PC upgrade - advice please

[Link83]

Hi everyone,
I am not that knowledgeable about PC's, so i'm looking for some advice, I have had my PC for four years now so its getting on abit but I cant really afford to buy a whole new PC at the moment.
I thought that if I could give my current one an upgrade that would probably be enough for me. At the moment I have:-

Shuttle SK41G
AMD Athlon 2400+
200GB Western Digital Hard Drive
ASUS Nvidia Geforce FX5200
Crucial 512mb RAM

I am thinking of upgrading either the RAM, the Graphics card, or possibly both. I'm considering getting 1GB of Crucial RAM (2 x 512mb) and an ATI Graphics Card by Sapphire(although I have no idea of which one) which must have a small-ish heatsink (not a fan) to fit in the Shuttle.

I dont really use the PC much for games, but would like it to be just that bit faster/stable when running programs/browsing the internet

Would does everyone recommend I upgrade? and to what model?

Thanks in advance

[sj33]

Given it's (I assume) a Socket A board, you'll be limited to DDR1 for RAM, and AGP for graphics card.

There really isn't too much point in upgrading the graphics card if you won't be gaming, it certainly won't help your general system performance. But if you still want to do it, and taking into account that you want passive cooling, this seems like a reasonable consideration http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=56&subcat=411
There are much better AGP cards, but not with passive cooling (though I can understand your desire for passive cooling, especially in a small size media machine where a nice large quiet fan isn't an option).

I think the main thing you should upgrade is the RAM tbh, get an extra 512Meg stick or something. That CPU only operates at 266FSB I think anyway, so you could even use PC-2100, though I'd check what speed your existing RAM is and get some the same speed.

(Obviously a CPU upgrade would give the biggest benefit, but I think your best off building a new machine from scratch for that).