Extend life of PC with upgrade? Worth it?

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mrhoddy

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Have a Dell XPS 420 - Q6600 2.4GHz, 3Gb ram, 8800Gt GPU running win 7 32bit.

Anyway late summer GPU fried I suspect - did the old heat in oven, re-paste etc to bring it back to life and is now 'normal' again. So it got me thinking, I wasn't ready to buy another PC yet to be fair, besides missus is saying lets get a mac - hmmm tempted but this wont aid my occasional gaming requirement will it?

Anyway, is it still worth chucking £125 at it and whacking in another GPU say GTX 560ti and another 1Gb ram (Ive read 4GB max - does that make sense?) just to keep me going for another year or so.

Im getting the itch to do a bit of PC gaming again, maybe Arma II, Dayz, that sort of thing sometimes (mostly I do strategy CIV, Simcity, Total War etc) and maybe get a version lightroom for pp.

Anyway any suggestions - keep it going for a while or save cash for a new pc or mac sometime next year?
 
GPU will make gaming a bit quicker, but the CPU is a bit long in the tooth now. In some ways it might be a bit better to just save up and replace it instead.

Adding an extra 1GB of memory won't give much benefit with a 32-bit OS, the final GB of addressable space is taken up by addressing for devices in the system so you'd likely be capped at 3.0-3.25GB addressable memory anyway.
 
Thorburn said:
GPU will make gaming a bit quicker, but the CPU is a bit long in the tooth now. In some ways it might be a bit better to just save up and replace it instead.

Adding an extra 1GB of memory won't give much benefit with a 32-bit OS, the final GB of addressable space is taken up by addressing for devices in the system so you'd likely be capped at 3.0-3.25GB addressable memory anyway.
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Yeah thats my dilemma I realise the CPU is old so unsure if throwing money at it is worthwhile - I dont feel I know enough, have the time or patience to do new mb, CPU etc and the thing is I have less and less time for gaming now so dont see PC as my entertainment like I used to - hence reticent to shell out (the missus imac suggestion he he he)

So the new PC/Mac or whatever wont be viewed as a place to play games on just mainly office work and then occasional gaming and pp I do nowadays, long gone are the days I stayed up till all hours on games!!
 
Thorburn said:
http://store.steampowered.com/browse/mac/[/url]
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Ooooh those games are making me shudder and 'look' like a bad uninteresting selection! However I dont really know just snapping.

Bootcamp, never thought of that or really know how this works - is this like some homebrew or warranty legal practice on the imac?
 
wouldnt bother upgrading that spec to be honest, best CPU youll probably get in there is a Q9550, if youre running 32 bit windows youll only be able to access 3.2somethingGb memory.

gpu on macs are pretty limited, check the games you want to play will work before taking the plunge.

bootcamp is perfectly legal, you just need a legit copy of windows, last i read the graphics drivers were a bit iffy regarding performance (and battery life if youre on a macbook).
 
My previous setup was a q6600. I'd suggest doing what I did and getting a SSD as your main system drive. It will make a big difference to startup and loading performance - you'll be be one of the first on the map when gaming...and more importantly can be pulled out and reused if you go for a new system at some future date.
A faster GPU will improve your gaming experience with more eye candy and smoother motion but a SSD will make it feel like a new PC the rest of the time and will become obsolete a bit slower. Go for a 256Gb one if you have lots of game maps etc that need to be on your C: drive.
 
RobertP said:
My previous setup was a q6600. I'd suggest doing what I did and getting a SSD as your main system drive. It will make a big difference to startup and loading performance - you'll be be one of the first on the map when gaming...and more importantly can be pulled out and reused if you go for a new system at some future date.
A faster GPU will improve your gaming experience with more eye candy and smoother motion but a SSD will make it feel like a new PC the rest of the time and will become obsolete a bit slower. Go for a 256Gb one if you have lots of game maps etc that need to be on your C: drive.
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You see this is where my knowledge of current PC tech falls apart - have no real idea what an SSD would offer me - is this essentially a solid state drive that I would use like a system partition to run OS and then read write to the HD?

In all Ive noticed sometimes that sometimes even scrolling word files are laggy since the GPU went awol (corrected by oven technique) yes it seems to work but it doesnt seem to work as well - so whilst I know chucking a GPU is dead money I feel like this one could go at any time as is on last legs

By the way, what sort of min system would allow lightroom to run smoothly - have been put off buying LR 3 or 4 as I was concnerend it might be hit and miss on this setup?
 
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An SSD makes a *huge* difference to how fast your computer feels, I just upgraded my old vista laptop with an SSD. No other changes and it's gone from minutes to boot, to less than 20 seconds to start from scratch. Updates and software installs are ridiculously fast, it's taken all the pain out of basic maintainence, and loading lightroom happens well inside my boredom threshold now!

It'll make a much bigger difference to how the machine feel than a GPU upgrade. Although I suspect any current budget GPU _that fits_ will outperform a 2007 gpu anyway. What it can't help with is CPU intensive stuff like importing photos/rendering images. Lightroom will load quickly but you'll still be waiting on large raw imports.

To be honest that's true even with current CPUs - I just built a brand new core i5 desktop and importing a few hundred raw files still takes a few mins there's just a lot of data to crunch. Editing on the desktop is a lot faster than the old (2008) laptop - but it was still *well* worth adding the SSD to the old beast and doing a clean windows install. Plus when I throw out the old machine, the SSD will happily help something newer clip along.
 
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mrhoddy said:
You see this is where my knowledge of current PC tech falls apart - have no real idea what an SSD would offer me - is this essentially a solid state drive that I would use like a system partition to run OS and then read write to the HD?
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It is a direct replacement for your existing hard drive but may have less space available on it. You install windows and your programs on it but use another normal hard drive to store data like picture and video files etc.
It more than makes up for the inconvenience of it being smaller by being so much faster.

mrhoddy said:
In all Ive noticed sometimes that sometimes even scrolling word files are laggy since the GPU went awol (corrected by oven technique) yes it seems to work but it doesnt seem to work as well - so whilst I know chucking a GPU is dead money I feel like this one could go at any time as is on last legs
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You might want to check you have the latest drivers installed. Something may have been corrupted when it was crashing.

mrhoddy said:
By the way, what sort of min system would allow lightroom to run smoothly - have been put off buying LR 3 or 4 as I was concnerend it might be hit and miss on this setup?
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LR3 was usable on a Q6600 but the sliders were a little lagged with a short (half second ish) wait to see what the adjustment does. that was with the SSD but the pictures were on a normal hard drive. You'd probably need a recent i5 processor for a smooth LR experience.
 
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