Upgrade Advice Please!

[SaijoBob]

I'm currently getting by with a Dell Dimension 9100 that I've had for the last 3 years, and it's met the games I've thrown at it admirably so far (Half Life 2, Dawn of War, WoW). However, games have been coming out over the last year that I would like to be able to play on reasonable settings without the PC exploding in protest.

The current setup I have is:

P4 3.00 Ghz
1 gig RAM
Geforce 6800 256
250 Gig hard drive
Windows XP

In order to play Warhammer Online, STALKER and C&C Red Alert 3 on decent settings, would you suggest I upgrade the RAM and graphics card, or just go for a new VISTA PC?

If you can give me any advice on a reasonable sub-?100 (pref ?60 or so) graphics card that would suit my requirements as well, that would be perfect! I'm not looking for a Crysis rig ATM.

Cheers
Rob

[abigsmurf]

you could probably upgrade the RAM to 4 gigs for around £30 and that'll be the best value for money upgrade. You could spend £15-20ish and get a pair of 1gig sticks then save for a new system. Mixing and matching different brands and types of ram isn't advisable. I'm not sure what speed ram your system will take but it's bound to be DDR2

You could probably build a decent gaming system for £400-ish maybe even slightly less. However the next gen Intel CPUs are hitting the stores now, the i7's. They offer roughly 30% more power clock for clock over core 2 quads. The motherboards are a bit expensive at the moment and the CPU prices will probably take a bit of time to stabilise too so it'll be after the new year till you could build one.

[SaijoBob]

Thanks for the advice, I might wait until after the New Year and see what turns up in the sales then new PC wise...

I was reading another thread here about the ATI Radeon HD 3650 and the nVidia GeForce 9400GT 512MB PCI-E being around the £40 mark. With either of these cards do you think WAR would be playable on reasonable settings before picking up a new PC?

Sorry if all these questions are too subjective, I've been out of the loop on PC gaming for about 5 years now!

[abigsmurf]

I think you're going to need 2gigs of ram for WAR. The frame rate will likely plummet in busy scenarios otherwise.

that gfx card will provide a bit of a performance boost but you need to be careful that your PSU can take a bit of extra power drain. Dell PCs are often known for having low power PSUs

[SaijoBob]

I've heard that before about the Dell PSUs. I cracked open my PC earlier to check the type of RAM, and am going to pick up another gig. Seems like the cheapest way to get a performance boost until I pick up a new one.

[Kit]

What resolution are you playing at?