has :
MB Asus PQ5 Pro Board
4 G DDR2 PC6400 (4 X 1 sticks)
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHZ
Sparkle GEFORCE 9800GT 1 GB 16X PCI-E

What should I upgrade for a better gaming experience?
Double the RAM (to 8 GB)? , get a better Video Card?, or Processor?

I would like to spend around $300. What should I upgrade?

Thanks!
mac
From: Grinder on 31 Jul 2010 13:06
On 7/31/2010 7:52 AM, mac wrote:
> My son has a gaming pc. I am considering an upgrade for his Birthday.
> He has :
> MB Asus PQ5 Pro Board
> 4 G DDR2 PC6400 (4 X 1 sticks)
> Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHZ
> Sparkle GEFORCE 9800GT 1 GB 16X PCI-E
>
> What should I upgrade for a better gaming experience? Double the RAM (to
> 8 GB)? , get a better Video Card?, or Processor?
>
> I would like to spend around $300. What should I upgrade?

Is this the motherboard that you have:
http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=c19zNYHCAXhCqBPq

If your operating system is 32-bit, expanding your memory beyond 4GB
will do nothing. Current 32-bit versions of windows cannot address more
than 4GB without hacking the kernel, which is not recommended.

If you're running a 64-bit operating system, but your game is still
32-bit, it likely will not benefit from additional memory either.
(Conceivably there could be a benefit in that you could run multiple
32-bit applications and they would have a larger pool of memory to use
from, without exceeding that 4GB limit individually.)

The processor is pretty good, so I wouldn't sweat that. With this
motherboard you could really only go for more cores and that would
likely not be exploited by your games.

If I have the right motherboard, though, I see that it has two PCIe x16
slots. (One is only x8 electrically.) You could pop in a pair of
crossfire-enabled video cards--which pretty much means some sort of
Radeon HD cards. You might also need a new power supply to handle
increased demand that two video cards will put on the system.

You can really spend as much as you want on a pair of high-end video
cards. I'm afraid I don't have much of a recommendation as two where
the price to performance cusps are. I've got a Radeon HD 4650 because I
just needed something intermediate, and several reviews said this was a
good performing card for the money. I spent $50.

You can easily spend half you budget on a high-quality power supply.
Something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371009

....could probably serve whatever expansions you make to your system.

- - - - - -

Something you may not have thought of, or might not be applicable, is
the addition of a tv tuner to your son's PC. For about $125 you can get
a good quality dual tuner, with a remote control. If you're operating
system is Windows XP MCE, Vista or Windows 7, you'll already have the
software you need to turn that PC into a Tivo.

Setting it up make take some effort, especially if you have set-top
boxes in your house, but it's a slick feature to have in a computer now
that our culture has forgotten how to read.


From: mac on 31 Jul 2010 14:00
Hi,

My son is running Windows 7 64 bit. That is the correct Motherboard,
except is a 2008 edition (our box doesn't say Turbo on it). But I think
it's the same. So we could upgrade the DDR2 up to 16GB if we wanted to.

His power supply is a NZXT 800 watts P.S. SLI which I don't know if it's
good or not, but it is 800W.

I think may I want to invest in the Video Card.

From: Grinder on 31 Jul 2010 14:09
On 7/31/2010 1:00 PM, mac wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My son is running Windows 7 64 bit. That is the correct Motherboard,
> except is a 2008 edition (our box doesn't say Turbo on it). But I think
> it's the same. So we could upgrade the DDR2 up to 16GB if we wanted to.
>
> His power supply is a NZXT 800 watts P.S. SLI which I don't know if it's
> good or not, but it is 800W.
>
> I think may I want to invest in the Video Card.
>
I would check tomshardware.com for reviews that would be on point. Your
motherboard supports crossfire. So, assuming your power supply does,
you need only be careful to get crossfire video cards.

From: John Doe on 31 Jul 2010 16:58
"mac" <macaaa macaaa.> wrote:

> My son has a gaming pc. I am considering an upgrade for his Birthday.
> He has :
> MB Asus PQ5 Pro Board
> 4 G DDR2 PC6400 (4 X 1 sticks)

About the same here.

> Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHZ

Quad core Q9550 here. Use Performance Monitor to tell whether the dual-core CPU is being taxed.

> Sparkle GEFORCE 9800GT 1 GB 16X PCI-E

GeForce 9800GT/512MB "ECO" here.

> What should I upgrade for a better gaming experience? Double
> the RAM (to 8 GB)? , get a better Video Card?, or Processor?

Consider an SSD drive. Use the SSD drive as the primary drive and
the conventional HDD as the secondary drive. Keep Windows and
applications on the primary SSD. Keep multimedia and anything that
is not installed by Windows or programs on the secondary drive.
You can also keep a mirror copy of the SSD on the secondary drive,
for a bulletproof system (using the free version of Macrium
Reflect). A screaming 64 GB SSD should be plenty. But you can get
128 GB for less than $300. It is not a whizbang upgrade, but it
hugely improves overall system performance. It is a tricky
upgrade, technical skill might be required.

If the current HDD is SATA, you can take both to the next system.

FWIW. For some strange reason, OCZ and maybe others rate their 64
and 128 GB drives as less than those sizes on Newegg, so you have
to look in a slightly smaller size category to find them.
--























> I would like to spend around $300. What should I upgrade?
>
> Thanks!
> mac

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