Hi all, new with some questions!

[Riggs]

Hi,

I currrently have an older pc, compaq presario sr1539uk. It used to be fine running things like battlefield 2 on highest settings but is struggling now to run the likes of arma 2 on the lowest.

The pc spec is as follows.. motherboard is the ms-7093, bus type amd hammer, it had a socket 939 AMD athlon 64 3500+ running at 2200MHz (11x200) ((cannot overclock due to locked out bios)) It has a Nvidia GeForce 6600 512mb pci-e and 3gb of ram.

I would like to know whether just replacing the graphics card to a ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB will help enough or do I look at replacing the processor to?? If so can I put a better processor on that mobo or is it also new mobo time? I am looking for the cheapest solution possible! (if these guys didnt have that deposit for pc's on finance I would have ordered one moths ago!) lol! I can get hold of the ati for £40 from someone I know.

If i do have to replace the mobo for a better processor, will it be as easy as connecting my existing harddrives, power supply, soundblaster card and it will just boot up as normal and go straight to my desktop background with all my files like nothing has changed or will it not be as straight forward as that?! c

Cheers all!

 

[kruppsy]

I think you could do with upgrading both cpu and gpu tbh. You have a single core processor (i think) and a game like ARMA II recommends a quad core, I think the minimum is a dual core for that game to run. I would consider putting an AMD FX Bulldozer/Piledriver spec together if you can. As you more than likely have DDR2, you would need new RAM as well. Which would mean, new mb, cpu, ram & gpu(to keep costs down you could buy your mates card but I'd advise getting better if possible) Plugging the remainder of your old parts in (ie. HDD) will only work if you have a Retail version of Windows you can reinstall. If you have an OEM version (one that came with the PC originally), there is a method i have read about online but its a bit 'grey' and might not work so i don't want to recommend that. So you may need a copy of Windows as well. It also depends what wattage your PSU is? it may not be enough for the upgraded components.

You may be best saving that deposit and buying here, or, if you are that way inclined, buying the components and upgrading yourself.

 

[Boozad]

Yeah personally I'd be looking at a new PC altogether. That gear is pretty dated and you'll only be able to upgrade it so far, and an HD 5770 isn't going to give you great performance in games either.

Like kruppsy said, save up that deposit and go for a whole new system.

 

[Rakk]

Like kruppsy said, save up that deposit and go for a whole new system.

+1
That spec is pretty old and you would pretty much have to replace 90% of it, meaning you'd have to completely rebuild it, also there may be size constraints that would have to consider (dependent on the case)

 

[Riggs]

cheers for the replies all, I was hoping to get a little more use out of this by putting in that gpu, I will look into a new pc and it will be from here, keep toying with it and building one, then seeing the price and its like £2000 lol! note to self, you dont need 16 gig of ram and a 4 gig gpu! Im just being greedy! lol! I built another on here last night and it was around £750 so thats more like it! think it was the basic intel i5, a two gig gpu and 4 gig of ram, that will do me! I have two more questions if you dont mind, If i buy a new pc, will it be possible to put my main hard drive from my old pc straight into the new one as a slave hd, just so i dont have to start transferring all kinds to the new, i.e pics and so on, second question, I have a sound blaster audigy in my old pc, I am pretty sure on this but i will be able to just transfer that over to wont I?! should have any issues with that i dont think? I was really good with pcs about 8 year ago and still have no problem building one myself, but iv not really been round em properly since battlefield 2 and moved to an xbox so i am rusty as hell! LOL!

 

[Blackdog]

Im pretty sure you can send in a HDD to PCS and they will install it for you. The same can be said for the sound card as i presume its a PCI slot. In general if you have any queries call them, they will be a talkative bunch.

GB bandwith isn't the be all and end all statistic for GPUs. True if you want to play on three screens at once then a higher number is better, but a 2gb 670 will handle 5760 x 1080 better than a 3gb 7950 in the majority of test cases. There is also a great deal of difference in a 2gb 7850 compared to a 2gb 680, and its a good idea to google some benchmarks for the respective cards and the sorts of games you want to play (RPGs, FPS, RTS?). Even with an 800 pound budget you can build a machine that will blow your current setup out of the water.

 

[vanthus]

It shouldn't be a problem installing the hard drive from your old PC to the new one,I'm assuming it's a SATA drive and not IDE,although some motherboards still provide a port for IDE hard drives.
As the hard drive on your old computer was the main one I again assume it has an operating system installed on it,in that case after connecting the old drive to your new PC I would boot the PC to your new PC operating system,then open the old drive from "computer" and copy the data files you want to the OS hard drive or a second hard drive if you have one.
After saving the files you can then format the old hard drive by right clicking on it in "computer" and use it as a storage drive or whatever.
You should be fine transferring the soundcard as long as you have the necessary PCI or PCI-E slot available,all you should need to do then is install the correct driver for your operating system.

 

[Boozad]

If you have budget to work to post it up and the fine folk will furnish you with a spec that will suit your needs.