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$500 Upgrade

N

NewBlackDak

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 31, 2003
Messages
1,322
It's time to upgrade my wife's system.

This machine does light gaming, light compiling, moderate encoding, and frequent virtualization.

Here's what I'm looking at currently:
GTS 250 512MB
Kingston HyperX T1 4GB
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3L
Intel Core2 Quad Q9400

Comes in right at $500. Can I do better?
 
The above system looks fine as it is right now. Whether or not it can be "better" depends on which tasks you consider to be the priority.

For example, if "light gaming" means WoW on a 1680x1050 or smaller resolution, you could downgrade the video card to, say, an HD4850 and not suffer anything in terms of overall performance. If you weren't planning on overclocking the processor, you could also purchase a cheaper 2x2GB DDR2 800 kit (from, say, G.Skill or A-DATA). If you were to combine both of my suggestions, you could use the savings from the video card swap to purchase a second 2x2GB kit, which would help you with compiling and virtualization. (You should also consider taking a look at the Phenom II processors and see if an AMD-based processor/motherboard combo would be cheaper than its Intel-based "equivalent.")

Out of curiosity, what does the rest of the build look like?
 
Her Current Rig:
Athlon X2 4600+
2GB Kingston DDR
DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D
PNY GeForce 6600 GT 256MB
PC Power & Cooling S61EPS 610W
2x Western Digital Black 1TB
LG 22X DVD±R
No name black steel case

I originally intended to keep her 6600, but she came home with the new Riddick game the other day, and it looks like a slide show. By light gaming I meant infrequent. She spends most of her computer time encoding and compiling. The virtualization is because her firm requires she test the web pages she designs with all kinds of weird OS/Broser combinations. Her monitor is 1680x1050 though, so maybe that's too much video card for that.

Mobo+CPU is ~$315
 
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