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Ok Upgrade?


adrian2055

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Supermicro PDSMA+ PCB Motherboard

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4 Ghz Processor

Dell IN1910N 19 inch Monitor

SONY 18 x DVD RW AW-Q170A

1GB Ram (Upgradeable to 4GB)

nVidia Geforce FX 5200 128MB Graphics Card (Yes, I know, Not the best, but I will upgrade as soon as I can)

Western Digital 80GB Internal Drive

Western Digital 250GB External Drive

64K primary, 4MB secondary Memory Cache

32-Bit And 64-Bit ready

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP2 32-Bit

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How much would that cost? It could be an incredible deal, or not a deal at all.

Either ways, I'm not so sure you're saving by buying a system like this (again, unless it's a crazy good deal). You're getting a quad core (which is most likely more than you'll need), but with so little RAM (1GB? seriously...) and a very low end video card (it gets beaten quite a bit by cheapo onboard video from ANY new board out there)

And about upgrading the video card? Well, too bad, you just can't. Unless you find something that fits in a plain old PCI (not express) slot. This only has one PCI-e slot, and it's a x8. The rest consist of a PCI-X slot (it's a server board -- without any of its benefits though), and a bunch of older PCI slots. So the best video card you'll find will probably be a not exactly great nor cheap. If you want something at least as good as modern onboard video, Newegg's main 2 options are:

PowerColor AP4350 512MD2-H Radeon HD 4350 512MB 64-bit DDR2 PCI $83, not a whole lot faster than decent onboard video, passively cooled (forget about gaming for the most part). It's good enough for Aero Glass, older games and simple stuff but that's about it. Oh, and it has a decent set of outputs.

or

JATON VIDEO-498PCI-DLP GeForce 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit DDR2 PCI $92, somewhat faster but by no means a gamer's card, the cooler kinda sucks, no VGA or HDMI if you need one of those. But mainly, it's totally not worth $92 performance-wise. I mean, I bought a 4850 that runs in circles around that for $60...

The board uses DDR2 which already costs more than DDR3 and whose costs are on the rise (making it a not-so-great upgrader; especially coupled with the old chipset and Socket 775). And it just might be ECC RAM on there too (more $, either to buy new ECC RAM, or throwing the old one away)

It's using an older chipset (ICH7R) from 5 years ago. There's no USB3 or anything fancy of course.

Going with a 19" monitor these days saves you just about nothing (you're just stuck with less of that precious screen real estate). My usual shopping place right now has a 22" LCD on for $115 CAD which is the same price as their absolute cheapest 19" LCD.

Also, you're getting older hard drives. Slower, have a few years of mechanical wear, and not exactly big. These days 500GB'ers are only worth $50, and even 1TB HDs can be had for $70.

Ideally, I'd want Win7 too, not Vista.

Let us know what the asking price is, and unless it's an amazing deal, we'll pick parts for something better at the same price point (especially if we include the price for more RAM and a new video card!) Ideally you want a PCI-e x16 slot on there, a more recent socket (future proofing) and DDR3.

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Whoops! I forgot to mention that I already have it. It was only $175 minus the monitor. I already had the monitor so I didn't have to buy one. I'm gonna get a 27" tv or 32" tv before christmas *cough* black firday *cough* and use it with my pc.

The ram isn't ecc so I lucked out on that.

As for the video card, I don't know if I should get a new one. I don't play any pc games. All my gaming is done on my nintendo wii. The only reason I got the gefore card is that the onboard card was a very old xgi volari z7 which was only a 16mb card and it wasn't compatible with vista or seven. I got the geforce card from a friend so I got it dirt cheap. I might have to get one with a dvi port if the tv doesn't have a vga port on it.

I had vista ultimate from when I purchased it in 2009 so I lucked out there too. That's the only version of windows I can stand at this point. It came with xp (JUST.......NO!) so I instantly upgraded it.

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Whoops! I forgot to mention that I already have it

Why ask if it's worth buying after actually buying it? :huh:

It was only $175 minus the monitor

So $175, plus the video card, plus at least some extra RAM to make it perform half-decently (at least 1GB extra, so about $20 more). Let's say $200.

For that much, you could have bought something else that's not bad at all if you find some good deals.

For example, NCIX had on a half-decent combo (assuming you even need a quad core in the first place):

AMD Phenom II x4 900E Processor AM3 2.4GHZ 8MB Cache 65W 45NM OEM (a pretty decent quad core)

along with:

MSI 770-G45 ATX AM3 770 DDR3 CrossFire 2XPCI-E16 PCI-E 3XPCI SATA2 RAID GBLAN Audio Motherboard; featuring 4x DDR3 slots, two PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots...

for $139.99

Add 2GB of DDR3 for ~$40

This still leaves you with $20 going for a video card, like a $60 Powercolor Radeon 4850.

So that would have been about $40 (CAD, not USD) extra overall, but it would have a modern socket & chipset, use DDR3, have two PCI-e x16 slots, a very nice video card (would run just about any game on max settings on your 19" LCD) and all. Or substitute the 4850 for a GT 210 (not for gaming) and you're at $205 and still have something quite a bit nicer.

Or perhaps, their Core i3 530 2.93GHZ CPU + MSI H55M-E33 DDR3 combo, with 2GB of DDR3, for $200 total. Better performing CPU for most tasks (far faster single threaded perf), it has a 1156 socket, a modern H55 chipset, uses DDR3, has better onboard video and has a PCI-e x16 slot...

Lots of possibilities here, even on a small budget. In both cases, you'd also save later on when you want to upgrade (more recent sockets & RAM with better availability and prices), and you get far better video too (you can actually play all the latest games, have hardware acceleration of H.264 videos, etc).

Anyway. I'm not sure what the question is at this point anymore.

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