This may very well be in the wrong forum. I don’t know for sure.
So I’m getting my brothers PC. It’s an older machine.
He’s running an 850 processor (I’m not sure which brand) and about 512 RAM. He’s got the video that came on the mother board, and 2 HD working together for a whopping 12G of space. It’s got my old 52x CD drive, and an older burner (HP).
Other than a new case, and a new HD, what fairly cheap video, audio, etc. parts would you suggest?
Budget is key. I’ve only got a little bit of money to play with here…
I use it primarily to play games, though nothing incredibly graphic intensive. Civ II, etc. That sort of game.
You might want to be more specific as to your budget - “budget” means different things to different people. That said, I’ll knock out a couple of suggestions and see if I get anywhere near the ball park:
You’re probably fine on memory, the CD/burner are probably not worth upgrading if they work.
For sound I usually recommend the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz for about $60 online. Most people buy Creative cards, but IMHO that has more to do with name brand recognition than quality. The Santa Cruz is cleaner and quieter than anything except the (starting at) $120 Audigy II, supports all the multichannel formats needed for gaming and DVD etc, and doesn’t install a bunch of useless junk on your system.
As far as video, the two big players are nVidia and ATI. Right now ATI has the winner in the budget segments of the gaming card market IMHO, with the Radeon 9000 Pro at around $95 online in the 64 MB version. nVidia’s GeForceMX series sits at a similar price point - but sacrifices DirectX 8 shader features, which may prevent it from running certain games in the near future. Also, ATI has always offered better image quality - it’s just that, up until fairly recently, nVidia owned the market performance-wise.
Are you going to need a new mouse, keyboard etc? I like the basic Logitech Optical, and you can find them on sale for $20 at Office Max and places like that sometimes. If you haven’t had an optical mouse, trust me - it’s well worth it to have it work without a pad, and not get gummed up with stuff.
If these products are far from what you had in mind, sorry - I’m kind of a hardcore gamer/PC enthusiast trying to think in a budget-minded manner, and I may not have pulled it off. Hopefully some of this is helpful either way.
to be honest its probably best to clearly work out what you want to do with it - if you really want to play games on it then get a new card, if you are only planning on playing Civ on it at the moment then don’t - you can always get one at a later date.
Plus keep an eye out - you may find that a mate is chucking an old computer etc. and you can salvage a graphics card from that.
Keyboard and such are not a problem, as I have mine from my old PC stored away, but I’m pretty eager to get cranking on something better than what I had.
Thanks for the suggestions… the AV stuffl looks like it’s exactly what I’m looking for, both in price and in quality.
I don’t really need to chime in here and reccomend that you get a bigger hard drive, do I? I mean, 12Gig? That’s almost nothing with today’s applications. I have more sound files than that. If you’re semi-reconfiguring the system, and add another hard drive, or replace one of the one’s in there currently, I suggest that you take the opportunity to change the drive letters on your CD drives down to like Y: and Z: or something. Will save you heartache later if you decide you want another hard drive.
Enjoy the new system. An 850MHz isn’t that bad, you’ll get a lot of quality gaming out of that.
The OS might not support a huge HD. You’d have to check that or use the Bios software that comes with the HD. Newer HD’s are much faster so you would notice some speed improvement, which might be nice.
Depending on the brand of machine, your on-board video may not even be upgradable (sans AGP slot). The mobo may also be proprietory (sp?) and not even fit in another case.
You may possibly have very little for upgrade options.
On the HD (if you can) wait on getting a new one until you see a good sale/rebate offer. This way, you can get the most G for your $. Try here to see what’s out there, price wise. (Note: Froogle is still in beta, and will return very wonky results on occasion.)
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If the on-board video isn’t 32-meg/4x AGP, I would get a 32 meg videocard (get a 4x AGP card, if your board supports 4x) and leave it at that. Try to find one that has hardware support for DirectX/OpenGL, or at least DirectX (for a Windows machine). These cards only cost $25-$40 now, and you need to know if you have an AGP slot or not so that you know what kind of card to shop for. There’s PCI or AGP slot, AGP is newer+better, use it if you got it but there’s still lots of PCI videocards in this price/performance range if you don’t.
I really doubt you’d benefit from a 64-meg card on such a slow machine, unless you are planning for the day when you get a faster motherboard…
If this doesn’t go quite fast enough for you, then you’ll need to get a newer/faster motherboard and processor. You could possibly just get a faster processor, but then you’re just getting a faster CPU running the same slow memory bus and disk controllers, and all three speeds are important. Just casually looking, I am finding several mobo/AMD 1.2 & 1.3 Ghz packages for around $100, 1.8 Ghz for around $130, -although you might need a new case if the mobo won’t fit int he old one ($40 for cheap&ugly generic one) and when you get up to around 1.8 Ghz CPU’s, you get into DDR memory motherboards. So you’d have to find a board that still has slots for both types of memory, or you’d have to buy new memory also…
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