Ok, I am basically new here and have a system I built in the middle of 2007. I am trying to see if it is viable to upgrade any of the components to make it a little more competitive for the rest of this year, but I don't know that there is much I can do with it without buying multiple components.
I have:
MSI AM2 Athlon 64/X2, PC6400 mem. capable motherboard
4600+ Athlon X2
NVIDIA 9600GT 512mb
2 gb PC6400 DDR2
I am currently running 64 bit Windows 7, and despite 2gb of memory it runs well.
Basically, I don't know if there is much that can be done with this. It's kind of stuck where it is. I could get a little faster dual core X2 processor, but I don't know that it would make much of a difference. Obviously a quad core CPU would require a new motherboard and CPU, so might as well do that with a whole new computer build. I could upgrade to 4gb of dual channel memory, but I don't know that games/programs would utilize it enough to be worth it. Video card wise, I have a 19" 1280 x 1024 monitor, so I whether or not a better video card would get a huge difference in framerate at that resolution I'm not sure.
I am primarily looking at this in regards to games like Bioshock 2, etc. coming out this year. I would just like to run those newer games a little better for this year until I anticipate building a new system in 2011. I have heard a lot of people say that 4gb of memory isn't totally used by most applications yet. I have heard that unless you do a major processor upgrade (like dual core to quad) it's not going to make much of a difference. Also, it seems that newer NVIDIA GTX/GTS cards really shine at higher resolutions, not where I am at.
Are any of these major components worth doing anything to, or should I just leave this system as is and replace the whole thing in the future?
I have:
MSI AM2 Athlon 64/X2, PC6400 mem. capable motherboard
4600+ Athlon X2
NVIDIA 9600GT 512mb
2 gb PC6400 DDR2
I am currently running 64 bit Windows 7, and despite 2gb of memory it runs well.
Basically, I don't know if there is much that can be done with this. It's kind of stuck where it is. I could get a little faster dual core X2 processor, but I don't know that it would make much of a difference. Obviously a quad core CPU would require a new motherboard and CPU, so might as well do that with a whole new computer build. I could upgrade to 4gb of dual channel memory, but I don't know that games/programs would utilize it enough to be worth it. Video card wise, I have a 19" 1280 x 1024 monitor, so I whether or not a better video card would get a huge difference in framerate at that resolution I'm not sure.
I am primarily looking at this in regards to games like Bioshock 2, etc. coming out this year. I would just like to run those newer games a little better for this year until I anticipate building a new system in 2011. I have heard a lot of people say that 4gb of memory isn't totally used by most applications yet. I have heard that unless you do a major processor upgrade (like dual core to quad) it's not going to make much of a difference. Also, it seems that newer NVIDIA GTX/GTS cards really shine at higher resolutions, not where I am at.
Are any of these major components worth doing anything to, or should I just leave this system as is and replace the whole thing in the future?