Last upgrade evah!!

[Doomy]

Well, to tide me over for a year. I am looking obviously at a motherboard and cpu upgrade that will run everything i chuck at it.

Current spec:

P4 2.8c at 3.3 aircooled (233 FSB)
X800 XTPE at stock (AGP)
1024 MB 3200 Twinmos ram
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7's SATA 120gig
Audigy 2ZS
865PE Neo2-PFISR MSI Socket 478 Mobo
Antec Sonata Silent PSU 380 and case
Inspire 5900 5.1 speakers (not too impressed with music playback)

Ive got £300-400 to chuck at this rig to make it last 1 year as i am going all car drivery soon hopefully and dont need any distractions in the car fund.

Also, are the raptor drives going to boost performance by a lot? Thinking of getting 1 x 76 gig of one of them and will need a board that can run more than 3 sata drives as i dont wish to lose storage space. Im not really interested in better ram, only just gotten used to 1 gig of the stuff so im happy with that. I dont mind whether i go AMD or Intel, the chip ive got has kept me very happy but i hear the 64's kill the latest P4 chips in most gaming related things.

I know its a fairly decent spec as it stands, but whilst i can i may aswell totally future proof it. Thanks.

 

[Clown]

I'll try -
AMD64 'Winchester' 3500+
Abit '3rd Eye' Socket 939 Motherboard

You can use your existing RAM and GFX card. Maybe you could get a Western Digital Raptor to give it a bit more speed loading Windows and MSN Messenger or whatever. Save the rest of your money for the rest of the year.

 

[smurkin]

I am using the slower 36 Gb raptor - I quite like fast HDs - its good for gaming - people go on about "itll only shave a few secs off you load time" - but if your a keen gamer, I think the investment is worthwhile over, say, better RAM.

I've been playing cs:s -and I always spawn first after a map change - this means everyone else has to watch me goofing around in the warm-up -not worth paying extra for - but it demonstrates that raptors are prettty fast in the field :worthy:

its also nice to have faster windows booting - but the biggest influence on boot speed is peripherals, usb stuff, HDs, pc cards & network etc - keep all this stuff to a minimum if speedy booting is what you need.

 

[Cask]

How much do you like your current motherboard? I like MSI so I'd probably get an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum to go with the Winchester 3500.

Doubt you'd be able to overclock your RAM much so cooling isn't really an issue, but I've read good things about the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 CPU cooler if you wanted something better than stock.